Thank you for a successful Supper Concert

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Last night the band hosted our Supper Concert at Crowthorne Methodist Church, and I am pleased to report that thanks to the hard work of the band members and our willing assistants, it was a big success!

Visitors from far and wide came to hear a hugely varied performance of “light entertainment” music, ranging from modern pieces and arrangements through to older and well-loved music.

I am building a bit of a reputation for digging out interesting stories about the pieces of music we are playing (even if the links from one to the other are a bit tenuous at times) – as well as going on a bit in between pieces! But there is one story I didn’t get to share last night which I would like to share now is about our opening piece of the evening, Alford’s Colonel Bogey march.

Here’s the “conductor’s score” for the march – if you look carefully it is old enough to have been stamped with the band’s original name, before we changed it back!

On the night I told the story about how the piece was made famous by the movie Bridge over the River Kwai, and you can see the scene from the movie here:

But there is another story, which is of how the piece got its title – and it’s all to do with golf!

When golf was just starting out as a sport, it is said that one player would whistle in two pitches rather than shouting “fore” – going down a minor third. This is the first two notes of each phrase of the Colonel Bogey march.

But what about the dear Colonel himself? According to golf lore, he never actually existed as a real person! In Coventry in the early stages of the game’s popularity, instead of scoring against the people in their own group, golfers came up with the idea of scoring against a mysteriously consistent and average player. The concept of “par” had just been invented, and so this imaginary player was said to score a “bogey”, or one over par, on each hole of the course – hence their consistently average performance. But the Coventry players, who were all men in the military, insisted that the imaginary player have a military rank just as all of the other members of the club did. And for someone who played so much golf, they must be very important – hence the assigned rank of Colonel, and the birth of Colonel Bogey!

BBC Radio Berkshire

Wenni and I were also on (very briefly!) the Peachy Quest programme of BBC Radio Berkshire just before 11am on the concert day. Sadly they didn’t complete their quest and make it to the venue in time, but they did come and say hello and put a video and photo up online.

Listen to the show on the Radio iPlayer or you can listen to the excerpt below: