Marches growing up

One of my granddaughters is a great fan of marches - toy soldiers mostly because that means Christmas to her and that famous scene from Toyland.  I like marches too.  About 1968 or so, can't be sure of the year, a concert band in Detroit made up of members of the Detroit Symphony, the Belle Isle Band and college faculty musicians from the universities got together and recorded all the Sousa Marches (of Stars and Stripes Forever fame).  When that little musical journey was over I could name 200+ Sousa marches and walk at 96 steps per minute and still can.

If you played in concert bands in parks during the summer, over time you would play just about every march ever written - an exaggeration of course - but it seemed that way. On more adventuresome days you got to get into the "transcription" repertoire - marches that were written for orchestra or piano and were "made over" for the concert band. ... there is a point to all this, I promise.

If you were 14 or so and this was in the day before much classical FM radio and records were the only show in town (at $3.99 a pop, well things were a little slim in our home). Much of the music that was "transcribed" was very difficult as it wasn't exactly written for the band and some instruments had to do the work of violins. What was wondrous however was the quality of the music - very serious composers in music history and there we were getting to hear these very new and exotic melodies and harmonies.

In a Persian Garden, the Steppes of Central Asia, Polevetsian Dances - all wonderful new sounds.  Two marches which I have now thought to be the cat's meow for half a century were "processions" or entry marches...one for a Sardar and one for a Boyard...think "big cheese" in India and Bulgaria of all places - but really kinda a eastern Europe on a trade route type of thing.  I can still remember the first time playing these and the Sardar one - well I can picture the first page of the printed music - my part resting on a black music stand in the basement of Germania Hall in Saginaw Michigan in a rehearsal where I was the only kid among 50 musicians and I had never heard such a thing in my life.  Vivid recollection. Tame now.