ANOTHER cuckoo has arrived in the village of Marsden.

However, it isn’t the winged variety which, legend says, took to the air before villagers could wall it in, but a new brass band march written by Canadian composer Gabriel Major-Marothy specially for the Cuckoo Day festivities on April 26.

The story begins back in the mid-1930s when local musician Sidney V Wood, who went on to become bandmaster of the Morris Motors Works Band in Oxford, composed a march called The Cuckoo for the then flourishing Marsden Senior School Boys’ Band, a pioneering enterprise which was founded in 1931 by headmaster Harry Collins and band trainer Tom Eastwood.

It was a popular march with the band and was heard hundreds of times over the years as the band paraded in the village streets.

More than 20 years later, when the country underwent a major educational revamp, the remnants of the Band and the music library were moved to the new Colne Valley High School at Linthwaite, and it was there that the band, at the time struggling on with depleted numbers, passed into history.

A year ago contact was made with the High School in a bid to find copies of the missing march, but unfortunately there was no response. Apparently that cuckoo had also flown, but the band’s old and battered bass drum showing that attempts had been made to paint out the name of the band, was uncovered in a cupboard in the Linthwaite school.

Brian Boothroyd, who had his initial training with the School Band, has spent a lifetime with Marsden Silver (Ossett Brewery) and it was his eldest son, Simon, himself a former member of Marsden Silver Band, who set the wheels in motion for the Canadian composer to write a new march for Cuckoo Day. Simon, a researcher who now lives in Canada, continued his banding interest when he left Marsden, playing with a band in South Wales during his university days and continuing when he set up home in Canada. It was then that he told the story of the cuckoo to Major-Marothy, who lives in Ottawa, and of his father’s wish to find the original march.

Brian said “The new march is very descriptive and brings in the call of the cuckoo, the excitement of the parade in the village and ends in some agitation and a great flourish when the cuckoo flies away. The call of the cuckoo comes from the soprano cornet.” The composer has dedicated the march to ‘BB and Marsden Junior Band’, although owing to a shortage of youngsters in the Junior Band, it will be the senior combination who play the march as they head the parade on Cuckoo Day.

Funding for the commissioning of the march was donated by the Cuckoo’s Nest charity shop in the village.

Major-Marothy has won two competitions with his march compositions, Mischievous Spirit recorded by Hannaford Street Silver, Canada’s leading brass band, with March of the Plumbers having been commissioned by the Plumbing Factory Brass Band which is based in London (Ontario).