What Instruments Should Be In A Band?
William L. Berz
Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey
wberz@rci.rutgers.edu
band directors have struggled to define what instruments should be included. In an article that I wrote for TEMPO
B
in May of 2014 (“What is the Band Sound of the Future?”), I suggested that concert bands were starting to change their instru- mentation. Certain instruments, notably horns, bassoons, and trombones were be- ginning to disappear in a great many high school and college bands. Simply put, young students were not choosing to play those instruments. In the article, I suggested that some composers and arrangers were be- ginning to assume that bands in the pres- ent and future would not feature a complete and traditional instrumentation. Instead, they are writing for a band that might fea- ture several soprano voices along with alto, tenor, and bass lines assigned to groups of instruments. The article seemed to resonate a little and was reprinted in several other state music magazines. If my theory is true, then maybe chang- es in band instrumentation are being made now. If so, teachers need to consider what music should be played in order for students to gain general musical insight.
Is Band Instrumentation Standard?
Wind bands have changed their instru- mentation dramatically over the past. This is due in part because of the relatively recent development of many wind and percussion instruments. After all, the valve was not de- veloped until the early nineteenth century; some percussion instruments were invented yesterday!
The modern large concert band had its birth during the French Revolution in
TEMPO
ands have had a long history of inconsistent instrumentation. For well over two centuries,
the late 1700s and early 1800s. The bands prior to that time where generally small and often featured the oboe as the most important soprano instrument. The newly conceived French bands featured the clari- net as the main soprano instrument partly because the oboe had been considered to be an instrument of the recently deposed king. Also, many of these bands played out- doors for public ceremonies; this required larger groups. Eventually brass instruments replaced woodwinds so that the ensembles could be better heard outdoors. It was for this purpose that Adolphe Sax developed the saxhorn family of brass instruments. Even in the United States, the brass
band became extremely popular. The tradi- tional band of the Civil War featured brass and percussion. One of the earliest college bands in America was the all-brass band at Indiana University.
As the nineteenth century progressed, woodwinds again found an important place in the band. Probably the most important leader with this was Patrick Sarsfield Gilm- ore (1829-1892). After hearing some of Europe’s finest bands, which included more woodwinds, he added them to his band. It became the finest band in the United States and proved to be a model for the Sousa Band. Gilmore, Sousa, and other leaders ex- perimented with adding or subtracting dif- ferent instruments to their band. The person who many consider to be
the founder of the college-band movement, A. A. Harding (1880-1958) made major experiments with instrumentation. At the University of Illinois he increased the num- ber of players—especially woodwinds, and tried including new and sometimes exotic instruments into the band. They included oboe d’amore, Heckelphone, E-flat flute, A-flat
flute, a family 36 of sarrusophones,
ophilicleide, octavin, antoniophone, corno- phone, along with alto and bass trumpets. He expanded the clarinet family to include the full range from E-flat to contrabass with as many as 30 B-flat sopranos. For over 20 years, he included at least one cellist. There were multiple players on each part in most sections and the membership could exceed 100 players.
After this period of unbridled experi- mentation, many bandleaders called for standardizing the band’s instrumentation. High school bands in contests of the 1920s were penalized for not having specified in- strumentation. This idea reached its zenith during the early 1960s when the leadership of the College Band Directors National As- sociation called for a standardized instru- mentation for bands. The idea never caught on in part because of Frederick Fennell’s founding of the Eastman Wind Ensemble. Fennell called for a flexible instrumentation following what composers specified in the score. It was this idea that has been adopted by many elite collegiate ensembles.
What Is A 21St Century Band? Bands—be they wind ensembles, wind
orchestras, concert bands, symphony bands, symphonic winds, or any other label—can consist of almost any combination of wind and
percussion instruments. However,
much of the music that has been composed for the band has been intended for a group- ing of instruments that roughly parallels that of the Sousa Band from the turn of the 20th century. It is that basic instrumenta- tion for which composers like Grainger, Per- sichetti, Schuman, Dello Joio, Gould, Han- son, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Milhaud, Chance, Schoenberg, and many others con- ceived music for the band. Ideally, if school
MARCH 2016
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