The seeds of irreverent humour that inspired the likes of "The Wayne and Shuster Hour" and "Monty Python" were sown in the trenches of the First World War, and The Dumbells--concert parties made up of fighting soldiers--were central to this process. "Soldiers of Song" tells their story.

Lucky soldiers who could sing a song, perform a skit, or pass as a "lady," were taken from the line and put onstage for the benefit of their soldier-audiences. The intent was to bolster morale and thereby help soldiers survive the war.

The Dumbells' popularity was not limited to troop shows along the trenches. The group managed a run in London's West End and became the first ever Canadian production to score a hit on Broadway. Touring Canada for some twelve years after the war, the Dumbells became a household name and made more than twenty-five audio recordings. If nationhood was won on the crest of Vimy Ridge, it was the Dumbells who provided the country with its earliest soundtrack. Pioneers of sketch comedy, the Dumbells are as important to the history of Canadian theatre as they are to the cultural history of early-twentieth-century Canada.

The Cambridge History of American Music, first published in 1998, celebrates the richness of America's musical life. It was the first study of music in the United States to be written by a team of scholars. American music is an intricate tapestry of many cultures, and the History reveals this wide array of influences from Native, European, African, Asian, and other sources. The History begins with a survey of the music of Native Americans and then explores the social, historical, and cultural events of musical life in the period until 1900. Other contributors examine the growth and influence of popular musics, including film and stage music, jazz, rock, and immigrant, folk, and regional musics. The volume also includes valuable chapters on twentieth-century art music, including the experimental, serial, and tonal traditions.

Some thirty-two experts from fifteen countries join three of the world's leading authorities on the design, manufacture, performance and history of brass musical instruments in this first major encyclopedia on the subject. It includes over one hundred illustrations, and gives attention to every brass instrument which has been regularly used, with information about the way they are played, the uses to which they have been put, and the importance they have had in classical music, sacred rituals, popular music, jazz, brass bands and the bands of the military. There are specialist entries covering every inhabited region of the globe and essays on the methods that experts have used to study and understand brass instruments. The encyclopedia spans the entire period from antiquity to modern times, with new and unfamiliar material that takes advantage of the latest research. From Abblasen to Zorsi Trombetta da Modon, this is the definitive guide for students, academics, musicians and music lovers.

In A Singing Approach to Horn Playing, author and renowned teacher-musician Natalie Douglass Grana develops the fundamental sense of pitch that is essential to play the horn. The book begins with simple songs to sing on solfege, buzz on the mouthpiece, and play on the horn, followed by inner hearing, transposition, and polyphonic exercises. Readers learn to fluidly hear the notes on the page before playing them, through sequential exercises with songs, improvisation, stick notation, and duets. Training continues with progressively challenging melodies, including canons as well as vocal etudes (solfeggi) like those of Giuseppe Concone. Finally, hornists apply their musicianship skills to standard etude, solo, and orchestral horn repertoire. Horn parts are provided with important lines from the orchestra or accompaniment, transposed to also be sung and played on the horn. Accompanying rhythmic and harmonic exercises enable performers to learn to hear the parts together as they play. Through a wide-ranging synthesis of theory, practical advice, and exercises, Douglass Grana puts forth a crucial guide for a new generation of horn players and burgeoning musicians seeking to improve and perfect their sense of pitch.

At its most intimate, music heals our emotional wounds and inspires us; at its most public, it unites people across cultural boundaries. But can it rebuild a city? Renowned music writer John Swenson asks that question with New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans, a story about America's most colorful and troubled city and its indominable will to survive. Under sea level, repeatedly harangued by fires, crime, and most devastatingly, by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has the potential to one day become a "New Atlantis," a lost metropolis under the waves. But this threat has failed to prevent its stalwart musicians and artists from living within its limits, singing its praises and attracting the economic growth needed for its recovery. New Atlantis records how the city's jazz, Cajun, R&B, Bourbon Street, second line, brass band, rock and hip hop musicians are reconfiguring the city's unique artistic culture, building on its historic content while reflecting contemporary life in New Orleans. New Atlantis is a city's tale made up of citizen's tales. It's the story of Davis Rogan, a songwriter, bandleader and schoolteacher who has become an integral part of David Simon's new HBO series Treme (as compelling a story about New Orleans as The Wire was about Baltimore). It's the story of trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, who lost his father in the storm and has since become an important political and musical force shaping the future of New Orleans. It's the story of Bo Dollis Jr., chief of the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indians, as he tries to fill the shoes of his ailing father Bo Dollis, one of the most charismatic figures in Mardi Gras Indian history. It is also the author's own story; each musician profiled will be contextualized by Swenson's three-decades-long coverage of the New Orleans music scene.

At its most intimate level, music heals our emotional wounds and inspires us. At its most public, it unites people across cultural boundaries. But can it rebuild a city? That's the central question posed in New Atlantis, journalist John Swenson's beautifully detailed account of the musical artists working to save America's most colorful and troubled metropolis: New Orleans. The city has been threatened with extinction many times during its three-hundred-plus-year history by fire, pestilence, crime, flood, and oil spills. Working for little money and in spite of having lost their own homes and possessions to Katrina, New Orleans's most gifted musicians-including such figures as Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, "Trombone Shorty," and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux-are fighting back against a tidal wave of problems: the depletion of the wetlands south of the city (which are disappearing at the rate of one acre every hour), the violence that has made New Orleans the murder capitol of the U.S., the waning tourism industry, and above all the continuing calamity in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (or, as it is known in New Orleans, the "Federal Flood"). Indeed, most of the neighborhoods that nurtured the indigenous music of New Orleans were destroyed in the flood, and many of the elder statesmen have died or been incapacitated since then, but the musicians profiled here have stepped up to fill their roles. New Atlantis is their story. Packed with indelible portraits of individual artists, informed by Swenson's encyclopedic knowledge of the city's unique and varied music scene-which includes jazz, R&B, brass band, rock, and hip hop-New Atlantis is a stirring chronicle of the valiant efforts to preserve the culture that gives New Orleans its grace and magic.

Sweet Freedom's Song is a celebration and critical exploration of the complicated musical, cultural and political roles played by the song 'America' over the 250 years. Popularly known as 'My Country Tis of Thee' - and as 'God Save the King/Queen' before that - this song is arguably the most important political song in our national history. Branham and Hartnett chronicle the song's appropriation and adaption by colonial Americans, Southern slaveowners, abolitionalists, temperance campaigners and civil rights leaders. Because the song has been invoked by nearly every grassroots movement in our nation's history, the story of 'America' offers important insights on the story of democracy in the United States.

This is an extremely thorough 4 volume guide to the regimental march tunes and other parade music which inspired loyalty, pride and battlefield motivation for generations of Germans over three centuries. Built around a translation of the previously unpublished works of two great German military music historians, the late Lieutenant Colonel Joachim Toeche-Mittler and Lieutenant Colonel (Retd) Werner Probst, it describes the history of every march in the official collections sanctioned by successive kings of Prussia, German Emperors, and later by Chief Inspectors of Music of the German Republic and Third Reich. This work is no apology or eulogy for a militaristic culture now long gone amongst the German people, but a description of the international and home sources for the march repertoire, and the personalities involved in composing, commissioning, and dedicating marches to the leading personalities of the age, and their adoption as regimental music by the fighting units of Prussia and the other Old German States, Imperial Germany, and the later German Reich and Post War Republics of East and West Germany. The series will provide information about how the regimental bandsmen and signaller musicians on fife, drum and bugle paraded and performed this repertoire, the manufacture and embellishments of their instruments, Schellenbaum 'Jingling Johnnies' and Drum Majors' Staffs, and their employment and deployment in the ranks of the fighting units on parade and in battle. After a short introduction, Volume 1 concentrates on the vast official Royal Prussian collection of'regimental' and 'neutral' quick marches. Translated from previously unpublished original research by the late Luftwaffe Lt. Col. Joachim Toeche-Mittler, it provides a definitive description for each march, its composer, and how and by whom it was used, in many cases on campaign as well as on parade. With only one exception before 1914, every Prussian, and most non-Prussian regiments, had their regimental march from within this collection.

In Hymns for the Fallen, Todd Decker listens closely to forty years of Hollywood combat films produced after Vietnam. Ever a noisy genre, post-Vietnam war films have deployed music and sound to place the audience in the midst of battle and to provoke reflection on the experience of combat. Considering landmark movies-such as Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, and American Sniper-as well as lesser-known films, Decker shows how the domain of sound, an experientially rich and culturally resonant aspect of cinema, not only invokes the realities of war, but also shapes the American audience's engagement with soldiers and veterans as flesh-and-blood representatives of the nation. Hymns for the Fallen explores all three elements of film sound-dialogue, sound effects, music-and considers how expressive and formal choices in the soundtrack have turned the serious war film into a patriotic ritual enacted in the commercial space of the cinema.

An advertisement in the sheet music of the song "Goodbye Broadway, Hello France" (1917) announces: "Music will help win the war!" This ad hits upon an American sentiment expressed not just in advertising, but heard from other sectors of society during the American engagement in the First World War. It was an idea both imagined and practiced, from military culture to sheet music writers, about the power of music to help create a strong military and national community in the face of the conflict; it appears straightforward. Nevertheless, the published sheet music, in addition to discourse about gender, soldiering and music, evince a more complex picture of society. This book presents a study of sheet music and military singing practices in America during the First World War that critically situates them in the social discourses, including issues of segregation and suffrage, and the historical context of the war. The transfer of musical styles between the civilian and military realm was fluid because so many men were enlisted from homes with the sheet music while they were also singing songs in their military training. Close musical analysis brings the meaningful musical and lyrical expressions of this time period to the forefront of our understanding of soldier and civilian music making at this time.

The Complete Marching Band Resource Manual is the definitive guide to the intricate art of directing college and high school marching bands. Supplemented with musical arrangements, warm-up exercises, and over a hundred drill charts, this manual presents both the fundamentals and the advanced techniques that are essential for successful marching band leadership. The materials in this volume cover every stage of musical direction and instruction, from selecting music and choreographing movements to improving student memorization and endurance to the creation of striking visual configurations through uniform and auxiliary units. Now in its third edition, The Complete Marching Band Resource Manual has been thoroughly updated to reflect new standards for drill design, charting, and musical arrangement. Offering a fresh approach to the essentials of good marching band design, this comprehensive resource shows both veteran and novice band directors how to prepare students to perform seamless and sophisticated musical formations.

33 grand ceremonial pieces that are ideal for use at weddings, as voluntaries, or for recitals. Not all the music is loud and extrovert: together with pieces like fanfares and marches, the collection contains a sprinkling of quieter items in solemn mood.

The Seven Weeks War of 1866 occurred during a golden age of military music in both Austria and Prussia. This study will examine the background to this music, the role of military bands in contemporary culture, their repertoire and their exploits on the battlefield.PART ONE Prussia: the Wieprecht era - the development of military music, the three types of music (infantry, Jaeger and cavalry), and the composition of the respective bands, the Army March Collection, Berlin's golden era: concerts, parades and competitions. PART TWO Austria: the Leonhardt era, bandsmen as "musical missionaries," reforms after 1848, types of music, drum majors and drum dogs, regimental marches, Prussia's unrequited love affair with Austrian music. PART THREE Musicians at war, what came before: the campaign of 1864 in Denmark, Nachod and Skalitz, Koniggratz: the 57th are played into action, Koniggratz: Gottfried Piefke restores his king's morale, the Koniggratzer March: myth and reality, Piefke goes on parade. PART FOUR The repertoire: a brief guide to identifying Prussian and Austrian marches known to have been played at the time, some familiar, some less so. PART FIVE Biographical sketches - Brief biographies of important personalities (Wilhelm Wieprecht, Andreas Leonhardt, Gottfried Piefke, Friedrich Wilhelm Voigt, Heinrich Saro, Georg Faust, Albert Lorenz, Johann Christian Meinberg, Johann Carl Neumann, Gustav Bock, etc). BIBLIOGRAPHY. Fascinating insight into military music in mid-19th-century Europe, and the part it played in the Campaign of 1866. Researched from original German sources, bringing to light many facts hitherto unknown or neglected for many years. Includes a list of recommended CDs and records. This special hardback edition will be produced in a limited numbered edition, signed by the author, of 250 copies

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States extended its empire into the Philippines while subjugating Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. And yet, one of the most popular musical acts was a band of "little brown men," Filipino musicians led by an African American conductor playing European and American music. The Philippine Constabulary Band and Lt. Walter H. Loving entertained thousands in concert halls and world's fairs, held a place of honor in William Howard Taft's presidential parade, and garnered praise by bandmaster John Philip Sousa-all the while facing beliefs and policies that Filipinos and African Americans were "uncivilized." Author Mary Talusan draws on hundreds of newspaper accounts and exclusive interviews with band members and their descendants to compose the story from the band's own voices. She sounds out the meanings of Americans' responses to the band and identifies a desire to mitigate racial and cultural anxieties during an era of overseas expansion and increasing immigration of nonwhites, and the growing "threat" of ragtime with its roots in Black culture. The spectacle of the band, its performance and promotion, emphasized a racial stereotype of Filipinos as "natural musicians" and the beneficiaries of benevolent assimilation and colonial tutelage. Unable to fit Loving's leadership of the band into this narrative, newspapers dodged and erased his identity as a Black American officer. The untold story of the Philippine Constabulary Band offers a unique opportunity to examine the limits and porousness of America's racial ideologies, exploring musical pleasure at the intersection of Euro-American cultural hegemony, racialization, and US colonization of the Philippines.

This carefully-researched book is the culmination of over ten years of research by local musician and teacher, Eric Johnson. It traces the history of brass bands around Staffordshire and Derbyshire from the 1930s to the present day, including the Newhall Band, Tutbury Silver Band, Gresley Old Hall Band, Swadlincote Salvation Army Band, Utoxeter Brass Band and Derwent Brass Band. This fascinating collection of photographs and first-hand accounts recall bands whose members survived the Second World War to regroup afterwards and those which have recently formed.

There were approximately 7,000 full-time bandsmen serving in the British army in the interwar years. This was about a third of the total number of musicians in the music profession in the United Kingdom, making the War Office the largest single employer of professional musicians in the country. British army musicians were a key stakeholder in the music industry in the United Kingdom, but also farther afield, where it made a significant contribution to the maintenance of British imperial authority. To sustain the large number of bands, residential institutions provided young boys for recruitment into the army as bandsmen and, as a consequence, the army set the standard for musical training and performance. The music industry relied upon the existence of army bands for its business and the military played a significant part in the adoption of an international standard of musical pitch. Nevertheless, there was a tempestuous relationship between army bands and the BBC, as well as the recording industry as a whole. Using untapped sources and original material, Major David Hammond reveals the role and soft power influence of British army music in the interwar years.