In the early 1960s, the global record industry experienced a boom that was caused by the rapid growth of popular music. In Britain and the United States, the gramophone companies essentially generated a new commercial market that was supplementary to live music-making, and the record outstripped the radio broadcast. The ‘album’ (LP, long playing record) became the dominant means of expression of popular music, exemplified by the early records of The Beatles and those of Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones. Imaginative record covers, such as the notable Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), designed by Peter Blake, made albums highly desirable possessions. An additional benefit of the record industry’s commercial buoyancy was an increased commitment to classical music and the viability of ambitious musical projects: Decca’s 1966 issue of a first complete Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, conducted by George Solti, preceded many ventures into ‘early music’ (initially, music predating J. S. Bach), contemporary music and chamber music.

In the United States, a record of brass music from this period, The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli (LP, 1969), recorded in one day by the brass of the Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago orchestras, was a phenomenon; it received a 1970 Grammy award for chamber performance, chosen from a number of outstanding nominees. In Britain, the judgement of this record was on occasion reserved: from Gramophone magazine for example: ‘more than ever convinced that the music was conceived in different emotional terms’. Nevertheless, this remarkable record, delivered by orchestral players who would intuitively feel at one in a performance of Copland’s Third Symphony, marked a watershed moment for brass music on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, British brass chamber music developed rapidly. But its performance practice differed subtly from prevailing styles of orchestral playing and was increasingly influenced by separate branches of music-making. The Philip Jones Brass Ensemble (PJBE) was the most prominent British group at this time, and its national profile was brought about substantially through regular collaborations with established choirs and their conductors: it was the ensemble of choice for David Willcocks and the Bach Choir; of John Eliot Gardiner in 1970 for his own edition of Monteverdi’s Vespers which marked the quatercentenary of the composer’s birth in 1567; and the choice of Roger Norrington for his concerts of ‘Schütz in the Round’.