All-Japan Band Association
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The All-Japan Band Association (AJBA) is an organization that exists solely for the purpose of facilitating an enormous annual competition among Japanese wind bands. While this competition has largely promoted the concert band idiom in Japan, in recent years AJBA has also included separate categories for marching band and smaller ensembles within its national competition.
The AJBA competition includes categories for elementary school, middle school, high school, university, company, and community bands. It is an extremely competitive three-tiered contest, with local, regional, and national levels of competition. In some categories - middle school for example - the school bands that manage to reach the national level of competition are among the top 2% in all of Japan.
The renowned Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra is usually hired to make the definitive premier recordings of the required pieces commissioned each year for AJBA's enormous national competition. The final (national) stage of the competition is regularly held in Fumon Hall, an enormous auditorium located on the campus of the Rissho Kosei Kai religious organization in central Tokyo.
[edit] World's Largest Music Contest
In recent years, nearly 14,000 Japanese bands have participated annually in the AJBA competition (totaling around 500,000 contestants nationwide), making it the world's largest music competition in terms of the number of active participants. The other largest music competitions in the world are the Eurovision and American Idol competitions in the field of pop music singing. While these do not exceed the AJBA competition in terms of the number of competitors, they may be larger in terms of the number of individual entrants, operating budgets, or fans (as these contests involve popular music, are marketed internationally, and enjoy a much higher global profile).
[edit] Further Reading
- David G. Hebert (2005). Music Competition, Cooperation, and Community: An Ethnography of a Japanese School Band. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Washington. Ann Arbor: Proquest/UMI.
- David G. Hebert (2001). “Hoshina and Ito: Japanese Wind Band Composers,” Journal of Band Research, Vol. 37, No. 1 (pp. 61-77).
- Philip V. Bohlman (2004). The Music of European Nationalism. ABC-CLIO [scholarly discussion of the Eurovision competition].
