Brassed Off

The piece the band was playing the day Gloria first came to the rehearsal room. The Aranjuez solo follows right after this jaunty tune ends.

• Katie Moss wrote this piece about a spring festival in Cornwall. The same rhythmic pattern repeats over and over, giving the feel of walking as if in a dance.
• A favorite of British brass bands, it sounds to the audience like familiar local music. The contrast with the unfamiliar Spanish melody that follows is sharp.
• Its light, bright mood makes the stillness of the adagio that follows all the more striking. By setting the two pieces side by side, the film creates the moment when the air in the rehearsal room changes.

The piece the bandsmen call 'Orange Juice.' With this single flugelhorn solo, Gloria becomes part of the band.

• The original is the slow second movement of Rodrigo's “Concierto de Aranjuez,” written for guitar and orchestra. Here the flugelhorn takes the singing melody in place of the guitar.
• The flugelhorn has a wider bore than the trumpet, giving it a rounder, darker sound. Its tone, which whispers like a human voice rather than soaring brilliantly, suits Gloria's quiet confidence.
• The actual player is Paul Hughes of the Grimethorpe band. The scene is matched so that the actor's fingering and the bandsman's sound are heard as one.
• The grace notes at the ends of phrases, that is, ornaments (short notes that brush quickly past the main note), imitate the bends of flamenco singing. It sounds as if southern light had suddenly fallen into a Yorkshire rehearsal room.

The longest of Trevor Jones's cues on the soundtrack. It holds the hearts of characters searching for something to cling to amid collapsing households and shaken relationships.

• The other Jones cues run from thirty seconds to just over a minute, but this one lasts more than 3 minutes. It is where the film gives its original score the most room.
• Its hallmark is a writing style that stays in the background rather than ringing out like the band. It sounds less like music that speaks the scene's emotion for it than music that stands quietly beside the characters.
• The title belongs to the same family as track names that seem drawn from lines of dialogue. Set beside other cue titles such as “A Sad Old Day” and “Honest Decent Human Beings,” it suggests that Jones attached his music in units of dialogue and emotion.

The piece the bandsmen, on the verge of disbanding, play at night on the hospital lawn for their fallen conductor. They believe it will be their last performance.

• Percy Grainger's arrangement of the old Irish folk tune, the “Londonderry Air.” Beneath the melody, the harmonies shift slowly, casting a deep shade.
• The band's low instruments sustain long notes like an organ, laying down a floor on which the melody can float. It suits the still air of the night scene.
• The shared name of the piece and the conductor is the scene's hidden device. Through the music, the bandsmen hand him the words they could not say to his face.
• The silence after the music ends is part of the scene, too. Because no applause is heard, the final chord stays longer in the ear.

The piece the Grimley band plays in the final at the Albert Hall. For a few minutes, accumulated weariness and loss turn into skill and power.

• The final section of the overture Rossini set before his opera, a galloping march, arranged for brass band by G. J. Grant. The cornet solo is played by Shaun Randall.
• At its heart is double tonguing (a technique that alternates two strokes of the tongue to split fast notes). This is where the sound comes from, surging on without pause like the beat of hooves.
• In the orchestra the fast notes belong to the strings; here the brass must carry every one of them. That is why it was chosen as a showpiece for the contest stage.
• It is a tune made familiar by cartoons and commercials. Yet in this scene the familiarity is not comic at all; it sounds instead like the release of people who have held back for a long time.

The piece Danny conducts in the final scene, atop a double-decker bus passing through London. The band plays the slow middle section of Elgar's March No. 1.

• The slow, broadly singing middle section of a march is called the trio. In Britain this trio melody is better known as the song "Land of Hope and Glory."
• In J. Ord Hume's brass band arrangement, the melody begins in the low register and builds gradually upward. The sound widens little by little, keeping pace with the bus as it moves down the street.
• Usually a melody for state occasions, but played by miners from a closed pit it carries pride and irony at once. Which way to hear it is left to the audience.
• As the music plays, captions about real pit closures pass across the screen. The music rings out like a festival while the words on screen are a record, so the film's final impression lingers in layers.