The Systemically Racist History of Wind Bands
Music has the innate ability to be shared across cultures, languages, and other socio-economic barriers. It is the universal language, capable of expressing emotion that can’t be put into words. Every culture, from all corners of the globe, has a history of music being an integral part of their expression and ability to create an identity.
I grew up in a musical family. My parents often told the story of how I sat in front of our stereo speakers, and cranked Rachmaninoff and Gershwin to feel it vibrate my brain and ears, and experience the music as fully as possible. I told my high school band director in fifth grade that I was going to take over for him after he had retired (I missed that opportunity, but haven’t quite given up the dream yet). After college, I spent five years of my life as a teacher, specifically a high school band director. I am now currently back in graduate school for a masters in Percussion Performance, but the lessons and concepts that I learned as a teacher continue to infiltrate the short and long term decisions in my music making.
The foundations of wind bands find their beginnings as far back as the 16th century, when Giovanni Gabrieli wrote a series of works titled Sacre Symphoniae, a series of works for mixed choirs of wind instruments that were made of various trombones, and cornets. Wind bands gained prominence in the 18th century when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart scrutinized the sound of wind instruments and selected specific timbres for several of the pieces he wrote, exclusively utilizing wind instruments. However it wasn’t until the 19th century and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique that the expansion of the wind section was commonplace. This evolution carried onwards, and at the beginning of the 20th century, Gustav Holst’s First Suite in E Flat was premiered in 1920 by the Royal Military School of Music.
When I first started teaching, as I’m sure all young teachers do, I used my own experiences in high school and college as a framework for the musical and non-musical aspects of the classes I was teaching. While in school myself, I spent a great deal of time learning how to become the best musician possible, and more applicably, how to instill that yearning for passion and excellence in others. I firmly believed, going into teaching at Ypsilanti Community High School, that an uninhibited passion and sustained belief in the power of music was all I needed in order to effectively reach any student imaginable. Oh how wrong I was.
John Philip Sousa began his career in the Marine Band in 1868, at the decision of his father, who enlisted him. In 1875, he left the Marine Band to focus on his own conducting and composition, a passion that he continued to follow until his death in 1932. He re-enlisted from 1880-1892, where he was tasked with leading the Marine Band and was promoted to Sergeant Major. After his tenure with the Marines, he continued to serve as a conductor in a civilian role. Sousa wrote over 200 works in his lifetime, including over 130 march-style pieces for the wind band medium.
The issue with this philosophy of steadfast passion is that I have a very narrow view of the world. I grew up in an upper-middle class suburb, going to primary and secondary schools in a nationally recognized district, and having the luxury of playing some of the best music for wind bands written - Holst, Grainger, Persichetti, Hindemith, Vaughan-Williams, Milhaud, Chance, Gould, Schuman - I had experience with almost all of the pieces that any respectable musician in the wind band world would be absolutely foolish to ignore. And absolutely none of that mattered to the students that I were now calling me a “little bitch” and telling me to “fuck off” every other day (yes, both of these actually happened).
From 1910 to 1925, the majority of musical instruction in schools shifted from a vocal to an instrumental focus, thanks to World War 1 and instrument salesmen decided to turn their focus to schools. This shift was cause for many competitions to develop, at various local, regional, and state levels, and is a practice that is still widely utilized today. Because of this growth of contest popularity, demand increased for a standardization of instrumentation across all competing ensembles. In 1928, largely thanks to John Philip Sousa’s 75-member ensemble. A 72-member ensemble was standardized, and bands were penalized for having fewer members.
The students that I had do not look like me. I am a typical all-American white male - slightly below average height, blonde hair, blue eyes. One article written about me even went on to describe me as “boyishly mousey,” which was somehow meant as a compliment in context. My students were black, white, and brown; they were asian, latinx, and African-American. It was a fantastic array of diversity that populated the chairs of my band room, and hardly any of them had an upbringing that resembled mine. I quickly had to learn that my life had few similarities to the lives of the students sitting in front of me.
In 1933, instead of having a single winner of band contests, a system of divisional ratings were introduced so that more than one ensemble could receive the highest rating. Up until this point, while the quality of ensembles had increased exponentially, so too had the intensity of rivalries and competition. In 1935, William D. Revelli became the Director of Bands at the University of Michigan. His influence on bands, particularly marching bands, is of monumental consideration, and still resonates with many high school and collegiate ensembles today. The pursuit of perfection is as iconic as “The Victors” when it comes to Revelli:
“Demand of yourself! How much do you demand of yourself of what I’m talking about? Not even ten percent, some of you… I want to know how you can dedicate yourself to your forthcoming positions in the musical world, when you can’t dedicate yourself right now to what you’re doing in a simple little march… When are you going to start to demand of yourself what I demand of myself? When are you going to be as uncompromising with what you do as I am uncompromising in what I hear and what I insist on?... Now, nobody’s killed when you play a half-note as a dotted quarter. But you might, from learning to play a half-note a full half-note, make the difference in the lives of 50,000 little kids… I mean, there’s a pride. And this guy knows he’s good! And nobody can take that away from him. When they play sloppy and don’t care or don’t know - a great many of them don’t even know, they don’t know how bad it is - they can be forgiven, but more they should be pitied.”
I spent three years at Ypsilanti Community High School. While my time there was incredibly valuable and I loved working with the students I had, I made the choice to move on to another district, and I was hired at Berkley High School - a far more affluent district, with a great deal more resources at their disposal. While I had difficulty making adjustments in my first year, I was feeling better going into my second year there and I had even planned out my program for the entire school year in the Summer months before school even started. I proudly posted my programming on Facebook, and received many positive comments of praise. One comment, however, called me out on something: “No Women?” my colleague, Mary Kate McNally asked.
In 2018, data was compiled on both the MSBOA basic music list, and the music catalog of JW Pepper; the largest wind band music distributor in the United States. At that point in time (although these numbers will have shifted slightly), there were 1197 pieces on the basic music list, and 4366 pieces on the JW Pepper list. Of the nearly 1200 pieces on the basic music list, 12 (1.002%) of them were by Women, and two of them (0.16%) were by African-American composers. In JW Pepper’s catalog, 97 (2.22%) of the pieces were by Women, and 67 (1.53%) of them were by African-American Composers. No piece on either list was by an African-American Woman.
After many comments and thread replies, as well as a frank and honest discussion with my other colleague, Kaitlin Bove, I came to a realization - Mary Kate was right to call me out. I had been lazy and assumed my privilege would carry me through without being questioned. After the dust had settled from my facebook post, the three of us worked together to create And We Were Heard - a project dedicated to the exposure and highlighting of Female and Minority Composers’ Works through quality performances and recordings. I brought these concerns and my collected data to the MSBOA fall meeting, where I felt that my words had been met with muted, dismissive skepticism, and that I shouldn’t question the way things had always been done. And while I have since stepped down from my involvement in the And We Were Heard project, they are still doing marvelous work that is worthy of everyone’s time and consideration.
The roots of wind bands and the wind band sound run deep. As a product of Michigan bands, and an indirect descendant of the “Revelli sound,” I have experienced a thorough understanding of the rehearsal techniques and secrets of creating a high quality ensemble sound. This concept is not limited to Michigan - bands all across the country, in Texas, Florida, California, New York, Indiana, Tennessee, and Colorado have similar approaches to the concert band medium - tone, intonation, balance, rhythm, and interpretation are pivotal aspects of wind bands of all levels, and we are often taught a hierarchy of importance in order to succeed at band festivals today. This concept of sound is also elitist, exclusionary, and dismissive of other cultures and musical ideas.
The issue that comes from this is that the concept of a “quality wind band sound” stems from the militaristic and privileged history of the bands that came before us. It is no secret that there are other concepts of sound that are as widely accepted as the wind band sound - jazz, hip-hop, and country are three examples of styles that are highly iconic in the United States, and are often shunned from the concert halls. That is not to say that they don’t exist, but that the primary sound that is expected has to find its roots in the Revelli and Sousa sound that is eventually demanded. The prevalence of school ensembles owes its success to the increasingly common competition-festivals, and these festivals are judged on a purposefully limited concept of sound: If a group can check all of the boxes that the judges are listening for, then they are deemed a high quality ensemble, and their ensemble members get blue ribbons for their efforts.
To deny the validation of other genres and to push students’ focus to this same wind band concept of sound is a sort of musical gentrification. We are telling our students that, while their music is fine and good in its own respects, the only sounds that are acceptable in the halls of our schools and our performance spaces are the sounds that our predecessors have bestowed on our own education. We are telling our students that it is ok to be different, but they have to conform to our standard if they ever want to be accepted by the other people in our small world of concert and wind bands.
Recent events have led to a sort of awakening and realization of our own inherent biases. The deeper the roots of these tendencies, the harder they are to face, and even harder yet to change. We have the knowledge and expertise. We have had great teachers that taught us how to think, rather than what to think. And it’s about time to start thinking that the way things have always been are not the way that things should always be.
