Music, War and the Military in

Music, War and the Military in. From the earliest major American wars to the Persian Gulf War, music has played an active role in wartime activities of both military and civilian populations. Soldiers wrote their own lyrics, and occasionally even the songs themselves, which they sang and played to pass the time or while marching into war. Civilians at home wrote and sang popular songs to support or oppose the war effort, and composers wrote more involved instrumental or vocal works dealing with the subject of war, often long after a war was over. In this century as well, composers have created music to be part of films and television shows dealing with war. Music and war have clearly had a strong relationship in America since the mid‐eighteenth century.

During the Revolutionary War, several Continental army regiments had small bands, but it was two decades after the war that Congress authorized a Marine band, in 1798. It consisted of thirty‐two members, playing exclusively drums and fifes. Most active during the Revolutionary War were the soldiers who sang ballads and strophic songs, the majority of which were usually set to British tunes since there were few composers in America. For many of those songs the music has been lost; only the lyrics were published in papers at the time. But some of the music is known. The most popular songs during the war were Yankee Doodle, The Battle of the Kegs, and Volunteer Boys. William Billings, the most significant American composer of this era, also wrote important songs dealing with the war, such as Chester, Lamentation Over Boston, Retrospect, and Victory.

Other genres appeared somewhat later, specifically battle pieces, which were popular in Europe and America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These battle pieces were sectionalized, programmatic keyboard works that attempted musically to reenact battle situations, and often incorporated national airs or military songs. One of the earliest American examples was James Hewitt's Battle of Trenton, written in 1792. Hewitt dedicated the piece to George Washington, composed a detailed program indicating how the general's army marched, crossed the Delaware, and defeated the Hessians, and included popular tunes such as Yankee Doodle and Roslin Castle.

The relationship of music and war during the early nineteenth‐century American wars was similar to that in the Revolution, chiefly patriotic songs and programmatic piano battle pieces. Benjamin Carr wrote one of the most difficult early pieces in his Siege of Tripoli (1801), concluding again with Yankee Doodle. Other works glorified America's victories, such as Denis‐Germain Etienne's Battle of New Orleans (1816), with a programmatic journey including Hail Columbia and Yankee Doodle. The most important song to be written during the War of 1812 was certainly Francis Scott Key's poem The Star‐Spangled Banner (1814), set to John Stafford Smith's song, To Anacreon in Heaven. Not until 1931 did it become America's official national anthem.

Although war‐related music in Europe changed during the mid‐nineteenth century with more sincere forays into seriousness of purpose (particularly in the music of Franz Liszt, Giuseppi Verdi, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky), American music devoted to war remained limited in its focus and quality. However, these pianistic battle pieces and salon works for voice and piano remained popular during the Mexican War. In 1846 and 1847, Charles Grobe composed two piano works, The Battle of Buena Vista and The Battle of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, dedicated respectively to Gen. Zachary Taylor, “who never lost a battle,” and to the men of the U.S. Army. In 1847, William Cumming composed a simple piano work, Santa Anna's Retreat from Cerro Cordo, in which the composer indicates at specific moments in the score how Antonio López de Santa Anna lost his wooden leg and later his Mexican hat. The most popular war songs during this time were T. A. Durriage's Remember the Alamo, sung to the tune of Bruce's Address, and Park Benjamin's To Arms.

The Civil War was a turning point in song writing. America was sufficiently established to have composers writing both the lyrics and the tunes, unlike the popular songs of the earlier wars that were chiefly set to preexisting tunes. George F. Root was the most gifted of the Union song writers and his Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching, The Battle‐Cry of Freedom, and Just Before the Battle, Mother, were among the most popular songs. Other particularly noteworthy songs of the North were Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic and Henry C. Work's Marching Through Georgia. Some of the most famous songs sung in the South were Daniel Emmett's Dixie, Harry Macarthy's The Bonnie Blue Flag, James R. Randall's Maryland, My Maryland, and Marie Ravenal de la Coste and John Hill Hewitt's Somebody's Darling. Many songs, however, crossed battle lines with different texts to the same tunes often parodying the originals. Emmett composed Dixie, the most famous song of the war, in 1859 as a minstrel song, but it soon was adopted by both the Union and Confederate states. For the Confederacy, it became an unofficial national anthem; President Lincoln liked it and had a White House band perform it as well.

Pianistic battle pieces continued, as seen in the blind slave Thomas Bethune's Battle of Manassas (1866), which quotes Dixie, The Star‐Spangled Banner, and Yankee Doodle, and uses clusters to imitate cannon shots in the lower part of the keyboard. The most serious composer of keyboard music in America during the mid‐nineteenth century, however, was Louis Moreau Gottschalk. He wrote several piano works that significantly elevated both the virtuosity and the quality of battle‐like pieces for the instrument. His L’Union (1862), for which Samuel Adler made an arrangement for piano and orchestra in 1972, is a brilliant showpiece for the pianist, with interlocking offices, rapid figurations, and cannon imitations. By the Civil War period, military brass bands were prevalent, having significantly replaced the drum and fife bands by 1834. During the war, several of these bands—chiefly the Stonewall Brigade Band, the Spring Garden Band, and the Fencible Band—became well‐known, playing concerts and assisting with recruitment.

The Civil War has remained vivid in the American consciousness to the present day, as is evident in the large number of works composed about it in this century—an inspiration due in part to the excellent poetry and prose that emerged about the war from Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Crane, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.

The most important setting of Crane's War Is Kind is Ulysses Kay's Stephen Crane Set (1967) and the best settings of Melville include Joseph Baber's Shiloh and Other Songs from Herman Melville's Battle Pieces (1991) and Gordon Binkerd's Requiem for Soldiers Lost in Ocean Transports (1984). David Diamond composed his Epitaph (On the Grave of a Young Cavalry Officer Killed in the Valley of Virginia) in 1945.

The poet most frequently set to music is Walt Whitman. Paul Hindemith (1946) and Roger Sessions (1964–70) both wrote outstanding large‐scale works on When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Other noteworthy Whitman settings include Howard Hanson's Drum Taps (1935), Norman Dello Joio's Songs of Walt Whitman (1966), Thomas Pasatieri's Dirge for Two Veterans (1973), Ned Rorem's Whitman Cantata (1983), and John Adams's The Wound Dresser (1989).

Numerous composers have also set Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to music. Other works, such as Rubin Goldmark's Requiem (1919) and Ernest Bloch's America (1926), include portions of the address or are based on Lincoln's life. Perhaps the most famous and most frequently performed work about Lincoln is Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait (1942), which uses a portion of the Gettysburg Address. Roy Harris based his four‐movement Symphony No. 6 (Gettysburg) (1943–44) on the address and composed his Symphony No. 10 (Abraham Lincoln) (1965) in honor of Lincoln. Warner Hutchison wrote an experimental Mass: For Abraham Lincoln (1974), and Vincent Persichetti set Lincoln's second inaugural address in A Lincoln Address (1973).

Very few works emerged from the Spanish‐American War, although some popular songs such as Charles K. Harris's Just Break the News to Mother, Good‐bye, Dolly Gray, and Joe Hayden and Theodore Mertz's popular There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight—which became the official song of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders—were well established. It was finally during the Spanish‐American War that piano battle pieces reached their demise after having dominated American war music during the nineteenth century. In their place, for the first time in America, composers created serious large‐scale compositions dealing with war for chorus and orchestra, such as Walter Damrosch's Manila Te Deum (1898).

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, John Philip Sousa composed about 140 marches for military band that represented the glorification of the martial, patriotic, and expansionistic spirit of the turn of the century. His most significant marches include Stars and Stripes Forever! (1896), Washington Post March (1889), King Cotton (1895), and U.S. Field Artillery (1917). Many other patriotic tunes related to the military emerged from this era as well, including Alfred Miles and Charles Zimmerman's Anchors Aweigh (1906) and Edmund Gruber's The Caissons Go Rolling Along (1907).

Charles Ives was the composer most interested in writing serious music for World War I. He composed two songs in 1917—He is There!, later expanded to They Are There: A War Song March, and In Flanders Fields. Ives dedicated the Second Orchestral Set “From Hanover Square North at the End of a Tragic Day the People Again Arose” (1915) to the victims of the sinking of the Lusitania. Few American works were written during the war; however, a number of pieces appeared after the war, such as Frederick Converse's The Answer of the Stars (1919) and Ernest Schelling's A Victory Ball (1922). American composers also wrote pieces lamenting those lost in the war, as did their European counterparts during this time. Arthur Foote composed Three Songs 1914–1918 (1919), and Horatio Parker A.D. 1919 for chorus and piano (1919) in memory of the Yale graduates who lost their lives in the war. The American G.I.s enthusiastically adopted British songs, chiefly Harry Williams's or Jack Judge's It's a Long Way to Tipperary, and Ivor Novello's Keep the Home Fires Burning. George M. Cohan's Over There and Johnny, Get Your Gun were two of the most famous popular war songs in the United States.

World War II witnessed the greatest outpouring of war music ever in America. By the midpoint in the war, the American government and other civic organizations were commissioning music for war bonds, films, education, recruitment, and patriotic fanfares. The government supplied 12‐inch, 78 rpm V‐Discs to servicemen abroad (chiefly popular and light classical music), and the Department of Public Instruction in Indiana published a book, Music and Morale in Wartime, for civilians to sing in support of the war effort. The War Production Drive Headquarters even produced a study of the effect of music in armament factories, Wheeler Beckett's Music in War Plants (1943). Otto M. Helbig focused on the therapeutic importance of music in his History of Music in the U.S. Armed Forces During World War II (1966). Eugene Goossens and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra invited composers to create short fanfares that opened their concerts, and the League of Composers commissioned short pieces, based on a war‐associated theme, which the New York Philharmonic premiered between 1943 and 1945. Aaron Copland's A Fanfare for the Common Man was the most important of these, and Copland later incorporated the work into his optimistic postwar Symphony No. 3 (1946).

Many composers dedicated these works to the war effort. Morton Gould dedicated his Symphony No. 1 (1943) to his three brothers in the service and to their fellow fighters; Marc Blitzstein wrote Freedom Morning (1943) for the black troops of the U.S. Army; Paul Hindemith dedicated his When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d: A Requiem for Those We Love (1946) to the memory of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to the American soldiers killed during World War II; Dai Keong Lee offered his Pacific Prayer (1943) to the fighting men in the Pacific; and Roy Harris originally dedicated his Fifth Symphony (1942) to the USSR before later removing the dedication.

Other composers wrote laments for the soldiers who had died: Bernard Herrmann's For the Fallen (1943); Douglas Moore's In Memoriam (1943); and William Grant Still's In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy (1943). A large number of popular songs, such as Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer, Der Fuehrer's Face, and Frank Loesser's Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition placed high on the popular charts of the era. Among the most popular of all the music composed about World War II was Richard Rodgers's incidental music to Victory at Sea in 1952.

Some of the most intense works deal with the Holocaust. Both Part III: Night of Morton Subotnick's Jacob's Room (1985–86) and the second movement of Steve Reich's Different Trains (1988) tragically depict a train journey to the concentration camps. Lukas Foss wrote an Elegy for Anne Frank (1989), which he later incorporated into his Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrows) (1991). Morton Gould extracted a Holocaust Suite (1978) from his music for a television docudrama about the Holocaust.

The Korean War produced very few compositions. Only two Americans composed serious works dealing with the war and only one during the actual conflict— Lowndes Maury wrote his Sonata in Memory of the Korean War Dead for violin and piano in 1952, and Donald Erb composed his God Love You Now in 1971.

The Vietnam War, however, marked a significant change. Its art and popular music mirrored youthful perceptions of the war. Early on, Sgt. Barry Sadler's Ballad of the Green Beret paid tribute to these extraordinary new special forces. Later, as young men and women vocalized forceful opposition to the war, their music reflected that protest. Compositions such as William Mayer's Letters Home (1968), Gail Kubik's A Record of Our Time (1970), or Lou Harrison's Peace Pieces (1968) were clearly antiwar works, as were many songs by the popular songwriters, such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan (Blowin’ in the Wind, A hard rain's a‐gonna fall, and Masters of War), and Phil Ochs (Talking Vietnam and Draft Dodger Rag). Dylan, following in the protest tradition of Woody Guthrie, became the spokesman for the Vietnam era and many musicians sang his songs, including Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Joe MacDonald's I‐Feel‐Like‐I’m‐Fixin’‐to‐Die makes fun of the soldiers and their willingness to die at any cost.

Furthermore, the cynicism found in the novels and films of the early sixties is active in war‐related compositions of the time. Donald Martirano's L'sGA (1968) includes a speaker who cites the Gettysburg Address while inhaling helium gas. Arnold Rosner's A Mylai Elegy (1971), Dai‐Keong Lee's Canticle of the Pacific (1968), and Donald Lybbert's Lines for the Fallen (1971) were all laments for those who died in the war; there were few optimistic compositions. But perhaps the most significant work related to the Vietnam War is George Crumb's Black Angels (1970) for electrified string quartet. The soldiers in the war continued their output of lyrics to preexisting melodies. Joseph F. Tuso's Singing the Vietnam Blues: Songs of the Air Force in Southeast Asia (1990) contains 148 songs written solely by U.S. Air Force combat flyers during the Vietnam War.

The Persian Gulf War, in contrast, was a popular war and the majority of songs supported the war effort. A new outpouring of patriotism could be seen in Whitney Houston's performance of The Star‐Spangled Banner and Lee Greenwood's God Bless the U.S.A. which were regularly heard during the conflict. Most recently, Aaron Jay Kernis premiered Colored Fields (1996), a three‐movement concerto for English horn that deals with the fighting in Bosnia.
[See also Bosnian Crisis; Culture, War, and the Military; Vietnam Antiwar Movement; World War I: Military and Diplomatic Course; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course.]

Bibliography

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Ben Arnold