As students return to school, school bands and orchestras are starting up again. It seems useful to consider the history and current state of school instrumental music programs. To keep this post to a reasonable length, I will concentrate on bands once they became established.

Early in American history, vocal music spread steadily throughout school curriculums. Only a few schools had bands or orchestras, and they existed only as ad hoc groups. That is, they met outside school hours. The leader, an amateur musician, taught another subject for the school.

For one thing, educators favored sacred music over secular music. For another, there was little precedent for instrumental instruction even in European schools.

Throughout most of the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans had little opportunity to hear really good instrumental music.

The last half of the century, on the other hand, is considered the golden age of bands. Professional bands led by Patrick Gilmore, John Philip Sousa, and many others reached a larger population with good music than did American orchestras.

The earliest documented American school instrumental music program began in 1857 at Boston’s Farm and Trade School. A few other similar programs existed in the last half of the nineteenth century. They had no standard instrumentation and offered no academic credit. These miscellaneous ensembles of stringed and wind instruments hardly count as either orchestras or bands.

The beginning of instrumental music in the American school curriculum

Little by little, some of them grew into high school orchestras. Historians generally credit Will Earhart’s orchestra in Richmond, Indiana (started in 1898) as the first successful school instrumental program in the US. More followed.

The program in Chelsea, Massachusetts started to offer credit for private study with outside teachers in 1906.

School orchestras of that era depended on the private students of local music teachers. They had trouble maintaining the instrumentation they needed to play orchestral repertoire.

Some of them, then, started elementary school orchestras. The practice enabled them to recruit and train musicians who would make a stable orchestra when they got to high school.

At about that time, the progressive education movement swept the country. Students for the first time had opportunity to choose electives. Progressive leaders considered music as a way of socializing students to become productive citizens of a complex industrial society.

Music theory and music appreciation joined the list of electives in many schools. The invention of the player piano and the phonograph greatly facilitated the appreciation courses. These classroom electives and the rise in the number of school orchestras fit hand in glove.

During this time, school systems began to provide instruments, rehearsal rooms, uniforms, and other equipment. Some started to allow rehearsal time during school hours and give academic credit. Many hired full-time music teachers.

Many of the instrumental specialists among them had been professional players, but more and more studied music education in college. Around 1910, a growing number of them began to teach in instrumental performance classes rather than relying on private teachers.

At first, orchestras played a larger role in school music than bands. A survey of 359 cities in the 1919-1920 school year found school orchestras in 278 of them and school wind bands in only 88.

It surely did not include the many extra-curricular and non-school bands that existed at the time. Nationwide, high school students probably had more opportunity to participate in some kind of band than orchestra.

The growth of school bands before World War II

Military bands and their music became highly visible during the First World War. Americans associated them with success in the war effort. Many high schools and colleges started ROTC bands. And many of these either remained after the war or became regular school bands.

With a booming economy during the 1920s, more musical instruments became available. Immigration increased the population by millions of people. More Americans than before attended high school, and more of them represented the swelling middle class. All these factors benefitted school bands.

At the same time, new technology in the form of radio, phonograph records, and motion pictures transformed how Americans spent leisure time. For the first time, it became possible to enjoy music without active participation. No one needed to sing, play an instrument, or go to a live performance

Growing numbers of automobiles made Americans more mobile than ever before. And a new kind of popular music, jazz, swept the country.

All these factors started the decline of both professional bands and town bands. But people still wanted music at parades and various civic ceremonies. School bands stepped up to provide it.

Professional organizations of music educators began to form. The Music Supervisors National Conference (MSNC) formed in 1907. It changed its name to Music Educators National Conference (MENC) in 1934 and to National Association for Music Education (NAfME) in 2011.

MSNC began to pay more serious attention to instrumental music and formed a Committee on Instrumental Affairs in 1922. The number of school orchestras grew during the 1920s, but the number of school bands exploded. The vast majority of American high schools supported bands by the end of the decade, as did many grade schools.

Band contests

The decline of professional bands and town bands forced musical instrument manufacturers to look for new markets. The Band Instrument Manufacturing Association decided to sponsor a national school band contest in 1923.

It appears highly successful or a fiasco, depending on which source describes it. The contest took place in Chicago, and half the participants came from around Chicago. But the idea caught on and more national contests followed.

The MSNC Committee on Instrumental Affairs eventually took over sponsorship contests to keep the contests from becoming too commercial. It implemented state and regional elimination contests and developed repertoire lists.

The contests grew in acceptance, but many bands resented the fact that with one band declared the winner, all the other bands felt like failures and losers. By the mid-1930s, contests rated each participant from I (the highest score) to V.

Because of the expense of traveling to a central location, a system of regional contests replaced the national contest after 1937.

Ups and downs for school bands since World War II

World War II interrupted the growth of school bands, but as was the case in World War I, returning veterans sparked renewed interest and emphasis.

By 1973, a survey counted about 50,000 high school bands in the US. Not only had they become more numerous than before but also larger. And many of the larger schools supported more than one band. The best students played in the best band without denying other students a chance to participate.

Writing in 1989, Jere T. Humphreys concluded, “Although the golden age of bands was from 1870 through Sousa’s death in 1932, we are now living in the golden age of school instrumental performing ensembles.”

What could he have been thinking?

In the very same year, William Fry wrote a letter to the Music Educators Journal. Replying to a previous article that decried the waning emphasis on quality in performance, he pointed out that the real problem facing high school bands was decreased enrollment.

He cited a 1986 MENC report. It found that graduation requirements had been expanded to include more math and science, and particularly coursework in computers and other high tech. These requirements had a negative effect on school music.

Questions of aesthetics and musical concepts had dominated the philosophy of music education for thirty years. The emphasis brought about summer music camps, honor bands, and other innovations that enhanced the quality of participants’ musical experience. Stressing these musical values in the context of declining enrollments, he said, threatened the viability of band programs.

Other problems in schools included budget cuts, the school dropout rate, teenagers’ various social concerns, and apathetic school boards. The only solution, Fry wrote, is “a conscious effort to market nonmusical benefits, along with musical values.”

Some threats to school bands

Short-sighted school boards and administrations had already started to regard music, the arts, foreign languages, and other electives as expendable. As administrative staff grew, music programs faced the chopping block.

I have no statistics to follow up on that 1973 survey, but I suspect enrollments in school bands began to decline not long afterward. A radical change in popular music accounts for some of the decline.

Up until just after World War II, popular music revolved around traditional instruments. I personally remember the summer television show that featured the Dorsey Brothers band. In my small midwestern town, the junior high school and high school bands had full sections of every instrument except oboe and bassoon. We had about twelve trombonists the entire time I was in school.

But in the 1950s, rock music began to supplant the earlier popular music. Instead of using wind instruments, with few exceptions, it used only guitars and drums, and perhaps a keyboard. Rock musicians didn’t use written notation. Most of them didn’t know how to read and write musical notation. And saw no reason to learn.

Music educators had long been concerned about how to reach students who didn’t participate in band, orchestra, or chorus. But now, students roamed the halls who eagerly participated in rock bands and listened to little but rock music.

Earlier generations of music teachers could ignore any kind of music that people picked up by ear. Plenty of people wanted to learn to read music and play instruments. Ignoring the new popular music put school music programs in danger of appealing to a dwindling number of people who had broader taste beyond rock.

The need for advocacy

Advocacy has been a major theme in the pages of music teachers’ professional literature for more than a hundred years. But never before has anyone had to advocate for the continued relevance of the kinds of music school bands teach.

After more than a hundred years of trying, music appreciation programs had failed to “elevate” the public’s musical taste. Yet the fact remains: popular music has always had a short shelf life. Popular taste always looks for some combination of the familiar and the novel. Taste for popular styles seldom outlives the generation that first embraced them.

Rossini operas, Strauss waltzes, and Tin Pan Alley songs once represented the vanguard of popular music.

Classical music has always enjoyed a smaller audience than popular music, but it has always embraced the music of the past. In fact, as popular taste moves on to the next thing and loses interest in an old style, classical music audiences embrace the best parts of it.

Arguments over the relative merits of classical and popular music haven’t changed much since pamphleteers first raised them in about the 1830s.

School bands used to represent some kind of meeting of popular and classical taste. They still enjoy wide support and turn out excellent musicians. Graduates of school bands don’t necessarily become professional musicians. But community bands couldn’t survive without them.

Even some music educators don’t care. They don’t recognize the social value of older music. Electric guitars and drums threaten to overwhelm the study and appreciation of wind instruments. People who value older traditions need to advocate for them like never before.

Sources:

Bands in the United States / Raoul F. Camus, Grove Music Online. October 2013. [A subscription is required for access.]
Decreased band enrollments / William E. Fry, letter to Music Educators Journal 76 (Spring 1989):4, 9.
An overview of American public school bands and orchestras before World War II / Jere T. Humphreys, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 101 (Summer 1989): 50-60.

Photo credits:
Eaglebrook Middle School concert. Some rights reserved by Eaglebrook School.
Grade school band. Public domain from Flickr
High school band 1939. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Library of Congress collection via Picryl
Marching band. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Rock band. Some rights reserved by Vegansoldier