Great bands of America

by Alberta Powell Graham

The whole program was a superb success, but the great soprano, Parepa-Rosa, the spectacular arrangement of The Anvil Chorus, and Patrick Gilmore himself, were the outstanding features of the festival.

To everyone’s surprise this huge music festival made a profit, a comparatively small sum, but when added to the proceeds of a benefit concert given for Gilmore, almost $40,000 was presented to him. That he had fairly earned this reward everybody agreed. He immediately went to Europe for a rest, he said, but later it was learned that he had spent much time making contacts with great bands for a bigger and a better Jubilee.

Gilmore who was now acknowledged the country’s greatest bandleader, returned from Europe all agog over another great musical Festival. The siege of Paris and the Franco-Prussian War had ended, so he decided to produce an International Peace Jubilee in Boston. He planned to double the chorus—20,000 instead of 10,000 singers, a band of 2,000 instead of 1,000; and a festival lasting three weeks instead of three days.

His preparations were soon under way. Another enormous auditorium—the first one had burned—and a larger organ were constructed. A bigger drum than at the previous festival was built in Portland, Maine. The heads were 12 feet across and the sides 4 feet high. It was so big that a wall had to be knocked out of the house where it was made in order to get it outside. It was shipped to Boston on an ocean steamer, but only a giant could have struck both sides at once and its thunderous sound was so slow in coming after the beat that it was useless. The World’s Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival was announced for June 17 to July 4, 1872. A whole regiment of soloists was engaged, and Johann Strauss came from Germany to personally conduct the huge orchestra in playing his beautiful Blue Danube Waltz. As the high point in the international Music Festival, Gilmore brought the greatest of Europe’s noted bands. The Grenadier Guards from London, from Paris the Garde Republicaine, The Kaiser Franz Grenadier Regiment Band from Berlin and also from that city, The German Emperor’s Imperial Household Cornet Quartette. The Irish National Band came from Dublin and the United States Marine Band from Washington, D. C.

However, in spite of the world’s most glamorous talent, the second great festival was a flat failure. The crowds would not come. One day there were 22,000 performers on the stage and only 7,000 people in the audience. Although The Anvil Chorus was again on the program and also the Soldiers’ Chorus given with red fire and many other embellishments, yet the people stayed away. No one blamed Gilmore, the unsurpassable, as he was called. He had done his part and produced every attraction which he had advertised.

Gilmore left Boston almost immediately for New York City. He was then forty-four years old, still fired with ambition and a desire to produce huge, perfect, spectacular performances. His band of one hundred players, always the most talented to be found, was in great demand.

In that year, 1873, Gilmore gave his last “big show,” this year in Chicago. It was a series of grand concerts celebrating the restoration of the city after the great fire. The programs were held in the huge concourse of the new passenger station of the Lake Shore Railroad, a room two blocks long, holding 40,000 people—and Gilmore filled it. He added two-hundred musicians to his band, had a chorus of 1,000 singers and to the delight of the audience he again played The Anvil Chorus with firemen, anvils, cannon and bells.

The Gilmore Band in 1875 played at Gilmore’s Gardens in New York City making the unusual record of one-hundred-fifty consecutive concerts to crowded houses. A highlight on the last concert of the season was a cornet quartette by the four greatest cornetists of that time—Arbuckle, Bent, Levy and Gilmore. In 1876 Gilmore and his band starred at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

For thirteen successive summer seasons the Gilmore Band played at New York’s popular Manhattan Beach resort. Gilmore and his noted organization toured the entire United States repeatedly. He was a marvelous organizer, a superfine showman and a good financier and business manager.

As a composer he did not rate high. He is generally given credit for having written the well-known song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, although many believed that he was not the author of the composition. That Gilmore was versatile and resourceful everyone admits. In 1890 when his band was asked to play at General Sherman’s funeral, Gilmore revised Marching Through Georgia, a rather inside-out-version, making an unusual, unknown funeral dirge, yet which many people felt was vaguely familiar.