“Wherever he has gone,” Deems Taylor wrote, “I am sure he has found a welcome. There is a dining hall in the Elysian Fields marked Grade A Composers Only. If you could look in at the door tonight, you would probably see him there; perhaps not at the speakers’ table with Wagner and Beethoven and Mozart and Bach and Debussy and the rest, but somewhere in the room—at a small table, possibly, with Herbert and Strauss and Delibes.
“‘However did he get in here?’ asks some disapproving shade—a small-town Kapellmeister, probably ... ‘Who got him in?’
“The guide smiles, ‘The marching men. The men who had to go long miles, on an empty belly, under a hot sun, or through a driving rain. They made us take him in. They said he made things easier for them.’”
PATRICK SARSFIELD GILMORE
The Father of the Concert Band
Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, America’s first great bandmaster, was born on Christmas Day, 1829, in the village of Ballygar, County Galway, Ireland. His parents hoped that he would go into the priesthood, but that idea did not appeal to Patrick. He loved music more than anything else in the world. Even when a very small boy he had a knack of making his own toys from wood, wire or whatever he could find. Always they were crude musical instruments, fifes, drums or fiddles from which he was able to blow, beat or scrape a bit of a tune.
At fifteen, Patrick having finished the village school, went to work in a mercantile house in the nearby town of Athlone. Several regiments of the British army were stationed in the town, and Patrick could not keep away from their bands. One of the bandmasters, a Mr. Keating, noticed the boy and taught him to play the cornet.
Before long Patrick’s employer discovered that his young clerk was giving more time to music than business. He kindly suggested that the boy teach his own sons what he knew about music. But Pat did not care to teach, he preferred playing. He learned so rapidly that soon Keating gave him a place in a regimental band. Later, when the regiments were sent over to Canada, along went Patrick Gilmore.
When Pat was nineteen, he became tired of the military service. He obtained his release from the British army, and drifted down to Boston which was then the musical center of the United States. Young Gilmore at once found a job in Ordway’s Music Store. This concern which had a band and a minstrel show held his interest for a short time. But Patrick, true to his first love, soon got a place in a band and became known as a skillful cornetist.