Winds of Hope
Jonny Watkins cofounded two national concert bands in the UK in the face of declining support for youth music instruction
Photo by Karen Payne
Winds of Hope
Jonny Watkins cofounded two national concert bands in the UK in the face of declining support for youth music instruction
Playing a musical instrument changes a person. It lowers anxiety and makes the player feel happier. Researchers have shown that playing music—especially in groups—rewires the mind. The combination of sensory and fine motor skills required to oompah on the tuba or tap out a beat on the timpani generates neurons and fires up synapses, strengthening communication between cells. The positive effects of music on children, whose brains are more elastic than those in adults, can be especially pronounced.
So, when London-based trombonist Jonny Watkins (’09) began hearing about the demise of youth bands and orchestras in the United Kingdom, he was worried about young musicians having fewer outlets to showcase their talents. In particular, youth concert bands featuring brass, percussion, and woodwind instruments—sometimes called wind bands—had all but vanished on the national level, beginning with the shutdown of the National Children’s Wind and Chamber Orchestras in 2018. And with a youth mental health crisis raging, he knew his country needed more opportunities for kids to practice and perform together. “There needed to be a national representation for a wind band in orchestra music,” Watkins says. “Almost every school [in the UK] has a wind band. Every town has a community band. It just seemed like a massive, gaping hole in the landscape that there wasn’t going to be a national wind band. So, we thought we’d jump in.”
In 2018, Watkins cofounded the only wind bands that draw students from across the UK. They feature audition-based bands for two age groups: the National Children’s Concert Band (NCCB) is open to musicians ages 10 to 14, and the National Youth Concert Band (NYCB) welcomes players 12 to 18. Each April, dozens of young musicians move into boarding school dorms in the Midlands region of the country for a week of individual lessons and group rehearsals (with plenty of camp-like fun mixed in). The course culminates in a performance at the end of the week. The bands have grown from 42 musicians in 2019 to as many as 90 today.
But after surviving the fallout from a global pandemic, will the bands be able to keep playing, on their shoestring budgets and amid a political climate that values (and funds) youth arts instruction less each year?
Filling a gap
The last national youth wind band in the UK shut down in 2018, when the nonprofit that backed the National Children’s Wind and Chamber Orchestras announced suddenly it was closing its doors. Three of the orchestras’ main volunteer musicians—Watkins, conductor Jonathan Parkes, and orchestra manager Kathryn Wood—jumped in to fill that void. Balancing their day jobs (Parkes and Watkins are professional musicians and educators, and Wood is a legal clerk), they formed the company that would become the NCCB and NYCB in November 2018 and held their first residential course in April 2019. The following year, as they were preparing to welcome the second cohort of students to the course, the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to hit pause. When many other youth arts organizations lost thousands of pounds canceling courses and performances or closed their doors for good, the NCCB and NYCB were able to wait it out.
“We live in different parts of the country, and everything’s done online,” Watkins says. “We didn’t have any overhead, so we could just close the lids on the laptops and step away from it while the pandemic was going on.”
They were next able to offer the program in the summer of 2021, testing every participant for COVID at the door. Once the initial nerves had calmed, Watkins says, the students enjoyed the much-needed connection and joy the course provided. “It was quite an emotional week,” he says. “You’ve got all these kids who have had no contact with anyone for a year and a half.”
Watkins established the concert bands while witnessing arts funding across the UK plummet, leaving many organizations in peril. Arts Council England (the national government’s grant-making arm for the arts) in 2022 removed a number of organizations from its grants portfolio following cuts to its budget—including the English National Opera, the acclaimed Britten Sinfonia chamber orchestra, and many smaller outfits—leading to what one Guardian newspaper columnist called a “doom loop” for the arts in England.
Watkins says the concert bands he cofounded have never received national grants, however, and operate exclusively on student tuitions for the April course. But they still face another headwind: given inflation and the socioeconomic realities of many of the families who wish to participate in the program, he says, the bands are “just about maxing out what we can ask people to pay.” And that’s just to continue doing what they’ve been doing; there’s little left over to increase the size of the bands or commission new music for the program.
It’s been life-changing for some of these kids from backgrounds where they never thought they’d be able to do anything like the national group…because they’re from a place where that doesn’t happen.
Watkins, who came up through elite youth bands and orchestras in England, studied at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama before pursuing a master’s degree in brass performance at CFA. After BU, he played with orchestras in Hong Kong and China before returning to the UK in 2018. Today, he is a regular with symphony orchestras in Bournemouth and Birmingham and teaches trombone to a few dozen students each week. Cofounding a youth wind band (for which he serves as course director and senior tutor in brass) wasn’t in the plan.
“I think everyone who sets foot in a music school has this dream of being a principal whatever of the Boston Symphony or Chicago or London,” Watkins says. “For some people, that works out. I quite like the variety I’ve got.”
A place to be themselves
Each April, young woodwind, percussion, and brass players from across the UK descend on the country’s Midlands—usually somewhere near Birmingham—to participate in what is the centerpiece of the concert band programs: a week of individual instruction and group rehearsals leading to a performance for family, friends, and the public. After students arrive at their dorm rooms, settle in, and begin to make new friends, they see their music for the first time—usually in an hourlong program for the older youth, and a half-hour session for the younger children. Tutors, who are experts in their instruments, work with each band during the day to refine the pieces. Students may also choose to join and rehearse with a saxophone quartet, wind or brass quintet, or another chamber ensemble to perform that week at community locations, such as nursing homes. In the evenings, staff and students gather for movie and game nights, karaoke, and special performances.
The result is music magic. In 2023, under the direction of Parkes, the concert bands played to a packed Bradshaw Hall at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. The bulk of the youth band’s set was a five-part, nearly 45-minute Johan de Meij symphony inspired by The Lord of the Rings. Many of the musicians are from parts of the country where funding for instruction in schools has been slashed and few opportunities exist for talented players to perform in public.
“It’s been life-changing for some of these kids from backgrounds where they never thought they’d be able to do anything like the national group, that they weren’t good enough to do that, because they’re from a place where that doesn’t happen,” Watkins says. “A few of those kids have gone on to our conservatoires, and they’ve written to us and say they wouldn’t have been able to do that without our confidence in them—that’s an amazing feeling.”
Watkins says the two national youth concert bands he cofounded in the UK have provided students a sense of belonging. Jonathan Parkes
The youth band programs do more than provide performance experiences and a boost in confidence: they also give the children a sense of belonging. A few years ago, a returning young musician notified leaders with the bands that they were exploring their gender identity and would like to be called by a different name during the weeklong residential course, “almost as a trial, to see how it was,” Watkins recalls. Every band member and staff honored the student’s wishes that week. Watkins says the student went home and came out to their friends. That student has since gone on to study music in college and helped organize a queer orchestra in the city where they study, he says.
“One of the things we’ve always tried to do with the course is to make a space that’s safe, nurturing, and where we encourage people to be themselves,” Watkins says. “We want it to be somewhere they don’t have to worry. Just come in, enjoy themselves, and do something that they love to do.”
