Musical group

“ Edwin Franko Goldman. “They are manifestations of a popular musical culture which finds in them an expression of something not provided by any other type of concert organization. Most important, they are a form of local, or regional, or national organization fulfilling a genuine community need and serving a genuine community interest....
“The band has introduced many people to music—both listeners and performers. A band plays for the masses with mixed tastes. It is close to the people, bringing many into firsthand contact with live music.” ”

“ The United States is today’s greatest musical nation, and bands have played a great part in developing and spreading the love and understanding of music among young and old in this country. A band is a strong music educational force; a school or college band has the widest opportunity in the world to personally convey music to the people. ”

“ The second decade of the nineteenth century, however, saw a renaissance of musical activity, which was developed into vigorous life chiefly through the agency of definitely constituted musical organizations. The concerts of the eighteenth century, on the whole, were rendered possible by a coöperation between people of culture, which in itself constituted a loose sort of organization. ”

“ The quartet thus fulfils the two essential conditions of dramatic music, and reveals itself as a consistent and harmonious piece of work, the separate motifs of which are beautiful and expressive, while the interest is kept alive by alternation and climax, and a vivid dramatic picture is produced by the artistic treatment of musical forms. The grouping of the voices in manifold variety of combination displays, as if on a ground plan, a symmetrical, well-disposed musical edifice. ”

“ It works for the musical life of the nation by creating a musical atmosphere, studying composers and their works and bringing the best talent in various lines to interpret and illustrate these studies. Large, strong clubs have been helpful in sending their members to those smaller in numbers and weaker financially. ”

“ Then the family circle could hear sonatas for violin and pianoforte by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms, and would accomplish what years of attendance at symphony concerts could not bring about. Chamber music has the great advantage of being simple in detail; one can easily follow the four strands of melody in a string quartette, whereas the orchestra leaves one breathless and confused. The practice of chamber music by amateurs would be one of the very best means of building up true musical taste. ”

“ It is syndicate music; and in proportion as a musical composition in this present day is an aggregation of multitudinous moods, in proportion as it is suggestive, complex, paradoxical, the way a crowd is complex, suggestive, and paradoxical—provided it be wrought at the same time into some vast and splendid unity—just in this proportion is it modern music. It gives itself to the counterpoints of the spirit, the passion of variety in modern life. ”

“ The small boy deaf to any other musical appeal, races down the street at the first blare of a band. In some measure we are all children to the last, and so it is that the music of the band sets our hearts and feet to beating out its gallant measures. Moreover such music produces definite measurable effects on the body, and it is well known that men march further and with less fatigue to the music of a band than they can without it. ”

“ In 1845 he established, under the name of 'The Musical Union,' a series of morning concerts of instrumental chamber music at which the best classical works have been rendered by the best artists native and foreign. ”

“ Hence one seldom or never hears in the musical réunions here an earnest, well-digested piece of music, such as a quartet or quintet of our great masters; every one produces his show-piece; you hear nothing but airs variés, rondos favoris, nocturnes, and the like trifles, and from the singers romances and little duets ”

“ Nothing more charming can be imagined than such family evenings of music, during which the players indulge themselves in the string quartets and piano trios of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, with perhaps a small audience of enthusiasts composed of other members of the family and half a dozen friends who afterward all join in a jolly supper of bread and cold meats, together with a good bottle of wine or beer. ”

“ It would be sufficient, one would suppose, to be made familiar with the skill of ordinary musicians; but you could take no interest in their performances, they are drilled to do them, and they can do nothing else: but here is a multitudinous family of musicians, hastening from the loom, the study, the workshop, the laboratory and the warehouse, who each has a distinct business to which he must devote his attention, to join, from a desire to please his fellow-citizens, in the execution of the most difficult and beautiful productions of the musical art ”

“ An important part was a musical half-hour by its big chorus, singing such grand compositions as arias from Faust, Robin Hood, Aida, and Martha; also both boys' and girls' bands, both brass and strings, doing first-class work on a Sousa march, a Strauss waltz, and a potpourri of National airs from many lands, which brought a storm of hand clapping; for no form of study will so aid youth in living happily, as music. ”

“ Even orchestral music itself does not escape these perversions. There is a distinct cult at the present day, especially in France, for playing at concerts music originally written to accompany pantomimes or ballets, and even for composing pieces intended for concert according to the processes suitable for such illustrative music—with highly spiced sonorous effects, schemes of structure based on dramatic action, and little or no purely musical interest. ”

“ No one would go far astray who should estimate the extent and sincerity of a community's musical culture by the number of its chorus singers. Some years ago it was said that over three hundred cities and towns in Germany contained singing societies and orchestras devoted to the cultivation of choral music. ”

“ A well-meaning person, if a trivial composer, he helped to found the London Philharmonic Society, which was the first society in Europe, and in the world, consciously formed for the furtherance of musical art and for no other purpose. ”

“ The regulations of the several societies formed for the encouragement of glee writing, and the practice of glee singing, preclude the presence of ladies, while they are attended with considerable expense wholly unconnected with their musical objects. The intention of the Vocal Society is to present, as its principal feature, the vocal music of the English school, both ancient and modern, including that of the church, the chamber, and the theatre ”

“ And just as the whole future of America is dependent upon the young people of today, in like manner, the fate of the bands of tomorrow depends upon the musical education and training received by the boys and girls of this present time. Youth must go marching on.
Throughout the ages man has found music to be [181] essential in voicing his own innate sense of beauty. Music is not a thing apart from man: it is the spiritualized expression of his finest and best inner self.
There is no one wholly unresponsive to the elevating appeal of music. ”

“ The accompaniment, too, is not less to be approved.
VOCAL SOCIETY WE have great pleasure in announcing the first meeting of a Society, under the above designation, comprising a body of musical talent, calculated, as we think, to render most essential service to the cause of music generally, but more especially so to the exhibition of vocal excellence, unfettered by the caprice or tyranny of that non-descript, but all-powerful, influence which is known under the familiar term—Fashion. It is, perhaps, the fairest way that the Society should speak for itself ”

“ Most of the leading minds whose zeal and energy directed the earlier movements of the various musical societies in this district, are yet among the living, and the natural dictates of refinement cause us to shrink from any attempts at their biographies; it is, therefore, with the deference due to real genius, which needs no praise, that we pass in silence over the names of the most earnest promoters of the growth and cultivation of music, especially as developed in the workings of the Festival Committee, and its important adjunct, the Choral Society. ”

“ We may, however, define a musical society in the modern sense as a body of people regularly and permanently organized for the carrying out of a definite program of musical education, study or performance. Such societies in America have been an evolution. They have evolved, on the one hand, from coöperation between cultured amateurs for the purpose of giving musical performances and, on the other, from the formation of singing classes for cultivating a proper skill in rendering the psalms. ”

“ This holds good in our own village churches to-day, for we consider music more a means of entertaining the church-goer than of enlisting his interest in the services.
Women’s clubs provide a certain sort of musical life to small communities. They [Pg 112] foster the performance by members of rather variegated programmes of pianoforte pieces and songs, with an occasional concert by a paid performer from abroad, and they sometimes make a study of a composer or a period of music. ”

“ The professional musician sees in him one of the advance guard of native-born Americans who have achieved success in some one field of musical endeavor, while a constantly increasing public, intent upon musical culture, finds in his letters and essays an expression of the deeper meaning of music and penetrative interpretations of the modern orchestra. ”

“ Seventeen figures are embraced in the group, and upon every countenance is deeply impressed a sense of the power of music when pathetically rendered. The look is earnest and enwrapt, as if there were no other moment than the present, or that all else by the sweet strains were banished from the thoughts. At the instrument, seated low, is the inspired poet and musician, with his face averted from the keys, as if drinking in with spiritual waves of melody the same entrancement that his guests enjoy. ”

“ Half the audience probably know every bar of the music by heart, and no inconsiderable number could perhaps perform it very decently themselves. It is indeed at these quartett and quintett meetings, that you see genuine specimens of musical knowledge and musical enthusiasm. They take place by half-dozens during the season; and you always find the same class of audience, often the same individuals, regularly ranged before the executants. ”

“ In no other style is sympathy between performers and listeners so necessary, and for that reason Chamber music should always be heard in a small room with performers and listeners joined in angelic wedlock. Communities in which it flourishes under such conditions are musical. ”

“ But we have multiplied our choirs and our choral societies, our Musical Festivals with their competitions have taken solid root, training in musical work is now more widespread than ever before, and these considerations have served, and are serving, to make music more and more a part of the national life. ”

“ What is more thrilling than a fine brass band? There’s something about a band that sets hearts pounding and pulses racing.
Band music stirs all ages. Young and old pour into the streets to see and hear a band. Mothers with babies in their arms and wide-eyed youngsters clinging to their skirts, line the sidewalks. Small boys run to keep pace with the drummer, then with shoulders back and stomachs stuck out, they proudly march beside them. Old men lift heads high, women’s eyes are tear-filled as the band brings sad memories. ”

“ It is a crowd invention. The orchestra—a most distinctively modern institution, a kind of republic of sound, the unseen spirit of the many in one—is the sublimest expression yet attained of the crowd music, which is, and must be, the supreme music of this modern day, the symphony. Richard Wagner comes to his triumph because his music is the voice of multitudes. The opera, a crowd of sounds accompanied by a crowd of sights, presented by one crowd of people on the stage to another crowd of people in the galleries, stands for the same tendency in art that the syndicate stands for in commerce. ”

“ Other Organized Bodies.—Other means for promoting musical progress in the United States were the societies in different parts of the country, which provided concerts, aided musical education, kept up public interest, the great German singing societies, music festival associations, lecture courses, etc. ”

“ Most boys who have begun their music study with the band make it a hobby in later life, and many choose it as their lifetime profession. Composers, arrangers and music publishers have come from this Farm and Trades School Band, while many other former players have become valued members of symphony orchestras, opera and theater orchestras and nationally-famous concert bands. ”

“ The Musical Art Society has succeeded very well in its difficult task and its concerts are invariably among the most interesting events of the New York season. Its repertory to date includes the names of over one hundred composers, with special emphasis on Palestrina, Bach, and Brahms, and it includes also a large number of delightful old Minnelieder, mediæval hymns and German, Scandinavian, Scotch, French, Bohemian, and English folk-songs. ”

“ We had an orchestra of stringed and brass instruments, in which May played the flute, Ada the piano and organ, Ida second violin, while all our four girls sang solos, duets, trios, and quartettes. Many elderly people paid generous fees for honorary membership, while the large, active membership, responded regularly when called upon with musical, literary, or dramatic renditions individually or in combination as they might prefer. ”