Editorial

Take a stroll through a museum and look at some of the old or unusual brass instruments in the glass cases, fossilised in the dust and silence of the past. Let your imagination run wild. Picture the person who played it. Tall, short, fat, thin? Playing well, or not so well? A virtuoso or a modest accompanist? He or she is lost in the mists of time; the instrument is stranded here, sadly silent. Great things, museums, but they are graveyards for things.

Visit an instrument factory and look at all those bells lined up, one inside the other, one silencing the other; those hundreds of valves standing to attention, ready to obey fingers and baton; those thousands of little tubes, braces and bows which skilful craftsmen will manipulate, hammer, heat, cool, file, adjust, solder, assemble and polish to produce that horn, trumpet, trombone, flugelhorn, tuba or baritone. Still asleep (a bit like Pinocchio) they will be put to bed in a fine case and sent out into the world to the very place where you have been waiting for them.