Opera at the Bandstand: Then and Now by George W. Martin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Opera at the Bandstand: Then and Now by George W. Martin David M. Guion Opera at the Bandstand: Then and Now. By George W. Martin. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2014. [xx, 254 p. ISBN 9780810888531 (hardcover), $85; 9780810888548 (e-book), $84.99.] [End Page 143] Illustrations, tables, appendices, bibliography, index. At first glance, opera and wind bands have no obvious connection. Opera seems like high art, and bands seem most at home in parades, football halftime shows, and summer concerts in the park. In fact, only in the last hundred years or so has most opera become regarded as fine art. (Wagner’s works occupied that pedestal from the start.) Programs by the Innes Band were described in 1896 as “a mix of classical music, operatic selections, marches, songs and lighter classics” (p. 91). So for the author (and certainly others), opera did not quite count as classical music, but nonetheless ranked higher than the other kinds of music listed. For a little more than a century, concert bands played a large and conspicuous role in American popular culture. Until about the Second World War, operatic excerpts comprised a large part of the concert bands’ repertoire. George W. Martin has chosen as his book’s theme the decline of operatic selections in wind band concerts, and he makes a “heartfelt plea” for bands to reintroduce them to their public (p. xiii). That theme provides a hook on which to hang a general overview of the history of American bands and their repertoire. For the most part, he provides a very good one, with some missed opportunities. Terms like orchestra, band, classical, popular, etc., can be hard to pin down. Martin reviews these difficulties and concludes that while terminological imprecision might explain in part why “scholars, critics, and opera historians tend to skim by concert bands,” generations of snobbish attitudes contribute to a general neglect of concert bands now that they no longer dominate popular culture (p. xvi). Martin neglects to define opera alongside the other terms he explores. His list of operas premiered between 1940 and 1980, which he suggests as good sources for successful band transcriptions, includes Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Why not anything by Leonard Bernstein? Why not anything else from the Broadway stage? Is it because, since its Broadway premiere, opera companies have staged Sweeney Todd but not other musicals? Ironically, it seems that Martin is somewhat infected by the same snobbery toward musicals and operettas that he criticizes in band scholarship. Their music, and film music, seems to serve the same purpose today that operatic excerpts did in earlier times. For Martin’s purposes, the history of American bands starts in the 1830s with the Dodworth Band, an all-brass band. I wish he had provided more information about the Dodworth family, how they came to have such a dominant role in New York’s concert life, how long their band remained active, and why so many bands of the time excluded woodwind instruments. Louis Antoine Jullien, the eccentric leader of an English promenade orchestra, brought his core members to the United States in 1853. He probably had more impact on the development of American band music than the Dodworths did. Supplemented by local musicians, Jullien’s orchestra put from 60 to 100 musicians onstage at once. Its repertoire included symphonic works, quadrilles, virtuoso soloists on many instruments, and, of course, a large dose of operatic literature. Martin shows how Jullien impressed American musicians with his flamboyance and strong personality, the precision of his ensemble, and the success of his tours. Martin devotes two chapters to the first important beneficiary of Jullien’s example, Patrick S. Gilmore. He devotes three chapters to John Philip Sousa. Although he explicitly states in his introduction that his book is “not a history of all civilian touring bands, but only a representative few,” he describes too few: only Gilmore and Sousa (p. xiv). His comments on Gilmore’s chief rival, a band conducted by Claudio Grafulla, and after Grafulla’s death Carlo Antonio Cappa, are scattered throughout the narrative in a way that makes it impossible for the reader to get a clear picture of it. Important...