Brass in the Southern Hemisphere: An Interview with Fendall Hill

One of the things I love about this blog is the interactions it allows me to have with like-minded, brass loving people from around the globe. It's always nice to receive feedback on my writing through likes, comments, and messages. Occasionally people will, off the back of a post, make suggestions as to what I could write about or who I could interview and, in recent months I have had more than one person reach out to me to suggest interviewing Fendall Hill, an Australia-based soprano cornetist and composer. The thing is, before those messages came through, I didn't know anything about Fendall and, embarrassingly, had never heard of him. Thankfully we live in a world now where social media can provide direct access to pretty much any person anywhere and so I was able to get in touch with him and spend time chatting to him about himself, his love of music, and his musical connection to a town seven miles north of Birmingham and some ten thousand miles away from his home.

Fendall Hill

Born in Blenheim, at the top of New Zealand's South Island, Fendall is a well-known figure in the brass band movement of Australia and New Zealand and is currently based in the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia. Having previously lived in Auckland and Singapore, he became an Australian citizen in 2016. Life outside of banding is diverse for Fendall, a trained civil engineer who works as an advisor in a large consultancy firm called GHD. He explains "I help companies, councils, governments, universities and other organisations figure out where they are with their infrastructure portfolios and help them plan for the future. I also do a lot of disaster management planning, important for a region prone to bushfires, heatwaves, flooding, earthquakes, and poisonous jellyfish!"

Like many members of the banding community, Fendall has roots in The Salvation Army, and those family ties provided him with his first musical experiences. "My earliest influence was my Dad, Rev. Tom Hill, who was the New Zealand Salvation Army’s most preeminent trombone soloist" he explains. "Dad left The Salvation Army to become an Anglican minister the year I was born, so on moving to Auckland, he spent a very influential fifteen years in the 'secular' banding world winning national trombone solos and training up the Waitakere Auckland Brass Band from 'C' Grade through to the 'A' Grade in that time. The band have remained 'A' Grade ever since and have been the New Zealand National Champions twice in that time".

It's clear that his father shaped and directed Fendall's early career exposing him to "an incredible range of music and test pieces, dominated by Gilbert Vinter, Edward Gregson and my favourite, Gordon Langford". Having a parent as your MD, can have further advantages too. "While I played cornet, (and even flugelhorn in one New Zealand National Youth Band) I fell in love with the sound of the piccolo trumpet, the solo in Penny Lane, and most of all, Maurice André. My only problem was I struggled to play high notes on cornet after a few minutes, so I convinced Dad that I needed to move to soprano cornet. My physiology just worked, and it became my natural instrument".

As a Soprano Soloist

That move proved, eventually, to be a catalyst for success as a soprano soloist. “The national solo

competitions in New Zealand are held in the same week as the band competition, and they are a huge part of contesting in New Zealand” he explains. They hold a junior, and open class for each instrument, and a Champion of Champions event with the winners of each instrument”. Similar contests are also held in Australia and are a big deal for all involved. “In his brief time competing in National solos, my dad won the national trombone title four times, my sister won the bass trombone solo and my brother won the junior trombone title at age thirteen”. As a result, the importance of these solo contests was ingrained in Fendall from a young age and his ambitions were big. “My Dad was a prodigy aged thirteen, and I initially heard stories of the great Ken Smith winning the NZ open cornet solo aged 16, so that’s what I initially aimed for”. He duly entered aged sixteen but finished last. A rocky start, and whilst he did pick up awards, the National title continued to elude him. “I didn’t win my first national solo until I was thirty”, he explains, “but was immediately disqualified for playing an E flat trumpet albeit with a cornet mouthpiece. I didn’t compete much after that”. 

After an almost complete break from banding, competing just three times in sixteen years, Fendall finally tasted victory, winning the first of his seven (to date) National Titles in 2005, just shy of his fortieth birthday. Since then, “I have competed fourteen times since 2005, and have a 50%-win rate including 2007 and 2019 where I won both the NZ, and Australian national soprano cornet solos”.

As a Composer

As well as being an accomplished and influential soloist, Fendall is a well-established composer, with

his composition Mind Dances being selected as an 'A' Grade set test piece for a state contest in Australia this year.

But Fendall had to work to hone his craft. "I had a desire to compose as a teenager in the 1980s, but soon determined that I could only write rubbish" he says. "When I was seventeen, I had tried to write a band piece; I was three minutes in when I scored up my progress for Dad who rehearsed it. It was dire, boring, cliché… just awful. I decided then that the gulf between my desires and my abilities was a gaping chasm, and not able to be crossed". A relatable sentiment to many of us, I'm sure. Things would improve for Fendall though and, after writing some band arrangements, his first major composition, 'Concerto for Eb Trumpet and Orchestra', came in 1988. This piece "was composed on a four-track sequencer, so it wasn’t scored, but was later arranged for band with help from a friend, David Oswin, and has since been reworked in full arrangement". For Fendall, composing is an iterative process and not always a simple one. "Once something germinates, I just think, sketch, arrange, replay until it’s finished. I love doing huge five thousand piece jigsaws, and it feels like that… complete with the big rush at the end as you see the whole picture revealed, and that sense of disappointment when you’re finished and thinking “what’s next?”. Sometimes the next piece takes some time to germinate".

By his own admission however, Fendall's career as a composer didn't really take off until 2016 "when I bought Sibelius", he says, also noting that David Chaulk was the catalyst for "the stars aligning. He [David] had been a fan of my playing and my few compositions to date and was starting an online publishing company called Experianza and wanted my few existing compositions in his stable. I used Sibelius to rearrange the concerto and tidy up my solos, but he sowed the thought of doing more arrangements and compositions. I trained myself up with an arrangement of one of my favourite Prokofiev pieces using the original score and midi files I sourced". This sudden creative burst did, however, have a negative impact on that year's Christmas plans as "I had an 'ear worm' of a phrase from Bach’s Fugue in D minor that wouldn’t go away and so, so instead of starting another huge jigsaw puzzle, over the next 12 weeks I wrote my first test piece, Temperamental which was eventually selected as the 2021 New Zealand National B Grade set test piece".

Brass Banding in the Southern Hemisphere

More broadly speaking then, what is the brass band scene like in Australia and New Zealand? “Both

countries have long established histories”, Fendall explains. “The New Zealand nationals are the longest continuous band contest in the world, having started in 1880, and only paused for wars and a pandemic. The countries are distinctly different but share significant similarities”. These similarities include the numbers of competing bands and the adoption of the same grading system at national contests. There are differences though. Despite having, approximately, the same number of competing bands “Australia has five times the population of New Zealand, so you can see how strong the New Zealand banding scene is in comparison per capita”. There is mitigation for this though and it is something that, as someone based in the UK, is difficult to imagine. “Australia has a ‘tyranny of distance’ problem internally, due to the vast distances between major settlements, but higher-grade bands commit to travel thousands of kilometres to get to national contests. They can hold a contest in Perth, West Australia, and a large percentage of all ‘A’ Grade bands in the country will take four-hour flights to get there!”

This is a problem that Fendall has encountered personally. Whilst he is now settled north of Brisbane, and has three ‘A’ Grade Bands within driving distance, before the pandemic his banding commute was a little longer. “Prior to Covid, all three bands had regular soprano cornet players so there was no place for me in the local A grade scene. My Dad lives eleven hours (1000km) drive south in a city called Gosford, and Central Coast Brass of Gosford was a recent Australian national champion band in need of a top order soprano cornet player. So, I joined them in 2019”. Despite now being settled with the more local Brisbane Brass, Fendall clearly cannot shake off the desire to travel and belongs to the New Zealand based Brass Whanganui. “This commute is 2,450km as the crow flies” he explains, and “the challenge is to drop in the weekend before the contest and play two A Grade test pieces”. Thankfully modern technology, and private links on YouTube aid this process and make the transition into the band that much smoother. So, the obvious question here is to ask when Fendall continues to do such lengthy commutes? “Because I love meeting and bonding with new people and bands” he explains. “I don’t have the time or energy to commit throughout the year, but I am able to commit to “mad” contest seasons from time to time, and it is nice feeling that I can still impress with my soprano playing in a contest setting. I love national contests. I love knowing I can still perform at this level, and even improve”. Fendall, I can’t argue with any of that.

UK Connections

This desire to get involved with a broader version of brass banding isn't just limited to the Southern hemisphere. Despite being based in Australia, Fendall has strong musical ties to the UK, specifically the market town of Wednesbury in the West Midlands, some ten thousand miles from his home in Queensland. Wednesbury is the home of (soon to be) Championship Section Band, Sovereign Brass, where Fendall was appointed Associate Composer in November this year. The connection comes through the band's MD Alan Gifford whom Fendall first met through an association with the Blidworth Welfare Band in Nottinghamshire.

The benefits for both band and composer have been immediate, with Sovereign finishing their set at the recent Wychavon Festival of Brass with Fendall's original work Fawkes, winning the First Section in the process. There is more to come as two more of his pieces are set to be included on the bands upcoming Christmas CD release.

Fendall is clear that all bands should think about similar partnerships and would “encourage bands to look to encourage composers with similar roles”.

To wrap up

And that was where we left it. It never ceases to amaze me how much in common we can have with someone we’ve never met and who lives on the opposite side of the world from us. We are intrinsically linked though, through our love of music and brass bands specifically, a love which compels some of us to fly eleven hours to band practice or others to use their spare time writing about brass bands. It was a pleasure speaking to Fendall, learning about him, and his banding life and hope that one day we might be able to meet in person.