At some stage of this summer's Leeds conference on music and the North –a wide-ranging, international affair taking in heavy metal as well as brass bands – someone may recall a famous story about the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra.

It's a classic story, encapsulating the parochial, philistine, thick-skinned, bird-brained bone-headedness that's the unique preserve of local councillors.

The orchestra, funded by ratepayers, flourished for eight years in the late Forties and early Fifties. It bravely challenged Lancashire's monopoly on professional northern orchestras and flew the flag for a county – then as now – curiously rich in choral societies but curiously poor in orchestras.

It gave hundreds of concerts in Leeds, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Hull, York and practically everywhere else in Yorkshire except Bradford and Sheffield (where the Hallé held sway). Often winning glowing reviews, it attracted conductors of the calibre of Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir Adrian Boult and Sir Malcolm Sargent.

In 1950, its regular conductor, Maurice Miles, suggested that a visit to London's Royal Albert Hall would be a prestigious, morale-boosting change from concerts in Armley Baths Hall or the Ritz Cinema in Doncaster. "Nay, nay, Mr Miles," barked one councillor on the orchestra committee. "If London wants an orchestra, let them do what we've done and get one of their own!"

In the event, the concert went ahead, with special trains taking civic dignitaries and supporters from all over Yorkshire, and there were good reviews from the London critics. It was a showcase for Northern music... which is exactly what the Music and the Idea of the North conference should be.

Celebrating this year's 150th anniversary of the opening of Leeds Town Hall, it will explore connections between music and Northern identity. Over three days in September, more than 100 delegates from all over the world will discuss Northern choirs, Northern Soul, Northern post-punk, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Mersey Sound, brass bands (particularly Brighouse and Rastrick), The Smiths, 20th century choral festivals and heavy metal.

If it plays or sings and it's linked to the North, it will probably be in there somewhere. It should be fascinating. Any academic event, after all, whose publicity quotes both Tennyson ("Dark and true and tender is the north") and Dr Who ("Every planet has a north") is getting off to a promising start.

The conference is the brainchild of
Dr Rachel Cowgill, senior lecturer at the University of Leeds school of music (and originally from Cheshire: we have a short debate about whether Cheshire is North, Midlands or, as some claim, a moneyed outpost of the South-East).

Her particular interest is the northern choirs and choral societies which have long been at the heart of community life and partly inspired the building of Victorian town halls like the one in Leeds.

"The halls were a fusion of amateur music-making and civic pride, in a way that I don't get a sense of it happening down South," she says in a university seminar room just up the road from the Town Hall. "It was the ideal of classes unified and working to a common goal. A social glue, very democratic and linked to self-improvement."

Dave Russell is champing at the bit. "There's an egalitarianism about the North of England," he says, and suggests a parallel with the way football can celebrate common identity and disguise class differences. Isn't there a danger
of sentimentalising this, I suggest.
"Not half," he says.

Professor Russell is based at the Institute of Northern Studies, set up two years ago at Leeds Metropolitan University to study "issues of northern identity and culture" and "the past, present and future of the English north". Born, for no fault of his own, in Croydon, he reckons: "Northerness is probably the most powerful identity in English culture."

There's much debate, of course, about what exactly "northerness" and "the north" add up to: a geographical fact or a state of mind, an outlook. "But there does seem to be a constellation of ideas around the notion of 'the north'," says Russell. "There's the idea of being masculine and full of freedom and independence of mind and spirit, to set against more effete metropolitan values. The idea of the north being 'other', wilder, untamed."

All this chimes in with WH Auden's vision of his own mental and spiritual North-South divide. In his 1947 essay I Like It Cold, the poet (born in Bootham in York near the Minster), writes: "Crewe railway junction marks the wildly exciting frontier where the alien south ends and the north, my world, begins…

"North: cold, wind, precipices, glaciers, caves, heroic conquest of dangerous obstacles, whales, hot meat and vegetables, concentration and production, privacy.

"South: heat, light, drought, calm, agricultural plains, trees, Rotarian crowds, the life of ignoble ease, spiders, fruits and desserts, the waste of time, publicity."

Whether this North-South difference is reflected in classical music is hard to say. Most of the great British composers have been southerners, writing music with considerably more grit and fire than much of the output of arguably the greatest northern composer, Bradford-born Frederick Delius (whose works owe more to the heat, light and calm of Auden's south than to the heroic conquest of his north).

It was left to Elgar, a Worcestershire man, to fly the northern flag. After a 1903 Morecambe performance of his choral work The Banner of St George, he wrote that "the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further north." The composer was a big fan of the Dales and in the 1880s had holidays at the Giggleswick home of his friend Charles William Buck, a doctor and cellist. Early in the planning of the conference, involving Leeds International Concert Season and Opera North as well as the two universities, there was debate about whether the "north" should be just the English north, or whether the canvas should be broadened to include other norths as well.

They settled on the second idea, so the schedule includes papers on the eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who made ground-breaking radio documentaries in the 1960s exploring the "Idea of North" which gives the conference its title. Plus a paper on Percy Grainger, the equally (though differently) eccentric Australian pianist and composer, who collected Danish and English folk songs.

There are Nordic gods, Icelandic music videos, "the Nazi idea of the north", Scandinavia ("In praise of open landscapes, solitude and homebrewed schnapps: the musical aspect of Sweden's nature-based identity"), a consideration of the Isle of Man's emotional geography ("Changing perceptions of an island's northernness") and, as an alternative compass reference, a study of Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antartica, based on his music for the film Scott of the Antarctic.

"We started with the idea of Leeds Town Hall, then spread out to the North of England, and eventually went out into the world," says Rachel Cowgill.

The conference will also look at current issues. Not just the rock-music rivalries between Liverpool and Manchester, but a study of music's role in regeneration. The building of Victorian town halls – with Leeds and Bradford locked in bitter rivalry to build the better monument to civic pride – is mirrored by today's proliferation of new concert halls as symbols of local rejuvenation in Birmingham, Manchester, Gateshead, Nottingham and Glasgow (not Leeds as yet). The northern emphasis here has always been on participation.

"Amateur music-making in the North seemed central to the region's identity for much of the 19th century," says Cowgill. "There was a suspicion of professional music – the idea that it wasn't a 'manly' thing to be in. And the idea that the North was a culturally depleted area – there was a cultural inferiority complex."

Beyond the purely classical, she muses on the "sense of working class creativity" in Northern pop music, with "the Kaiser Chiefs versus Arctic Monkeys thing... it's to do with the idea of the North as a place of struggle."

Her conversation counterpoints with Russell's as he recalls last year's Myth of the North exhibition at The Lowry in Salford. Visitors were asked to fill in cards asking: "What does the North mean to you?" The answers, now with the Institute of Northern Studies, were revealing.

"A lot of it is about friendliness, wonderful countryside, strong community sense, sometimes even grimness," he says.

"I think local and regional identity is still very important to people in an age of globalisation."

Cowgill draws things together: "The idea of northernness keys into moral issues and values – honesty, plain-speaking, not southern sophistry."

Russell points out how the 17th and 18th century image of northerners was all horse thieves and overall dishonesty. Now, research by call-centres has established the Yorkshire accent as the most trusted.

"The fiscal probity of the Yorkshire accent..." he muses. Which sounds like a conference paper in the making.

Music and the Idea of the North is at Leeds Town Hall on September 6 & 7. Get more information on 0113 343 2583 or www.leeds.ac.uk/music.