Concert Band

Second to None

Grade 5 | 6 Mins

Second to None was commissioned by the British Corps of Army Music (Principal Director of Music, Lieutenant Colonel Neil Morgan) to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its foundation. The formation of the Corps (CAMUS) in 1994 was triggered by a Ministry of Defence review in the early 1990s and followed a 1993 announcement by the Chief of the General Staff that the number of Army bands was to reduce from 69 to 29. As CAMUS continues to evolve, the Army’s bands have become much more diverse, including rock and pop bands, strings and big bands. In addition, the Army formed three new brass bands in 2014.

Second to None takes its title from the Corps’s motto, Nulli Secundus, and opens with a fanfare, including optional fanfare trumpets, which leads to short quotes from two of the Corps’s own marches: the slow march, Esprit de Corps (Greg Machin), and the quick march, The Music Makers (Ian Mitchell), whose music is used with kind permission of both composers and the publisher, SafeMusic Publishing Ltd. A Vivace follows, in celebratory mood and centred around a more legato central section, and this leads back to the opening fanfare to bring the work to a close.