Melody in the military : A brief history of military bands

By Uditha Devapriya
udakdev1@gmail.com

On the field and onstage, military bands play a decorative function today. Originally formed to accompany armies to their battles, they flourished in the West after the 17th century. A number of factors, including the rise of trade, industry, literacy, and imperialism, combined to popularise it in Europe and the United States. Yet the history of military and cadet bands goes beyond the West. Though they bear Western insignia now, these troupes are no more Western than are artillery, mathematics, even science. Indeed, they were as much at home among Europeans of the 18th century as they were in Sri Lanka of the 15th.

Military bands emerged when the crescent met the cross, or literally when the Europeans met the Saracens and the Turks during the Crusades. By then the division of the world into West and East had been complete. Yet the writing of music, which military bands obviously depended on, long predates this division: the first written sources on the subject come to us from southern Iraq, or Mesopotamia. The cuneiform script materialised in Ancient Sumer in 3000 BC. Nearly four centuries later, we hear of harps and lyres, used on their own but also as accompaniments to various functions and ceremonies.

Civilisation flourished at roughly the same time in Sumer and Egypt. Archaeologists have unearthed remains of clappers, scrapers, rattlers, clarinets, and oboes in these territories. Sometimes they appear in both places at once, but often they emerge in the one before the other: the clarinet, for instance, is missing in Mesopotamia, but was indigenised in Egypt by 2700 BC. What we can gather is that these instruments acquired a rhythm and pattern of their own, in line with the material conditions of their societies.

Louis XIV

From the early period to the Crusades, there is a long historical development. In the second millennium BC the cuneiform script spread to Anatolia. As with Mesopotamia and Egypt, a musical culture soon evolved. Yet unlike in those two societies, in Anatolia or Turkey music served a different function, more ritualistic; this explains the horn, which was never popular in Mesopotamia, but was indispensable for the Turks. During the Middle Ages the Ottoman Empire emerged as a formidable power and made inroads to Western civilisation. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 thus ensured that, for the next 500 years, “all things Turkish” would intrude on the Western consciousness. These included the military band.

The Ottoman Turks divided the world between what was and what was not theirs. They internalised this dichotomy, at home, by means of a division between believers and non-believers, granting the latter a status of protected persons they referred to as dhimmi. On the other hand, identity being a fluid construct, the State had the right to strip persons of such status and compel them to conform to the dominant Muslim culture. Yet the historian Fernand Braudel has noted that while non-believers wanted to convert, the Ottoman State felt it in their interests not to accommodate them, since converting them meant depriving the Treasury of the taxes it collected from non-believers.

In certain cases, however, the Ottoman State reserved its prerogative to convert. One such prerogative was the right to conscript Christian subjects from the Balkan regions. During the reign of Sultan Orkun (1326-1361) these conscripts were raised to form the most formidable contingent in the Middle Ages, the Janissaries (or “new troops”). The Janissaries then raised their own band, which they called the mehter: the forerunner of today’s military and cadet bands. At first the mehter consisted, among other instruments, of trumpets, kettledrums, bass drums, cymbals, shawms, and Turkish crescents, the latter a percussion stick (known as the “Jingling Johnny”) largely neglected today. Performed together, these instruments often “shrieked in unison” and emphasised “the ruler’s overwhelming might.”

Militaristic though its function was, the mehter played in peacetime as well, especially for the Sultan: on mornings before prayers, and on evenings after prayers. European diplomats in Turkey obviously could not escape these influences. Returning from the Crusades, kings and nobles brought with them their ideas for military contingents, based on what they had seen on “the other side.” Until then the horn and the trumpet had been the mainstay of the European band. The Ottomans were more varied: one chronicler lists clarions, horns, pipes, drums, and cymbals among their instruments, played “to excite their spirit and courage.” As for drums and kettledrums, these were “unknown” and largely alien to European militaries. At the siege of Damietta in 1249, for example, the Ottomans’ use of the kettledrums is said to have had a “frightening impact” on European soldiers.

The Ottoman influence spread to Britain and France. The serpent and the trombone became the first two major additions to the British military band. The oboe is reported to have made its first appearance in 1678 AD, during the reign of Charles II. The cleric Thoinot Arbeau, in his record of Renaissance life, Orchésographie, lists down the war instruments used by the French army; the oboe is not among them. By 1825, though, the French infantry had among its inventory of 36 instruments four oboes and two trombones.

The disbanding of military contingents after the Crusades elevated the role of music in the armies of Europe. We are told of minstrels accompanying the King of France to Calais in 1347, during the Hundred Years’ War, at a not unreasonable pay of “12 pence per diem.” Once at home, these minstrels formed guilds from which military bands would later fill their ranks. This set the foundation for the Europeanisation of Turkish music, a process which culminated with the French Revolution, Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, and the Treaty of Paris, not to mention the disbanding of the Janissary troops in 1826 AD. The Treaty of Paris, which “sealed 40 years of peace” between France and Britain, no doubt gave the militaries of both countries some space to absorb and add to these influences.

Janissary troops, an inescapable feature of cultural life in Europe at this time, had long caught the attention of ambassadors, artists, rulers, and even naturalists, who had noted their formations, instruments, their ranks and their hierarchies. It wasn’t only what was played, but how it was played that entranced these Westerners: one writer in 1891, for instance, refers to soldiers speaking of Turks “throwing up a bass drumstick into the air after the beat and catching it with the other hand in time for the next.” These had a profound influence on military band formations, as much then as today.

Starting with the Calvinist-Lutheran states of central and north Germany and extending later to Austria-Hungary, pseudo-Turkish music became a feature of court music; right until the mid-18th century, when a rift developed between popular and elite culture, these festivities entranced ruler and ruled alike. It was a time of mass artistic plagiarism: popular tunes, for instance, “borrowed from folk songs, theatre songs, patriotic songs, and new compositions”, while Bach (“Symphonies for Wind Instruments”), Mozart (“Serenades K. 375 and 388”), and Beethoven (“Octet in E-flat Major”) found favour with and became “familiar to the officers and wealthier classes of the fighting men within the various regiments.”

Military bands thrived on the whims of rulers, and on social and political change. Louis XIV, the “Sun King”, played a not insignificant part in the popularisation of their music, after he entrusted their training to the composer Jean Baptiste-Lully. Following Austria’s wars with the Turks, Frederick the Great played an equally pivotal role in shaping military music as an expression of the growing tide of European nationalism. When Mahmud II disbanded the Janissaries in 1826, after more than 135,000 of them revolted against him, it was left to European states to fill the resulting lacuna. These developments marked the beginning of the Europeanisation, and Westernisation, of an Oriental artistic form.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the War of Independence did for military bands what the Crusades had done for their European counterparts five centuries earlier. There the drum and the fife became the most sought-after instruments. Curiously enough, however, it was not until the arrival of a Prussian nobleman, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, invited by none less than Benjamin Franklin, that the US Continental Army began turning into a professional body. We are told that music was soon regarded so highly that “a subordinate inspector was appointed for its standardisation.” Not surprisingly, sales of books and staff papers soared at this time, signalling the importance of band contingents.

However, not until the late 19th century did these contingents gain the respect and esteem they are held in today. By 1912 they had commanded enough respect to warrant their own tournaments: a “grand international contest” held in France that year, for instance, offered a sum of £500, equivalent to £57,000 or Rs. 26 million today.

Buttressing all this was another development: the formation of school cadet corps across Western Europe. These corps spread wide and far, taking what had been an Oriental art form to the East and teaching it along Western lines. By now, thanks to the rigidity with which imperialism imposed its culture on its colonies, the Ottoman origins of the military band had been forgotten; it hence wouldn’t be long until, as with mathematics and music, science and art, the Oriental roots of yet another subject would fade away.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist