Durham Brass Festival marked its twentieth year this month, a full week of concerts and street performances across the county, and by most accounts bigger than it’s ever been. Out of everything I’ve made for the festival over the years, the one I still think about most is Witness, a project from 2012 I haven’t properly gone back to until now.

It wasn’t the only thing I made for BRASS around that time. The year before, I’d filmed Scanner’s Floral Derrangement, a sound installation reworking The Floral Dance along the River Wear, and a very different project the same year following Xarxa Theatre’s carnival procession through Spennymoor. Of the three, Witness has stayed with me longest, mostly because it was built entirely around an idea rather than a performance.

Durham Brass Festival and Witness

Witness was a collaboration between the composer Scanner, whose real name is Robin Rimbaud, and Sound and Music, commissioned for the festival in 2012. The idea was simple to describe and strange to watch unfold. An original piece of music was performed once, on 23 June that year, at Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, to an audience of one classical quartet. That quartet took away whatever they remembered of it, rehearsed their version, and performed it to a new set of witnesses. No manuscript, no recording, nothing but memory carried the piece forward. This repeated for the best part of a month, moving between local singers, brass bands, young people and visiting street musicians, each of them passing on only what had stuck.

The piece didn’t just decay as it travelled. At one point our narrator, the musicologist Andy Jackson, noticed a rhythm that had dropped out completely resurface days later in a performance by the cellist Duncan Brown, not because Duncan had remembered it correctly, but because he’d unconsciously borrowed it from a Shostakovich piece he happened to be practising at the time. Nobody could have predicted that, and it wouldn’t have happened if the piece had ever been written down.

I worked mostly alone, moving between rehearsals with a Panasonic AF101, a GH2, an old Sony Z5 and an iPhone, though I wasn’t quite alone the whole time. Andy came with me for most of it, and somewhere along the way went from advising on the project to appearing in the film himself, ending up as its narrator almost by accident.

Near the end of the month, Bridie Jackson and Natalie Stern were about half an hour into a session in a parish hall in Barnard Castle when a man in a checked shirt put his head round the door asking about a completely different gig. A few minutes later a crowd gathered outside carrying instrument cases: Beat ‘n Blow, a jazz-inflected street band, who’d turned up for a paid booking of their own at the same hall that evening, at the wrong time, for a gig nobody there knew anything about. After about thirty seconds of general confusion, one of the band suggested they just carry on witnessing, since everyone was already there. They went off to the pub while Bridie and Natalie finished what they’d started, came back, heard it, and turned it into a loud, riff-based version of their own that they took out onto the street.

It still left me with a real problem in the edit, how to show something that unplanned honestly, without flattening it or overplaying it. I hadn’t faced that particular problem before. But looking back, that’s exactly what made the ending work. A film built on the idea that something can survive and change through pure accident had just been handed a genuine accident to end on, and there’s no way I could have planned for something that true to the idea if I’d tried. Colin Robson turned up at the house in Barnard Castle at all hours over that final stretch, and between us we found a way to let the ending land as the film arriving at its own answer, rather than something that had simply gone wrong on the day. We were working against a premiere at the Gala Cinema in Durham, my first time seeing anything of mine on a cinema screen, and somehow it all came together in time. The full film runs to about half an hour and is still up on the Witness project page if you want to see the whole thing.

Fourteen Years On

Watching it back now, what strikes me isn’t really the music. It’s how deliberately unrecorded the whole thing was, at a point when that had already started to feel unusual. Everyone in that chain had a phone capable of filming the performance in front of them if they’d wanted to, and the project only worked because, mostly, they didn’t. I’m not sure how you’d engineer that same condition today. Imperfect transmission isn’t really something you can rely on happening by accident any more, which makes me wonder whether Witness could be repeated the way it worked the first time.

The festival’s still doing something similar in spirit. This year’s programme includes Brassed On, which pairs emerging North East artists with brass ensembles to make something neither would arrive at alone. It’s not the same idea as Witness, but it comes from the same instinct: brass music treated as something to be reshaped rather than simply performed.

I don’t have a clean answer to that question, and this isn’t really a pitch. But twenty years into Durham Brass Festival’s history, a festival that’s always been willing to commission something a bit strange, it feels worth sitting with. A Witness for now wouldn’t need to look anything like the original to work, only to be built on the same trust: that something can change as it moves and still be worth documenting. If BRASS or Sound and Music ever want to pick that thread up again, I’d be glad to be part of it.