CULTURES OF BRASS PROJECT
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CULTURES OF BRASS PROJECT |
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The Diary of a Victorian Bandsman British publishers of military music 1770-1880
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The Diary of a Victorian Military Bandsman
The band of the 1st Devon Militia From the mid-eighteenth century into the nineteenth century, military bands were wind and percussion bands that typically included eight to ten wind instruments –clarinets, oboes, horns, bassoons, a trumpet and often a serpent. From the regimental accounts for 1805, we know that the early nineteenth-century band of the 1st Devon Militia did indeed include clarinets and a serpent in its instrumentation, and a turban which is listed alongside the cost of caps for the bandsmen implies that it also had a black percussion player – a common practice at that time (Walrond 1897, p. 235). The accounts for 1806 show that it had acquired a trombone, probably replacing the serpent (Walrond 1897, p. 241). Historically, military bands were funded by the officers of the regiment (a situation that continued into the 1870s). A regimental band thus functioned just as much as the officers’ private band, as it did as an element of military ritual and ceremonials. A significant part of its purpose was to play music for the officers’ entertainment in the Mess, and to perform at balls and concerts, and there is plenty of evidence in surviving printed music and in newspaper reports of the period of the kind of music that they played – ‘favorite airs and marches’, ‘reels and country dances’, quadrilles and ‘selections’ from the operatic and classical repertoires being typical. The band of the 1st Devon Militia appears in regimental accounts until 1825. Its status from then until 1854 is not clear, but it is likely that many militia bands fell into abeyance during the 1820s, 30s and 40s, given the state of the militia at that time. When the 1st Devon Militia was revived in 1853, it seems clear that the regiment had only fife and drums, and that it was necessary to reform the band. Shepherd notes that it held its first band practice ‘about the middle of March 1854’ (p. 1). The officers employed a professional bandmaster, Herr E. Hartmann (a civilian, as the title ‘Herr’ reveals). Shepherd gives a list of the bandmasters he served under (p. 34), but Hartmann is the only one he actually discusses. Hartmann was the band’s second bandmaster, the first, Mr Pinney, having resigned early in 1855. One of Hartmann’s first actions was to strengthen the band by the acquisition of four other professional German musicians (p. 3). They comprised a B flat clarinet player, an E flat clarinet player, and, more significantly, a cornet player and a euphonium player. The presence of the latter two indicates that the invention in the 1830s of valved brass instruments had necessarily had an impact on the instrumentation of bands. Shepherd’s time with the band of the 1st Devon Militia coincided with a period of significant change in the culture of the British regimental band, when some of its traditional practices would be brought to an end. While the Mess and civilian functions of the band remained important (both – and particularly the latter – are apparent in Shepherd’s recollections), over the second half of the nineteenth century the military would take steps to curb the control of officers over the functions of the regimental band, finally taking the funding of bands out of the officers’ hands. The 1st Devon Militia also followed a common historical practice in employing foreign musicians who were both professional and civilian. (That Hartmann and the four German players were professional and civilian is evident in the fact that they clearly had fixed-term contracts that terminated with the disembodiment of the regiment in 1856 (p. 19).) The practice dated from the eighteenth century, but its days were numbered: in 1857 the Military Music Class (subsequently the Royal Military School of Music) was established to train home-grown military musicians and bandmasters. |