Lloyd: Works for Brass

George Lloyd was very familiar with music for brass from an early age. One of his first musical recollections was listening with rapt attention to a Salvation Army Band with his mother in St. Ives. As a student, he attended regularly brass band concerts at London’s Crystal Palace, where he heard the premiere of John Ireland’s A Downland Suite at the National Band Festival Competition on 1 October 1932. Lloyd played the cornet when serving as a Bandsman in the Royal Marines, giving him invaluable practical experience as an executant within a group of players. His scoring for the brass section in his large-scale works is invariably idiomatic, impressively wrought, and indicates a keen understanding of all the instruments’ range, character, and versatility. Yet, despite all these indications that he was a natural composer of brass band music, he turned to writing music for brass instruments only in the last two decades of his creative life. Though music for brass band was the last major genre Lloyd added to his catalogue of works, his enthusiasm for the medium, once he had embraced it, was unstinting.