One Composer's Memorial Days

Memorial Day always reminds me not only of those we honor for their dedicated service and the gift of their lives to our country, but also of Memorial Days past and their particularly stirring music.

   Take the Salisbury Central School marching band filling the air with patriotic tunes as the whole town, from seniors in lawn chairs to toddlers on a parent’s back, applaud.

   Later, in the cemetery I close my eyes and hear the wind whooshing through the microphone while the distant, plaintive trumpets play “Taps,†one echoing the other.

   And I recall back through the years to when I played glockenspiel for the Rye, NY, high school band, the blasts of the tuba and the swirls of the drums all around me while the three elementary school bands farther down the street added their own harmonies to the haze of sound: cheering, fire engines, flutes, clarinets, and, if not quite 76 trombones, enough to give you goosebumps.

   Not quite 100 years ago Connecticut composer Charles Edward Ives wrote:
  
    Take a few moments to listen to an online recording of the “Decoration Day†movement of his “Holiday Symphony.†This is music whose flavor is keenly American, and startlingly fresh a hundred years later. A simple search for “Ives Decoration Day†will produce a few choices.

   Keep clicking and you’ll hear the rest of the symphony, similarly filled with abundant sonic evocations of three other seasonal celebrations, Washington’s Birthday, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.

   And just after Veterans’ Day, our area will welcome another American treasure, Arlo Guthrie, whose wry observations of life brought him acclaim in the 1970s with “Alice’s Restaurant.†He’ll appear at Infinity Hall in Norfolk on Nov. 11 and 12.Tickets are $75-100. Infinityhall.com or 866-666-6306.

In the early morning of a Memorial Day, a boy is awakened by martial music — a village band is marching down the street — and as the strains of Reeves’ majestic ‘[Second] Regiment March’ come nearer and nearer — he seems of a moment translated — a moment of vivid power comes, a consciousness of material nobility — an exultant something gleaming with the possibilities of his life — an assurance that nothing is impossible, and that the whole world lies at his feet.â€

                                                    — “Essays Before A Sonata†(1919)

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