Whitwell on the “Roots” of the Modern Wind Band (1984)

This little paper has had a difficult time seeing the light of day. It was first
commissioned by Don Hunsberger in 1984 when he was planning to create a new
journal devoted to the wind ensemble and wanted a contribution. For financial
reasons, I presume, the journal never came into being.
Next, in 1992, Don organized a meeting with scholarly papers and concerts in
Rochester, NY, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Eastman Wind Ensemble
and invited me to participate. As hearing someone read a paper is the most sleep-
inducing drug known to man, I decided to use this paper, but in a form in which
recordings of the various kinds of early ensembles, such as those of the French
Revolution, would use most of the allotted time.
At the conclusion of the conference, those of us participating were asked to
submit versions of our presentation in a form appropriate to be published in a book of
proceedings, of which Frank Cipolla would be the editor. Consequently I submitted
the paper as it stands here. When the volume was published I was quite surprised to
find that not only was my paper missing, but that there was no reference at all to my
presentation. I looked at my calendar to see if I went! After some time I asked Frank
Cipolla about this and he maintained that he never received this paper from me and did
not think to ask if I were submitting one. So, this paper, I suppose, gained the dubious
honor of being the only thing of mine ever lost by the US Post Office.
So, after all of this, and 23 years later, since I am rather fond of this short
paper I offer it here so that it may finally be read!

Those conductors who today make music with wind ensembles and wind
bands are contemporary participants in an art form which can be documented in an
unbroken tradition reaching back to the very earliest records of man. Individual
wind instruments are still extant in specimens of actual instruments and cave
paintings from the Upper Paleolithic Period (30,000 to 10,000 BC) and
performances by ensembles of wind instruments are clearly documented as a part of
the daily life in the civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome, and even before
among the peoples of Ancient Egypt, the Near East and China.
The traditions established by these ancient ensembles continued into the
period of modern history we associate with Western Europe and the Christian Era.
During the Medieval and Renaissance Periods there were independent wind bands
maintained by the members of the aristocracy, civic governments and the Church.

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By the 15th century there were regular outdoor concerts performed by wind bands
and from the 16th century a substantial repertoire of music played by these bands is
extant.

Wind Bands during the Baroque Period

The Baroque Period is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of
the wind band. The wind band entered the Baroque with the old shawms,
bombards and trombones and exited the Baroque in a new instrumentation – the
modern oboes, bassoons and horns.
The first band to use the new French oboes and bassoons was the 12-member
private wind band of Louis XIV, known as the Les Grands Hautbois. All of Europe
was influenced by the court of Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” as can be seen in the
imitation of French taste in architecture, food, clothes and in the use of French as
the diplomatic language for all of Europe. It is no surprise, therefore, that this wind
band was also widely imitated and similar ensembles rapidly appeared in the major
courts of Germany under the half-French and half-German name, Hautboisten.
This name was used in Germany for both the independent military bands and for
the court wind bands which functioned in imitation of the Les Grands Hautbois.
This latter ensemble, the German court Hautboisten, imitated the French
model in its instrumentation, but not in its repertoire. The repertoire of these
German bands developed from the 16th century Italian church forms which had
spread North during the 17th century, the intrada, aria, canzona, sinfonia, sonata,
overture and concerto da camera.
The original overtures (a multi-movement form) and concerti for oboes,
bassoons and horns by late Baroque composers in Germany, such as Telemann,
Molter, Venturini, Muller and many more, are the immediate predecessors of the
music for the same instrumentation which in the following generation is called
Harmoniemusik. The Baroque overture became the Classic Period divertimento and
the Baroque concerto became in the Baroque the partita for wind ensembles and the
sinfonia for string ensembles.

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 Although they are thus distinguished by their literature, the late Baroque
Hautboisten and the Classical Harmoniemusik were the same medium: they were
indeed “oboe bands,” in so far as the principal melodic instrument was the oboe and
they functioned as performance media for the aristocracy. These two
characteristics, as we shall see below, form an important background for
understanding the aesthetic and sociological development of the modern wind band.

Wind Bands during the Classic Period

The aristocratic Harmoniemusik of pairs of oboes, bassoons, horns and later

clarinets was the most important wind band of the Classic Period, especially in the
German-speaking countries. On the basis of scant information available to former
scholars, the activities of this ensemble have for years been misrepresented as
functional music, in particular “table music.” Thanks to research carried out
during the past decade by a large number of scholars, one can now see that this
wind ensemble consisted of the finest artists available and functioned in the court
environment as fully as any other kind of musical medium then present. On the
basis of actual music I have examined in libraries throughout Europe, together with
other court documentation from the period which has become available, I believe
that between 1750 and 1790 the Harmoniemusik performed as a “concert” ensemble
or in a “functional” role in about the same ratio as any other medium. Anyone who
proposes that this wind medium was considered during the time as being anyway
less aesthetic than any other medium is making a judgment which can not be
supported by the extant music and documentation.
There were also military bands, however even when they had the same
instrumentation as the Harmoniemusik they tended to go under different names –
Feldmusik, turkischemusik, etc. But it was the indoor, concert Harmoniemsuik for
which there is so rich an extant repertoire, for it was these bands, and not the
military ones, for whom virtually all the leading composers composed. The four-
movement form “partita” was considered at the time to be a synonym for

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“symphony,” the terms being a designation of instrumentation and not a distinction
in aesthetic aim.
The Harmoniemusik stood at the heart of musical activity in Central Europe
during the Classic Period, but it was short lived for the same reason it surged into
prominence – its relationship with the aristocracy. With the economic
retrenchments necessary to support the military campaigns which occupied Europe
from the beginning of the French Revolution to the end of the Napoleonic period,
the Harmoniemusik became too expensive a luxury. The players who made up these
ensembles did not lose their jobs however, for it was the Harmoniemusik which
became the basic wind section of the classical orchestra – another private,
aristocratic medium.
A new kind of Harmoniemusik appeared during the late Classic Period, born,
as the “oboe band” had been earlier, in France. This new Harmoniemusik was
identified by two characteristics which clearly set it apart from the long established
Hautboisten tradition. First, the clarinet displaced the oboe as the principal melodic
vehicle. Second, the “clarinet band,” with a few exceptions admitted, tended to
perform not for the aristocracy, but for the public.
The first of these “clarinet bands” was an ensemble of clarinets, bassoons
and horns which existed among the employees of a wealthy citizen of Paris, known
as La Popliniere (1693-1762). I believe the choice of clarinets over oboes had some
relationship to the royal Les Grands Hautbois which still existed. Perhaps, at first,
Le Poupliniere and those who followed in forming “clarinet bands,” among whom
were the Duke d’Orleans, the Prince de Conde, the Prince of Monaco, and others,
were only observing some protocol in not imitating too closely the king. Later,
however, during 1789-1796, I believe one can say the clarinet sound was more
directly anti-monarchical. Even though the “clarinet band” can be documented in
the courts of some French aristocrats before the revolution, it did appear first in the
employ of a non-aristocrat and, in any case, rapidly became a public medium in its
role as the French military band. Furthermore, one sees for the first time the
doubling of clarinets in the typical military instrumentation of four clarinets, with
pairs of bassoons and horns. This doubling of the melodic vehicle, the clarinet, was

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for the purpose of the augmentation of the sound in the out-of-doors. In the case of
the principal military band in Paris during the revolutionary years, one finds the
doubling of all instruments as that band had on occasion to perform in stadiums
seating up to 400,000 members of the public!

The Wind Band during the 19th Century

During the period of the Napoleonic Wars, 1790-1815, yet another new kind
of band appears. This was the band of the civilian militia, which was called
“Volunteers” in England and Schutzencorps in Germany. These were troops of
civilians who, eager to join in the consuming public interest in all things military at
the time, formed their own small military organizations in each town. These civic
militia bands were modeled generally after the “clarinet bands” and not after the
aristocratic “oboe band,” although as they were military bands one is not surprised
to see the addition of at least one trumpet, together with percussion to the nucleus of
the four clarinets and pairs of horns and bassoons of the French model. Here we
can clearly see not only the modern band instrumentation in its initial stage of
development, but the fundamental characteristics which would remain descriptive
of bands in many part of the world today: [1] a woodwind-brass-percussion
ensemble in which the doubled clarinet is the principal melodic vehicle, [2] an
ensemble of civilians who dress in military-style uniforms, and [3] an identification
with the broad public, rather than with the aristocrats.
For serious musicians who had spent their lives performing before a small
handful of listeners in the palace, the new opportunity to perform before the general
public must have been an exhilarating experience. In Germany and Austria large
military bands, often composed of engaged civilians together with a smaller number
of career military musicians, were soon performing concerts before enthusiastic
audiences numbering in the thousands. At first these concerts were nearly always
exclusively aesthetic in aim and repertoire. The description of one of Europe’s
leading critics, Hans von Bulow, of a band concert conducted by Piefke in 1858,

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 the technical perfection, the painstaking nuance of every detail, the majestic
power of the mass impression and finally the fresh full vibrating spirit of the
noble performances...

was by no means an isolated reaction. The response of the public can be measured
in part by the demand for the appearance of military bands in opera and in the
attempts by composers and publishers to use the band to “prepare” the public for
the publication of orchestral music in its original version.
Unfortunately, conductors being insatiable as they are by nature, this was
not enough. Nearly everywhere band directors during the final decades of the 19th
century sought to further widen their audiences by successively lowering the quality
of their repertoire. They succeeded in enlarging their numbers of listeners, but at
the expense of losing their identification with aesthetic music. Thus there was once
seen a sign before the Crystal Palace in London, “There is no concert today, the
band is going to play.” But, as I said, this happened nearly everywhere, thus for
many average citizens in Germany and Austria today, “wind music” (Blasmusik) is
a synonym for “folk music.” It was this environment which set the stage for Sousa,
by the way, who thought of himself as entertaining the public, in contrast to the role
of orchestras in “educating” the public.
Unfortunately, early in the 20th century the horrors of World War I brought
an end to the public’s fascination with the adventures of the military and at the
same time there arrived an onslaught of new entertainment media, in particular
movies, radio and TV. The result has been a full-scale retreat by the broad public
which the band had for 50 years so energetically courted. Ironically, the orchestra,
which had never courted the broad public during the 19th century (having been a
private aristocratic institution in most places until rather late) has seen its audience
grow to the point that today it is clearly larger than that of the band. And it has
done this without losing its aesthetic image, even though it too became a civic
institution with the fall of the monarchies in 1917.
It is quite incorrect to say, as one often hears, that the difference is one of
literature. Anyone who spends a little time in European libraries will discover that
the orchestra, like the band, has a vast repertoire of entertainment music as well as

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aesthetic music. The real difference is that 20th century orchestral conductors have,
for the most part, refused to perform any but aesthetic music. And make no
mistake about it, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic still has that choice today
– it would be very easy to turn the Berlin Philharmonic into a vehicle aimed at a
broader public.
Band directors have had a very difficult time in giving up their late 19th
century heritage of entertaining the public. But the fact remains, in every art form
there is a freedom of choice; each conductor can make of his medium what he will.