RSM People: David Gordon-Shute
Onyx Brass will reach their 30th anniversary as an ensemble next year, a huge achievement. To celebrate, they have made the incredibly generous decision to donate to RSM a portion of ticket and merchandise sales, as well as collect donations, at every one of their concerts in 2023. Onyx Brass and RSM Member David Gordon-Shute explains why they wanted to help RSM and what it means to reach this milestone.
What first interested you in becoming a musician and when did you decide to specialise in tuba?
I always enjoyed listening to my parents’ music in the car when we did long car journeys as a family. My Mum would put on Boney M, ABBA and musicals like Les Mis. and “They’re playing my song” (anyone remember that with Tom Conti and Gemma Craven?) but my Dad would always put on large scale romantic music like Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. It was that music that affected me the most. When he made a tape for me with Peter and the Wolf on one side and the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on the other, I loved it. Very weirdly, after a few listenings, I found myself uncontrollably bursting into tears when the two tunes collided at the end of the fugue in YPG. It remains for me one of music’s great moments.
The tuba was put into my hands as a 10 year old purely because I was big for my age and the school needed a tuba player. I quickly became reasonable and started playing in children’s orchestras but it was joining the NYO that changed my life. I imagine that quite a few members of the RSM might say something similar.
How did Onyx Brass come about? How did meet the other members?
Onyx was largely an ex-NYO brainchild (Onyx being an anagram of X NYO) and, after a month’s inter railing with the trombonist Amos Miller when we had left school, a joint decision was made to ask three more friends (from the NYO) to join us on this journey. We were after a particular sound and this sound has always been something that Onyx have tried to celebrate and showcase. The horn player had to change very quickly in the first six months and there have been three other personnel changes in the trumpets but over 30 years, I think that’s pretty respectable. We all have different stuff that we do away from the group but Onyx happens fairly regularly across the year and it’s a chance to play interesting repertoire and not be conducted by anyone!
30 years is a huge achievement for an ensemble. Congratulations! What do you think has made you stand the test of time?
On the one hand it has been easy. We are all good friends and enjoy seeing each other and playing music with each other. It has also been relatively easy to come up with new and interesting repertoire ideas and recording projects which really get us fired up. On the other hand, there are often setbacks. Writing unsuccessful applications for funding, availability crises and having to rely on (exceptional) deputies every now and again, having to deal with difficult promoters… I could go on. At its core, Onyx is a group of friends. We know an awful lot about each other’s lives. We have been there for each other through all the ups and downs of life and I think that this helps form a very tight bond.
To celebrate your 30th anniversary in 2023, you have very generously offered to collect donations for RSM at all of your concerts throughout the year. What made you want to support the Society?
Having only been part of the Society for a relatively short time, I have been very impressed by its forward-looking approach and its keenness to help musicians in need. I have helped recommend a name or two when I have known people to be in trouble and I think that the growing list of services that the RSM provides is impressive and reflecting more and more the times we live in. Its incredibly generous response to the Covid pandemic was very touching and made a real impact.
What can we expect from your activities in 2023? Any highlights?
2023 will, in a way, be like any normal year. There is a full list of concerts and masterclasses for us to do. It will be different though in a couple of ways. First, we have given ourselves some wonderful birthday presents in the form of new commissions by a group of incredible composers. In March alone, we will be premiering four of these. Works by Mark Anthony Turnage, Errollyn Wallen, Bobbie-Jane Gardner, Zoe Martlew and Yshani Perinpanyagam. There will be others later in the year and we sneak-premiered a few last year too just because the composers managed to write them so quickly. We will also be heading to the Royal Academy of Music for the first time in the group’s history which feels like a welcome return home as four of the five members of the group were students there. At the RAM, we will be also be doing some side by side work with the students playing some of our own arrangements of Richard Strauss and a new work for triple brass quintet by Tim Jackson. We can’t wait.
A huge thank you to Onyx Brass for their incredible generosity. View their full diary of upcoming engagements, including the premiere of work by Mark Anthony Turnage on 21 March, by clicking here.
