An Introduction to America’s Music

116 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

By the middle 1800s bands in the United States were serving functions that

had nothing to do with the military. Bands can easily travel and reconfi gure

themselves, adapting themselves to many different settings: in early America

they performed in theaters, private halls, hotels, resorts, parks, hospitals, and

churches, and at sporting events, fairs, store openings, dinner parties, club

meetings, and even funerals.

Bands also played concerts, and here they followed the long-standing custom

of varying the sound from number to number. During the 1850–51 season, for

example, the sixteen-member American Band of Providence, Rhode Island, pre-

sented a series of concerts in a local hall. On one surviving program, the band

offered a concert in two parts with six numbers on each. The fi rst half consisted

of a march, a vocal song, a cornet solo, a dance piece, another song, and an over-

ture, in that order. Nineteenth-century band concerts embraced virtually all the

musical genres that audiences of the time were likely to hear: marches, patriotic

and popular songs, descriptive pieces, solos, transcriptions of orchestral and

operatic works, and dance music.

An example of the last-named genre is Helene Schottische (LG 5.1), which sur-

vives in an arrangement for a twelve-piece brass band: two E-fl at cornets, seven

saxhorns (three E-fl at altos, two B-fl at tenors, and basses in B-fl at and E-fl at),

and percussion (three players on side drum, bass drum, and cymbals). The

arrangement was written out during the Civil War by Walter Dignam, born in

En gland in 1827 but an American resident from 1844. Dignam led the Second and

Fourth New Hampshire Regiment Band in Virginia during the confl ict. A skilled

player, he intended the demanding fi rst E-fl at cornet part for himself. Played on

instruments from the 1800s, the accompanying recording shows the delicacy,

restraint, and beauty of sound possible from this kind of ensemble.

Each strain of this dance tune is eight bars long. Since the basic sequence of

steps in the schottische (a type of polka) fi lls four bars, dancers could complete

two sequences in each strain. For most strains, the instruments that accompany

the melody outline the dancers’ rhythm:

step-step-step-hop step-step-step-hop step-hop-step-hop step-hop-step-hop

In the fi rst two bars, they play a chord on each step and are silent for each

hop. In bar 3, the bass instruments play for each step and the midrange instru-

ments for each hop: oom-pah, oom-pah. Bar 4 may have either pattern, assur-

ing variety.

Many of the military bands during the Civil War were state militia bands

whose members enlisted as a group, participated in the war as a unit, then

returned home and continued to play, either in a militia band or a town band.

Small towns north and south took pride in their local bands and often pro-

vided some degree of fi nancial support, sometimes buying a set of saxhorns

that were then lent to band members but remained town property. With their

participation in all sorts of public functions, from concerts and dances to

parades and holiday celebrations, town bands provided small-town Americans

with music ranging from dance tunes to patriotic songs and lighter pieces in

classical genres. For at least some audience members, exposure to operatic and

orchestral music in band transcriptions whetted an appetite to hear the real

thing.

LG 5.1

militia and town

bands

performance settings

concert formats

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