Bands might seem an unlikely thing to associate with democratic ideals. The connections between bands and military order and discipline predate the Revolutionary War, after all. Their uniforms, traditionally styled after the military, anonymize band members. They march in parades with lockstep precision, rigidly wielding shiny instruments behind a color guard as if they were a military regiment marching to war. The terms used to describe bands similarly imply a top-down authoritarian structure: “drum major,” “director,” “conductor,” and “bandmaster.” Generations of dictatorial and commanding directors of professional, school, and town bands—P. S. Gilmore (at one point a regimental band director during the Civil War), Lt. Cmdr. John Philip Sousa (who received his Naval Reserve rank during World War I), Lt. James Reese Europe (of Hellfighter Regiment fame)—seemingly bent their musicians to do their will, treating their bands as a single unified instrument through which to achieve their personal expressive goals.
At the same time, bands are as American as apple pie—or “ham on rye” according to a 1940s wartime edition of the Saturday Evening Post. What could be more patriotic than listening to a band’s trombones pump out the Star-Spangled Banner in the opening strain of E. E. Bagley’s ultra-popular National Emblem March on the Fourth of July, regardless of how the band received its orders?
In reality, the tens of thousands of amateur and semi-professional town bands that performed across the United States from about 1840 to 1940—documented in the Smithsonian’s Hazen Collection of Band Photographs and Ephemera—functioned as democracies based on the rights of regular members. They wrote constitutions, voted, and presented the public with a functioning democracy in miniature—a visible and local paradigm to which the American government could aspire. They promoted civic life, public engagement, and political discourse in ways that we could only dream of in today’s fractured political landscape. Charles Crozat Converse—today remembered mostly for writing the hymn tune to “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”—called bands the “leveler of the people” and “the best illustration of true democracy” in 1897. Bandsmen were more important to society than “poets, lawyers, and doctors” —because the musicians were “missionaries of love of country.” These “tone-missionaries” for patriotism deserved wholehearted support from the public and government: “Imagine our free young land without the band!”
Directors not Dictators
The idea that band directors exercised unlimited authority turns out to be more myth than truth. In 1879 P. S. Gilmore, fresh off the successes of his massive jubilees (and probably the most powerful director with as masterful a sense of personnel management as ever was) placed Francisco Fanciulli’s Voyage of Columbus on his musicians’ stands. A revolt ensued—the musicians declared the piece unplayable—and Fanciulli recounted how “the men threw the score on the floor and danced jigs on it . . . The great leader had to bow to the inevitable and my composition was shelved.” Gilmore finally talked the band into premiering the work 12 years later!
John Philip Sousa, certainly the most outwardly autocratic director in band history, answered to his business manager, his personnel manager, his paying public, and his men. Yet in 1918 he stated, “the basic principle in [our] republic is that the individual is the institution . . . the individual is the all-powerful, he himself must determine where he belongs.” His remake of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, the Humoristic Good Bye (1892)—a piece which itself copied Philipp Fahrbach’s far more popular Comic Tat-Too (Musicians’ Strike) (1885)—leaves a bewildered conductor alone on stage abandoned by his disobedient bandsmen.
“We the Bandsmen”
Countless examples of band members asserting their rights and assuming their responsibilities survive. Before the first notes sounded in rehearsal, most bands wrote a constitution resembling the United States Constitution in both function and language. The Union Band of Maryville opened theirs with an elaborate “We the undersigned.” The Hazen Collection includes a similar 1884 constitution: “Whereas, in all well regulated societies certain laws, or rules are necessary for the government of said societies, we the members of Jillson’s Cornet Band [Hopkinton, Rhode Island], do hereby agree to adopt, and support, the following constitution, and by laws.”
Band constitutions were so common that T. H. Rollinson, a prominent band director, composer, and arranger in late 19th-century Massachusetts, published the New and Improved Constitution and By-Laws for the Bands of the United States and Canada (around 1870) as a model legal document so that “every bandsman should fully understand and realize his responsibility.” Separation of powers appear immediately in Rollinson’s sample constitution, with the leader (first chair cornetist), the business manager, president, and director each limited to specific duties. When the time came to perform, it was up to the elected drum major to act as “the commanding officer of the Band,” not the conductor.
Ultimate authority in these bands resided with the members, who functioned collectively like a legislature. Rollinson’s exemplar language indicates that all officers were subject to removal, and he tasks members with enforcing discipline by fining or removing anyone—even the director—with a two-thirds vote. Nearly all matters required a majority or super-majority vote. The members set their own schedule and prices for performances and the “board of directors or leader shall not deviate from these” without “a two-thirds vote of the entire Band.” Taxation existed only with representation when it came to initiation fees and dues, and all spending required the membership’s consent.
Paul De Ville’s 1906 Universal Constitution and By-Laws for Band and Musical Organizations provides the same structural suggestions as Rollinson’s pamphlet, augmented with advice on practical matters ranging from purchasing instruments on installment plans to marching tactics. De Ville’ emphasizes that bands must encourage civil society and the members should always act as model citizens: “As soon as bands are organized the whole character of the people is changed and they feel that they have taken on a new lease of life.”
Functional Democracies in the Gilded Age
Partisan politics—the “divided camp”—plagued more than a few of these miniature democracies. In his 1924 columns in Jacobs’ Band Monthly, Rollinson offered advice to keep bandsmen civil: “[The conductor] is in his position as a guide and should be supported as such. He may not be all that you could desire, but if you cannot secure his superior, encourage him by co-operation.” He called on embattled band directors to act diplomatically like a head of state: “A band leader’s position is not always a bed of roses, but he cannot improve conditions if thorns are encouraged to thrive. By diplomacy many difficult problems, even in international affairs, are satisfactorily solved.”
Rollinson’s exhortations reflect real-world problems, many of which he learned through personal experience. In 1868 the 24-year-old found himself elected to lead the Willimantic, Connecticut town band. Rollinson’s signature agreeing to all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of band membership appears alongside everyone else’s in the band’s minute book.
Just three years later the band failed to raise enough money through “taxes” (membership dues) and performances to pay Rollinson’s salary. Morale hit a low point in one meeting’s “long debate,” and the membership voted to fine those who missed recent practices and performances. Eight members found themselves abruptly “expelled forever” at the same meeting that elected Rollinson their new conductor! In April 1876 the band died in the same way it lived: a set of resolutions passed calling for disbandment and the sale of all remaining property.
Accounts of mundane and extreme situations survive in minute books stored at archives across the country. The Iowa Brigade Band minutes (in the University of Michigan’s Center for American Band History Research’s Foreman Collection) present the intersection of band and government through band law property taxes. In the years following World War I, small towns and villages across the Midwest increasingly viewed bands as integral to civic life, and Iowa, Minnesota, and other states passed laws allowing municipalities to levy property taxes (via referendum) to finance town bands. A January 1926 letter written by Iowa Brigade Band’s treasurer (a dentist) to the Iowa state director of budget E. L. Hogue asks about regulations on spending their appropriation legally. Iowa repealed the nation’s last functioning band law effective July 1, 2024.
The Experiment of Democracy in Today’s Bands
Today most bands exist within an educational framework: middle-, high-school, and college bands remain a familiar fixture in American musical culture. The teacher-student paradigm often suppresses the democratic tendencies of bands. However, students also effectively rebel against their institution’s wishes from time to time in ways that show how bands continue to teach so much more than music! In 1987 Massachusetts’ Walpole High School Band voted 30-14 to stop performing at football games after constant heckling. The local newspaper rallied the population: “Walpole may have one of the state’s top football teams, but a team without a band lacks more than music.” The school district’s fine arts supervisor opened negotiations, and the students prevailed, leading to regular school-day rehearsals and significant new financial support.
In 1993 the University of Virginia’s “scatter band,” which played for football and basketball games, voted to “cut its ties to the university’s athletic department” when the football program denied them the use of the microphone for announcements during their raucous halftime shows. The dispute arose over free speech, as their performances routinely provoked attendees with scandalous and purposely offensive content (such as a 1991 mock lynching of Elvis during a football game versus Tennessee). The band survived an attempt in the Virgina General Assembly to replace them with a regular marching band overseen by a music professor. For a decade the band held out against the university’s administration, only acquiescing to professorial leadership in 2002.
Over the past two centuries, bands have evolved to mirror and mimic American democracy. They serve as a beacon of American cultural values, present an idealized society in miniature, and encourage civic virtues and values such as equality, representation, rights, and responsibilities. Americans have, by the same token, embraced bands not only for their music, but for their innate patriotism and ability to unify the citizenry through shared cultural experience. The musical and educational process in civics and government continues to the present as new generations of youth exert their political power through real-life experiments in democracy in school, college, and community bands across the nation.
Bryan Proksch is professor of music history and 2019 Distinguished Faculty Lecturer at Lamar University. His research centers on American band history, the reception and “revival” of Haydn’s music in the early twentieth century, Viennese Classicism, and the history of the trumpet. He has written four books: The Golden Age of American Bands: A History in Source Documents (1835–1935) (GIA 2022), A Sousa Reader: Essays, Interviews, and Clippings (GIA 2017), Reviving Haydn: New Appreciations in the Twentieth Century (Rochester 2015), and most recently Bands in American Musical History: Inflection Points and Reappraisals (Rochester 2024). He thanks archivist David Haberstich for supporting his research in the museum’s Archives Center and the use of Hazen Collection materials in his Golden Age of American Bands book.
The illustrated descriptive guide to the Archives Center’s Hazen Collection of Band Photographs and Ephemera is available online in the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives (SOVA), and the collection is open for research by appointment. The donors hope to add additional photographs and documents to the collection this year.
