June 19, 1869— Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, an emigrant from the Irish Potato Famine who achieved
renown in the Civil War as an army bandleader and composer of “When Johnny
Comes Marching Home,” concluded a five-day music festival in Boston that he himself
had organized to celebrate the return of peace to the nation and to benefit the
widows and orphans of the conflict.
Gilmore is not so well remembered today, but it was another
story in his time. Musicologist Frank J. Cipolla has written of the bandleader’s
“quick wit, flamboyant personality and grandiose musical projects.” It is hard
to conceive of musicians such as John Philip Sousa, Arthur Fiedler or Guy Lombardo
without thinking of how Gilmore paved the way for them. Moreover, in a time
still rife with anti-Catholic sentiment, Gilmore’s ebullience and patriotism
enabled many to see his ethnic group as potential contributors to American
life.
The Great National Peace Jubilee was built
on an epic scale, complete with a band and orchestra of about 1,000 musicians
plus soloists and members from 103 choral groups totaling over 10,000 singers. It
was, in a way, a kind of hammock event swinging between past and present,
illustrative of the manner in which Gilmore sought not just to equal or even
surpass a past event, but go 100% beyond it—and use it as the baseline for his
next monster moment.
It was also the kind of
event made to order for Ulysses S. Grant,
who had made the centerpiece of his successful campaign for President the prior
year the slogan, “Let us have peace.” The Union hero’s musical tastes were not
unlike his writing style: utterly straightforward. Asked about his favorite
music, Grant responded: “The cannons!”
Gilmore knew the President (who came for the opening
ceremonies only) was onto something. In his prior major public musical event, the
March 1864 inauguration of Louisiana's new governor, Gilmore had used cannons
in a performance for the first time. Now, for the Boston show, he proposed to
use cannons even more prominently
throughout the performance, along with double the number of musicians and singers used in his New
Orleans gala.
Today, people who pass through Boston’s Back Bay and
notice the Copley Plaza Hotel and Hancock Towers never realize than 145 years
ago, Gilmore had constructed on the site the the largest structure of its kind
in the city. The building was cavernous. It had to be, in order to hold all
those musicians and singers, along with seating for seating for 30,000 audience
members, not to mention 100 Boston firemen striking anvils, a battery of cannon,
chimes, church bells, a bass drum 8 feet in diameter, and a gigantic organ built
for the occasion.
Six years before, after the Battle of Gettysburg,
Gilmore had adapted “Johnnie, I Hardly Knew Ye,” a mordant Irish ballad, into
the rousing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” During the war, he would train, equip and dispatch 20 bands from his state to accompany troops on their missions. Now, he proposed to play music
not to rouse men’s martial spirits but to foster reconciliation and
understanding—and he was not done yet.
In 1872, Gilmore organized a World Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival to celebrate the end of the
Franco-Prussian War. The pattern he set was familiar: twice the number of
musicians and singers than had appeared at the National Jubilee, and a festival lasting more than three times longer. Gilmore wasn’t even fazed by the collapse of the new
coliseum meant to house all of this—he had another built and opened just in time,
for a program featuring the likes of Johann Strauss and his orchestra from
Austria, the Grenadier Guards Band of England, the Garde Republicaine of
France, and the Prussian band of Kaiser Franz Grenadiers.
A more important contribution by Gilmore on this
occasion was introducing American audiences to emerging talent from a
completely unexpected source. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, formed only the year
before to raise urgently needed funds for that new African-American college,
received major national exposure for one of the first times on this occasion.
So did the Hyers Sisters, two African-American musical prodigies from
California, who impressed Gilmore greatly at a private audition in Boston with their rendition of opera arias.
Seldom if ever had African-Americans been featured in such a large-scale
American musical extravaganza.
Annual Fourth of July concerts that Gilmore offered
on the Boston Common predated, by more than half a century, the similar
Independence Day musical extravaganza that Arthur Fiedler began offering on the
banks of the Charles River, a tradition that the Boston Pops orchestra
continues to this day.
When he was done with Boston after two decades,
Gilmore moved to New York, where he began the tradition of ringing in the new year
in Times Square. The rather tame doings of Guy Lombardo and the Royal
Canadians, however, paled next to the highlight of Gilmore’s show: the
bandleader firing two pistols into the air at the stroke of midnight. (How
times have changed: nowadays, those sounds, of course, would precipitate a
massive police action.)
Throughout his career, Gilmore never forgot where he came from. It started with charity work, for such causes as Famine Relief, Clan na Gael, the Annual Emerald Ball for Orphans and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. But he also endorsed the work of Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt and promoted Home Rule and the value of the boycott as a means of economic redress for the Irish people.
Throughout his career, Gilmore never forgot where he came from. It started with charity work, for such causes as Famine Relief, Clan na Gael, the Annual Emerald Ball for Orphans and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. But he also endorsed the work of Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt and promoted Home Rule and the value of the boycott as a means of economic redress for the Irish people.
Gilmore’s death from a heart ailment in 1892 brought
about a kind of passing of the musical torch. On the night of his
funeral, 37-year-old John Philip Sousa, not yet the lionized creator of the “Washington
Post March” and “Stars and Stripes Forever,” dedicated his performance in
memory of the County Galway native he rightly termed “The Father Of the American
Band.” In fact, 19 musicians from Gilmore's troupe would shortly provide the backbone of Sousa's newly formed "Sousa's New Marine Band."
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