Eaglebrook Middle School band concert, 2012. Sorry, but their Flickr profile doesn’t identify where they are located.

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. Continue reading →