Greg Stepanich

The symphonic band: A pillar of American classical music

A footnote in Joseph Horowitz's Classical Music in America, which I finished recently, has me thinking about how a lot of Americans first become acquainted with art music.

On page 390, Horowitz writes at the bottom of the page: "Though they lie slightly outside the scope of this study, bands are not irrelevant to the history of classical music in the United States." He goes on to mention John Philip Sousa, as well as Edwin Franko Goldman and his son Richard, eminent bandmasters all.

But he's still mentioning them only in a footnote; a long footnote, yes, but a footnote.

And yet it seems to me that bands are not only "not irrelevant," I'd argue that for a great many Americans, their first acquaintance with classical music came not through an orchestra but a symphonic band, either through playing in one or going to a live concert in the park.

This is especially true outside the big cities, in the small towns that make up so much of the United States; in my hometown outside Chicago, for instance, the high schools had trouble getting an orchestra together, but that wasn't the case with the bands. And we band members took our music very seriously, not just because we had a large repertoire of canonical orchestral works in arrangement, but because we had a vast, rich repertoire of our own to play, much of it by Americans.

To take a couple examples off the top of my head: Vincent Persichetti, who gets also-ran mentions in books about American classical music, which deal almost exclusively with orchestral music. But to band players, Persichetti is a very important American composer, a man whose pieces, such as his Divertimento and Symphony for Band, were masterworks that you could tackle only if your band was a top-notch ensemble.

Same goes for Alfred Reed, a longtime University of Miami professor and composer. His Armenian Dances, to name one work that stands out in my memory, was a first-rate piece of writing, period, and a guaranteed crowd exciter whenever our high school or municipal band played it (and it was quite difficult).

Or take a non-native composer such as Australia's Percy Grainger, who took American citizenship as an adult. His huge piano career was forgotten not long after he died, and it's rare to hear a Grainger piano work on a recital, or hear one of his orchestra pieces on a concert. But short works like Shepherd's Hey are staples of band concerts, and because of the bands, Grainger survives as a composer.

The sound of the band, even a great one, doesn't have the variety of tone quality you can get when strings are involved. But band music, much more than orchestral music, was the art music the average American knew for generations, and that there has been so much fine music written for the concert band, and that it is so little-known outside its immediate circle of players and composers, is something of a disgrace.

So let's redress that balance a little bit. When we think of American classical music, we ought not be thinking only about works for orchestra and string quartet, about operas and piano pieces. We should be thinking at the same time of the enormous contribution the concert band has made to American classical music, and recognize it as one of the pillars of our music history.

So take a baritone horn player or alto clarinetist to lunch someday and tell him or her thanks for helping keep American classical music healthy and vital for so many years. In our country, the symphonic band is anything but a footnote.