To ask why I felt emotional from brass band outside supermarket?

[brassmonkeybrassband]

Brass band playing outside the supermarket invoked a lump in my throat and feeling a bit emotional.

Why?

Anyone else?

They've always made me cry. Don't know why. Haven't heard one out and about since covid. I'll be a wreck when I do!

I think brass bands make me think of christmases gone by, before even my lifetime...
How many families or worse, orphans, must have listened to those tunes..

One year my dd’s teacher (year 5 I think) decide not to do a traditional Christmas play. They did Pompeii - it was amazing. Lots of shouting and ripped sheets (as costumes) and no reason to cry!

then they sang the Angels’ Carol (by John Rutter)
No trigger warnings, no announcement they just lined up and sang it.
It was intense. It was about 8 years ago and I still remember the purity of their voices. Don’t Google it unless you want a good cry!

Not quite the same but I heard an interview with Chris Martin once and it was about how Viva la Vida makes some people well up (I’m one of them). He laughed and said it’s the timpani.

I think certain musical sounds can really evoke an emotional response

I feel emotional just reading this thread.

The snowman music makes me tearful, too.

Yup, every time!

Always. Donkey adverts, kids singing, brass bands, the last Christmas tree in the shop…. I’ll tear up at anything this time of year.

@Stigsmother

Me too, I think we're all on the very edge....not surprising really given the last couple of years

I agree with this. I am finding that I am having to work quite hard to keep my emotions on an even keel at the moment. My emotions are far more raw than usual and on a par with the first Christmas after losing my Dad 7 years ago. I keep reminding myself that we are healthy and our dc are OK. But I still feel a tad raw so anything like a brass band, children singing will set me off.

Yes, brass bands always bring tears to my eyes, which is fine when they’re playing carols but not so fine when it was the local miners’ rally.

Choirs often have the same effect on me, which can be problematic as I actually sing in a choir…

Ah yes, I have the same reaction. I guess the sound takes me back to my childhood in a northern mill town where my grandfathers played in the colliery band.

Except I grew up in a new build suburb of Dublin in the 1980s, with never a brass band in sight

Glad to see this emotion thing isn't just me.

Yes to pp I am a highly sensitive empath so that probably explains it.

No, but just show me a choir, even if they haven’t opened their mouths yet, and I’m away. I saw the London Gay Men’s Choir (apologies if I have the name not quite right) on a show about Liberty earlier tonight and was crying so much DP came through from another room to ask if someone had died.

Me too

I once heard Alan Bennett on Radio 4 say “If you are from the north of England, listening to a brass band is like stroking your soul”. As a Londoner adopted by Yorkshire, I’d extend that to the S, E, W and everywhere else too.
We live in “Brassed Off” country - we may no longer have any pits, but we still have plenty of brass bands. Love them.

Same here, you are not alone !!

Brass bands always make me cry. I remember being with a friend’s mother and both of us crying when we heard one.

@brassmonkeybrassband

Glad to see this emotion thing isn't just me.

Yes to pp I am a highly sensitive empath so that probably explains it.

I've got all the sensitivity of a breeze block and think empaths are psuedo woo bollocks. I still feel something when teeny children start up with Away in a Manger or Little Donkey. Because they're cute and have only just started to learn to sing and read and try to be little people in their own right. And brass bands remind me of some of the few good times in my childhood (when I played trumpet).

You're mistaking nostalgia, memories of being a child, the cuteness of kids mangling lyrics ('It's When morning is NIGH, not When morning is nighT Year 2, we will stay here and practice through playtime if need be until you get this right!'), shepherds in teatowels and Hollywood Christmas movies with brass bands and washing powder snow being chucked out of a cherry picker as being a particular feature of your character.

Same here, I have no idea why,, I don’t remember them from childhood or anything.

@LlamaParma

Brass bands invoke something in me too.

Except when DD plays her French Horn (she’s just started lessons). That brings tears of a different kind

My DS has also just started French horn lessons. I feel your pain. Worth perservering though, I think, though I can’t imagine the tears at hearing him playing carols in a brass band!

Brass bands are just so beautiful. Also gospel choirs. I was in John Lewis at the weekend and a gospel choir started singing Abide with Me and I was in complete floods.

I feel like this about bagpipes and I’m not Scottish!

Music evokes an emotional response, I think. I love music and listen to it all the time - but if I am upset I can’t.

I think lots of us are ‘keeping calm’ through the pandemic and the innate emotional response to music — especially perhaps something like brass bands that are evocative of ‘the past’ in a general pre-pandemic, as time was before this, when everything felt known and safer — lifts the lid off that coping strategy.

I wonder what it is specifically about brass bands that has this effect compared to say, a folk band or a jazz band etc. I have this too.

My sons' primary school did a video compilation of each class singing a different song for Christmas, instead of their usual live performance. I didn't cry at either of my own kids' classes singing as they were both terrible, shouty and tuneless so it just made me laugh (they're 7 and 4 year olds) when we were watching it together in the living room. However one of the older classes, Year 5 I think, sang Hallelujah very sweetly, and I had to go into the kitchen and secretly cry. It didn't help that they were all singing it while wearing masks and I was reflecting on the thought that these kids have already lived a substantial chunk of their childhood in a pandemic

Oh my god yes me too, brass bands and bagpipes every time.

Makes me both unbearably jolly in a ‘goodwill to all men’ way and also a bit tearful, absolute rollercoaster