What shall we do with Marches?
I am old enough to remember a time when marches were the linchpins of band concerts. The epitome of that tradition came in the concerts of Sousa when he would routinely perform a march following each programmed composition. No one raised aesthetic objections to such disparate successions in style because it was all for the purpose of entertainment anyway. And for the same reason no one objected that the billboard at the Steel Pier in New Jersey listed a Sousa band concert followed by a diving horse act.
But today we can no longer do this. You cannot follow the Music for Prague, 1968 by a Sousa march, nor the other way around. In fact the old marches are almost never played at all any more. Perhaps in part age plays a role, for their being heard in concerts probably occurs in about the same ratio as Baroque works do on major orchestra concerts.
In my mind there are two characteristics of marches which are deeply rooted in me due to my own experiences, their aesthetic heritage and form. The first of these characteristics only fully became part of my thinking after a Christmas party in 1968 in Salzburg. Carl Orff was present and after his participation, reading from one of his opera librettos, it was announced that now we would have folk-dancing. Our small group moved to a large classroom and records were produced. I, due to my well-known shyness, leaned against a wall and watched the others dance. But, when a recording of “The Washington Post” began to play I, as a matter of education, had to join the dancers in the two-step. It is always nearly impossible to describe movement in words, so I will merely say that on this evening the two-step consisted of running in a circle at a very fast pace. It was exhilarating and far more fun than marching to a march.
This dance experience caused me to reflect for the first time on the folk roots of this dance form. All of us today know of the Hungarian roots of the march as a dance form, in particular the Verbunkos used for military recruitment. But the earlier Hungarian roots lay in folk choral music and it is this which still echoes in those wonderful sweeping melodies in the trios of Sousa marches.
In truth, in the 19th century social musical life of Europe marches were found side by side in high society with waltzes, schottisches and polkas. They were all folk music, music of the people. Marches did not yet have the associations which came later of militarism and colonialism. And we still have marches in our repertoire which have nothing to do with war, such as those found in folk-song suites, those of the court Harmoniemusik repertoire and even some marches composed for the church. And don’t forget processional music is march music –Wagner’s Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral is a march! I can’t help thinking that if we could somehow remove the political associations and present marches as folk-music it might perhaps be easier to find a way to program them.
The other special characteristic of marches as part of our repertoire which I have long thought about came as the result of an invitation to make an LP recording of Sousa marches with the Luzern Wind Orchestra in Switzerland. The regular conductor, Albert Benz, asked me to select 14 marches of which I would conduct half and he the other half. Working this into their already busy schedule resulted in a three-day period of rehearsal and recording in Zurich. Having to quickly absorb 7 Sousa marches, and deciding on performance practice in so far as time allowed, resulted in the thought occurring to me that these marches were very much like so many divertimenti. The problem would be the same if I were preparing 7 Mozart divertimenti, on some level they would all sound the same but they would also be distinctly individual. And for the first time I began to think of the march form as the divertimento of the band repertoire. I still think of them as exactly that, but, unlike divertimenti, the aesthetic problem is that they are too brief.
Performance Problems
Aside from the social and aesthetic problems discussed above, there are definite performance problems which have limited the appearance of marches on my own programs. First, it has been my experience that to play a march well requires a great deal of rehearsal, at least 3 hours with good players. This amount of rehearsal is necessary in order to recreate the historical traditions of earlier dance music. And after all this rehearsal and concentration is spent, one is left with 3 minutes of music. It is very uneconomical. Certainly in a normal university concert which contains major contemporary repertoire one simply cannot afford the time.
This particular performance problem became central to my life one week-end during which I fulfilled an engagement with the Pasadena All-City Honor Band in California, a Saturday afternoon rehearsal, a Sunday afternoon rehearsal and evening concert. Since the school music programs had undergone a tremendous decline in quality I was careful to select for these brief hours of rehearsal one march and a couple of very easy additional works. It was necessary for the school administration to bus students in for these two days and some administrator concluded that it made more sense to bus in half of the students for Saturday and the other half for Sunday, rather than busing in all the students for both rehearsals – clearly redundant! Not being an official of the school system I knew nothing of this until I arrived on Saturday and saw half of the chairs empty. The second day found the other half of the band present and the students from Saturday were missing. Only the timpani player, an eager kid who owned his own timpani, appeared for both rehearsals. I made a point of thanking him and he replied, “Well, it was the least I could do, in view of the fact….” Well, everyone knows how that sentence ended.
I explained to the supervisor of music that, in spite of my best efforts, I could only perform the one march, the other pieces being impossible in view of the rehearsal circumstances. She understood utterly without disappointment. The concert was held in the Ambassador Auditorium, one of the two great formal concert sites in LA at that time. This marble palace was filled with parents and friends as the concert began with the supervisor of music introducing me at length. It was the only time in my career that my entire resume has been read in public. Then, following thunderous applause, I appeared and conducted the 3 minute long march. Following more thunderous applause I commented at length on how hard the students had worked to create such a wonderful performance and if you don’t mind we will play it again! Following this I gave a long speech on the importance of music education, and played the march again. And so it continued through several more speeches and several more performances of the march. As I returned home it seemed, in retrospect, like an encore with no concert.
Apart from the problem of programming a 3 minute composition, the greater programming problem is an aesthetic one. One march at the end of a concert will inevitably turn the entire concert into an entertainment event. A concluding march works like an electronic eraser, erasing the memory of all earlier compositions no matter how substantial or how serious. A simple law of nature you can depend on. Placing the march first on the program is nearly as bad, for it creates a certain atmosphere which may cause the second composition to be in an impossible aesthetic position.
I have tried to manage this aesthetic problem by playing a group of marches, such as three of them in contrasting styles or periods. But they must be contrasting for listening to three Sousa marches in a row is a bit like eating three strawberry sundaes in a row.[1] Programming three contrasting marches helps the aesthetic problem somewhat but it only really works if the entire program is of a similar contrasting nature.
But the programming problem remains if it is an aesthetic program. Recently I attended a concert by the Austin Symphony during which a fine pianist joined the orchestra in a wonderful performance of a Mozart concerto. Then, most regrettably, for an encore the pianist played a stupid arrangement of a trivial popular song by some current composer. It ruined the entire experience and sent some of us home very disappointed and confused. When one thinks of the vast number of short piano works, any one of which we would have loved to hear live, one is at a complete loss to explain this man’s bad taste. A devastating blunder!
Why is this so important? It is important because our sensitive experiential identities are in a concert laid bare in the hands of the artist. This responsibility of the artist, or conductor, is very great and has been acknowledged and discussed since the time of Plato. As of yet there are no laws associated with offending the sensibilities of listeners, but Berlioz thought there should be. In 1852 there came to his attention a civic notice in Cologne forbidding wandering musicians with untuned instruments. “Fine!,” cried Berlioz in an article in the Journal des Debats of Jan. 7, 1852, reasoning that if we are going to control air pollution we should also control ear pollution. Such a law, he argued, should include,
Imbecilic singers without a voice, incapable performers and conductors who tear apart a masterpiece, break its four members; extinguish its flame, make it physiognomy ignoble and grotesque, are beings incomparably more destructive than if they were spreading infectious odors in the room where they worked.
The question is not whether marches will adversely affect the sensibilities of the audience, but rather if their placement in the program would. It follows, of course, that you can not ever play a march and still find a hundred other ways to insult the sensibilities of the listener by the repertoire you elect to present and the order in which that repertoire is presented. But beware: the factors at work here are genetic and universal and if the conductor insults the sensibilities of the audience, they will not return. An audience comes to a concert with no expectations at all beyond expecting a concert to be a concert. If they find they were merely amused, they will be unlikely to return because they can remain at home, turn on the TV and find 500 channels of amusement and save all that money spent on tickets, parking and transportation.
There are some marches I really love, among them the Black Horse Troop of Sousa. When I hear the Milano March by Ponchielli I feel transported to pre-world war European society and it is a wonderful feeling. I think any elderly person in Vienna who hears the trio of the Fucik Florentiner March must weep for the loss of the old empire. When I hear that trio I am back living on Kartnerstrasse and I see Mahler going by on the street car and most of the men wearing uniforms. Perhaps, in the end, I didn’t play more marches during my career because I was not of that world.
1
[1] Curiously, Sousa himself once used food as an analogy when speaking of his marches. When asked why his marches, unlike the long European tradition, did not have a da capo at the end of the trio (thus causing his marches to end in a different key than they began), he observed, “After the ice cream, who wants to go back to the roast beef?”