Episode 9: A dreadful hullaballoo

There are many ways to make a band sound bad.

Poor tuning will do it.

So will bad balance.

So will tired players, weak reeds, heroic percussion, and the ancient belief that “forte” means “as loud as physically possible, preferably with moral conviction.”

But Frédéric Berr, writing in 1838, was especially concerned with one problem.

The wrong instruments in the wrong proportions.

To Berr, a military band was not simply a crowd of available musicians.

It was an organism.

Or perhaps more accurately, an architecture of sound.

Each instrument had a place. Each section had a function. The clarinets, oboes, horns, cornets, trombones, bassoons, ophicleides, and percussion were not interchangeable decorative devices. They were parts of a structure.

Move them around carelessly, and the structure collapses.

Or, in Berr’s more memorable phrase, the result is “a dreadful hullabaloo.”

That phrase appears in one of his notes, and it deserves to be cherished.

A dreadful hullabaloo.

Not a minor imbalance.

Not a slightly unfortunate sonority.

A dreadful hullabaloo.

One feels that Berr had heard things.

Things that could not be unheard.

In his book, The Need to Reconstitute the School of Military Music, Berr argues that French regimental bands had fallen behind the musical world around them. Theatre orchestras had grown richer. Modern opera had become more colourful. Composers such as Auber were writing music full of energy, brilliance, and dramatic effect.

Naturally, military bands wanted to play this music.

Or at least arrangements of it.

That was part of their public function. Military bands did not only play utilitarian marches. They performed popular pieces, operatic selections, ceremonial music, and works intended to entertain soldiers and civilians alike.

But Berr says the bands were not properly equipped to do this.

The modern orchestra had expanded.

The regimental band had not kept pace.

The result, he says, was not a true imitation of orchestral effects, but a kind of travesty.

That is a brutal assessment.

A travesty.

He is not saying the bands were merely imperfect.

He is saying they were attempting music for which their resources and proportions were inadequate, and the result distorted the very thing they were trying to represent.

This is one of Berr’s most important musical insights.

A band is not improved simply by adding more players.

It must have the right balance of colours.

That is why he proposes a fixed instrumentation: piccolo, E-flat clarinet, solo B-flat clarinet, first and second B-flat clarinets, oboes (drawn from the clarinet section), horns, cornets, trumpet, trombones, bassoons, ophicleides, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, and finally, the Chinese Hat or the Jingling Johnnie.

The Chinese Hat, also known as the Turkish Crescent or Jingling Johnny, was a tall percussion instrument fitted with small bells and jingling metal ornaments. It was often associated with military bands and so-called Turkish music. It is far too interesting to dispose of in a single sentence, so perhaps we shall come back to it in a future episode.

To modern eyes, Berr’s list is a fascinating pre-Adolphe Sax military band. There are no saxophones yet, and no saxhorn family. But in essence, it is surprisingly close to modern wind-band instrumentation. What is missing are some of the instruments we now take for granted: the saxophones, the bass clarinet, the euphonium, and the tuba.

But what matters most for now is not the exact list of instruments.

What matters is Berr’s insistence that the distribution should be fixed.

He says it must be regulated and not changed at will.

Why?

Because every substitution changes the sound.

And not always for the better.

Berr gives a wonderfully practical comparison. In a theatre orchestra, if a horn player is missing, nobody simply puts an ophicleide in the chair and hopes for the best.

One does not say, “Well, they are both instruments, and both make noises, so that should do.”

The horn and the ophicleide have different colours, different functions, different registers, different expressive characters. They are not the same musical substance.

Yet in military bands, Berr complains, such substitutions happened too freely. Woodwinds were replaced by brass. Parts were shifted around. Instrumental proportions were ignored.

And then, when several regimental bands were combined, the problems multiplied.

If each band was badly balanced in its own way, combining them did not create grandeur.

It created accumulated disorder.

The disproportion of one band added to the disproportion of another could produce only, as Berr says, a dreadful hullabaloo.

This is funny.

But it is also serious.

Because Berr is talking about one of the foundations of ensemble sound: proportion.

A band is a set of relationships.

Melody to harmony.

Treble to bass.

Woodwind to brass.

Colour to weight.

Rhythm to resonance.

Brightness to depth.

If the relationships are wrong, the whole ensemble suffers.

A band with too much brass may become heavy and brutal.

A band with too little bass may lack foundation.

A band without inner parts may sound hollow.

A band with uncontrolled percussion may become less an ensemble than a weather event.

And a band where instruments are treated as interchangeable will never develop a stable musical identity.

This is why Berr’s argument matters beyond the military band.

Every ensemble has an internal ecology.

A choir depends on the relationship between sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses.

An orchestra depends on strings, winds, brass, and percussion in balance.

A brass band depends on a carefully graded family of cornets, horns, baritones, trombones, euphoniums, basses, and percussion.

A wind band depends on colour, weight, blend, and register.

You cannot simply replace one part of that ecology and expect nothing to change.

Sometimes substitutions are necessary.

Every conductor knows this.

Life happens.

People get sick.

Bassoonists move interstate, perhaps in search of better reeds.

The third horn disappears moments before a concert and later claims there was “traffic.”

One does what one must.

But Berr is not complaining about emergency practicality.

He is complaining about a system in which disorder has become normal.

That is the difference.

A temporary substitution is one thing.

An institution built on careless substitution is another.

Berr wanted fixed proportions because he wanted reliable results. He wanted regimental bands that could play modern music with dignity, not bands that produced rough approximations of orchestral effects. He wanted the military band to be treated as a serious ensemble with its own proper structure.

That is a forgotten idea worth recovering.

A band is not a lesser orchestra.

It is not a miscellaneous collection of portable instruments.

It is not a loud convenience.

It is an ensemble with its own architecture.

And that architecture must be understood.

This was especially important in the nineteenth century because the military band was one of the major public musical institutions of the age. Many people heard instrumental music through bands in streets, squares, gardens, ceremonies, and public festivals. If the band played badly, public taste was affected. If the band played well, it could educate the ear of a whole town.

Berr knew this.

He was not merely fussing over instrumentation because musicians enjoy fussing over instrumentation, though we must admit this is one of our traditional amusements.

He was concerned that poor organisation damaged the public dignity of military music.

A badly balanced band did not merely offend specialists.

It misrepresented the art.

It reduced modern music to noise.

It turned the richness of orchestral colour into a brass-heavy blur.

It created the dreaded hullabaloo.

And nobody wants that.

Except perhaps the percussion section, and even then only briefly.

There is also a lesson here for modern musical life.

We often talk about ensembles in terms of numbers. How many players? How many students? How many members? How large is the band?

But size is not the same as balance.

A band of thirty-six well-chosen, well-trained, properly balanced players may do far more musically than a larger group assembled without thought.

Berr’s proposed thirty-six-player band is not just a number. It is a design.

Someone must think about the whole.

Someone must understand what each part contributes.

Someone must know that a horn is not an ophicleide, that an oboe is not merely an inconvenient clarinet, and that the bass line is not a place where hope goes to die.

This is one of the reasons conductors and arrangers matter. They are not merely time-beaters and note-police. At their best, they are architects of balance. They hear the ensemble not as a mass, but as a set of living proportions.

Frederic Berr heard that.

He knew that if the proportions were wrong, the musical result would be wrong.

And he knew that reforming military music meant more than training better players. It meant giving those players a sensible musical structure in which to work.

In the previous episodes, we have seen Berr complain about systems, unreliable hired musicians, the gagiste, and conductors without authority. Here we see another part of the same larger argument.

Good bands need good foundations.

Human foundations.

Administrative foundations.

And musical foundations.

Instrumentation is one of those foundations.

Without it, even skilled players may be trapped inside a badly built sound.

With it, the band can become something more than a collection of instruments.

It can become an ensemble.

And that is the difference between music and hullabaloo.

You’ve been listening to The Musical Archeologist: forgotten ideas from music’s past.

Written and presented by me, Craig Dabelstein.

The music for this podcast was composed by Jeffrey A. Young.

The Musical Archeologist is one of many projects from Maxime’s Music, dedicated to recovering forgotten music, forgotten writings, and forgotten musical worlds.

Thank you for listening.