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Public Military Music and the Promotion of Patriotism in the British Provinces, c. 1780-c. 1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2020

Trevor Herbert
Trevor Herbert*
Affiliation:
The Open University
*
E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The role and importance of military musicians changed and intensified in the late eighteenth century through two important processes. The first was the culture of display that took root in both the home-based army and units in the colonies. The second was the result of successive militia acts which effectively ensured that military units with bands would be systematically placed in every corner of the British Isles.

It became evident that music as a component of military display served an important diplomatic purpose. Music performed in public spaces was heard by a population deeply sceptical of the army and with an essentially local sense of identity. The experience of the sight and sound of military music raised entirely new perceptions of nation and of the state as a benign power.

Two important and related themes emerge here. The first is the historical process that led, almost accidentally, to a realization that music as part of military display had potential to influence populations across the country and in the colonies. The second, more challenging, theme concerns the nature of the evidence for this idea and how it is to be treated. It is an idea that is totally convincing if the experience of hearing and seeing military spectacle by the mass of the people can be shown to have had impact. What is the evidence of listening to music by those people at whom it was targeted, how robust is it and what can be made of it?

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 17 , Special Issue 3: The Experience of Listening to Music in the Nineteenth Century , December 2020 , pp. 427 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2020

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References

1 National Library of Ireland, MS 13,527, J.K. Mackenzie letters.

2 The Introduction to this issue gives more information about the LED project.

3 Overwhelmingly, the bandmasters of regimental and militia bands were Germans. This was partly because early bands of music in Britain were imitative of the German model and also because of the ready supply of bandmasters through London agents such as George Astor, who directed Morning Chronicle advertisements at ‘Officers of the Army and Navy’ who could ‘be immediately supplied with complete sets of instruments for a Band with good musicians to play the same [as well as] several good Masters for teaching’; see Morning Chronicle, 8 July 1795.

4 National Library of Ireland, MS 13,527, J.K. Mackenzie letters.

5 National Library of Ireland, MS 13,527, J.K. Mackenzie letters.

6 See also Herbert, Trevor, ed., The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar and Herbert, Trevor and Myers, Arnold, ‘Music for the Multitude: Accounts of Brass Bands Entering Enderby Jackson's Crystal Palace Contests in the 1860s’, Early Music 38/4 (2010): 571–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Operatic derivatives are especially prominent in the repertoires of brass and military bands in the nineteenth century. Surviving documents relating to the music played at brass band contests evidence this.

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63 For the relevant sources and for a discussion of Wellington's funeral, Wolffe, see John, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2000): 28–56Google Scholar.