A Personal Encounter with our Drum Corps Heritage

[Geneva]

A Personal Encounter with our Drum Corps Heritage

I wanted to share with the drum corps activity a great experience that I had with my community band and drum corps. Our activity’s origins are from the military’s use of drums and bugles as signaling devices to marshall the troops in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Hellcats drum and bugle corps of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY is the modern day embodiment of this tradition. As such, they are one of the four components of the U.S. Military Band spanning over 220 years of musical tradition at West Point. They are comprised of eight soprano buglers, three snare drummers, and a rudimental bass drummer and provide musical support to the U.S. corps of Cadets with Reveille and Retreat, marching drills, reviews, and parades included in their routines. They often play in conjunction with the military band as a field unit providing fanfares and embellishments.

During the performance of my band (Corning, NY Area Community Concert Band) with the Hellcats in a recent sit-down concert, we served as the proxy to the U.S. Military Band. What a grand experience it was to perform with these accomplished musicians who are recruited in a competitive audition process. The perfection of their playing literally elevated our own performance as we were inspired by their stirring sounds. Together we played Bugles and Drums by Edwin Franko Goldman, The Official West Point March by Philip Egner, The Gallant Seventh by John Philip Sousa, and The Army Goes Rolling Along.

Offstage: I compared instruments with Clay, their high note specialist. The Hellcats play on custom made (limited manufacture by Blackburn) silver B flat, single horizontal valve bugles. They get an amazing amount of music out of these instruments that are limited mainly to the diatonic scale. This could be appreciated by listening to their swinging rendition of Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree. Clay used to play with a small junior corps from New Hampshire in the 60’s and there was at least one other ex-corpsman from the Salina Silver Sabres. Clay seemed quite bemused by my 3 valve Kanstul G bugle wondering that they should still consider it a bugle! Alas, the pretenses have now been dropped with the change to B flat trumpets.

Edited June 12, 2003 by Geneva