The role of music as a mood-changer or mood-enhancer is appreciated in all human activities. In a military context, music can serve to create and maintain a warlike spirit, act as a means of communication, assist movement, and enhance morale. Music produced by the human voice has been used for such purposes by fighting men of many different countries, times, and cultures. In the armies of classical Greece, the paean or war-chant was the standard opening to set-piece battles. The Roman military historian Tacitus recorded that the Germanic war-bands of his day, after assembling in response to horn-blasts, moved to the accompaniment of their own voices. During the religious wars in the Germany of the 17th century, Protestant armies sang hymns to raise their spirits as they went into battle, as did the parliamentarians in the British civil wars of the 1640s. On one occasion, psalms bellowed by the advancing Hussites alone caused an imperial army to flee.
Singing on the line of march was encouraged in European and American armies of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but faded out when the advent of mechanization meant that infantrymen moved on their feet only in operational conditions. The lyrics of such marching songs tended to enhance group cohesion by appealing to the local, national, or ideological sentiments of the singers, reminding them of the heroic achievements of their predecessors, or emphasizing the justice of their cause. Examples of all these may be found in songs such as ‘The British Grenadiers’ (UK), ‘Dixie’ and ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ (USA), ‘The Watch on the Rhine’ (Germany), ‘Sambre et Meuse’ (France), or ‘Peasants and Workers are One’ (People's Republic of China). Songs by minstrels, bards, or other popular entertainers have at all periods raised the morale of their audiences and inspired appropriate martial sentiments. Such performers frequently join armies in the field or even go into battle with them. One well-known instance is that of the Norman jongleur Tallifer who sang what was probably an early version of the Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) as he rode to his death among the English axes at the battle of Hastings.
The drum, the simplest of musical instruments, was still in use for various military purposes by tribal warriors in Africa, Asia, and North America at the close of the 19th century. Its earliest use by the troops of civilized states appears in wall-friezes depicting the armies of Ancient Egypt, who may have adopted the drum from their campaigns in the Sudan or Ethiopia. Drums were not used by the Roman army but European soldiers were reintroduced to them in the Crusades, when the presence of kettledrums and other percussion instruments was noted in the Saracen battle line. Such instruments were a feature of the Ottoman Turk armies and were taken up by western armies from the 16th century onwards as ‘Turkish music’. With the regimentation of battle tactics and the increasing importance of the need to keep step, drummers became an essential part of European armies. They not only beat time but also used recognizable rhythms to signal orders such as the alarm, the charge, retreat, parley, etc. Increasing sophistication of construction allowed the development of complicated drum tunes, played in combination with tonal instruments such as fifes or bagpipes. Among cavalry units, kettledrums provided the percussion, followed by mounted trumpeters, horn-blowers, and other wind instrumentalists.
Trumpets of various types were used in organized armies from Ancient Egypt onwards, to give signals in camp or battle and to sound fanfares on ceremonial occasions. The bugle, a smaller and less shrill instrument, emerged in the mid-18th century as the trumpet of light infantry, who found that the infantryman's drum was not suited to a body of rapidly moving skirmishers. Their origins lay among the huntsmen and foresters who had for long used horns, either animal or metal, as a way of communicating in wooded areas. Such instruments, especially when grouped together and supported by percussion, could play simple tunes on the march, but it was not until the full development of valves and keys in the early 19th century that brass instruments realized their full musical potential.
Woodwind instruments were more melodious and mostly capable of a fuller scale of notes. In battle, the armies of classical Greece moved to the sound of the flute. In Saracenic armies, bands composed of reeds and pipes of various sorts played during combat to encourage their own troops and to show that the line remained unbroken. The first military band in the modern sense, made up of uniformed musicians forming part of a regimental establishment, was that of the janissaries, the élite regular troops of the Ottoman empire, first raised in 1326. Such bands were formed in all western armies in the course of the 18th century to provide music not only for marching but also for general entertainment and social occasions. During the 19th century, the emergence of new instruments such as the saxophone (invented in 1845) gave military bands the potential to become, in effect, walking orchestras. They then had the full diatonic scale of conventional western music, rather than the simpler pentatonic scale of folk instruments such as bagpipes.
Careful scoring allowed bands to play all kinds of music. Military bandmasters were able to arrange pieces to suit their players and instruments, and many became composers themselves. Among the most famous was John Philip Sousa, ‘the March King’ and conductor of the US Marines Band between 1880 and 1892, who wrote over a hundred military marches together with other works. Evocative tunes from earlier periods, such as ‘The girl I left behind me’ and ‘Garryowen’, and their equivalents in other countries, remained popular. By the late 19th century, military bands had disappeared from the battlefield, but, a century later, technical advances in sound recording, broadcasting, and reproduction systems meant that martial music could once again accompany the soldier in combat as in ceremonial parades. The worldwide commercial success of the pipe and brass rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’ in 1971 gave testimony to its continued ability to move and inspire. Strauss ‘the Elder’'s Radetzky march, the piece of music most identified with the old imperial Austrian army, is played each year as the finale to the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert.
Bibliography
- Arnold, Denis, The New Oxford Companion to Music (Oxford, 1983).
- Farmer, Henry George, Military Music (London, 1950)
— Tony Heathcote
