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FOREWORD. |
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constitution, already rich, is ever expanding; while its repertory, with certain slight reservations, knows no boundaries.
France has always taken the lead in military music. Its archives furnish many important documents bearing on schemes for the art's betterment, in which we find associated all the principal musical names of the day. This year (1912) France is promoting a grand international contest for bands. Large prizes are offered, one for £500, and it is confidently hoped that all the nations will send representatives.
Austria and Germany boast some really fine bands, although—and this particularly is the case in the latter country—one feels that artistic considerations often yield to those utilitarian.
Much attention has been devoted to wind band music in Italy—the service combinations being rarely below fifty in numbers, including the fanfare. The Italian cavalry has no music. All the large cities boast very fine organisations of seventy to eighty musicians, which, while they are under municipal control, enjoy wide European fame.
The Continent is now so easy of access and international exhibitions so frequent, undertakings in which good open-air music occupies so important and conspicuous a place as to necessitate usually a special bureau of management all to itself, that we are now more or less familiar with most of the bands of European reputation.
But the Western hemisphere has not been inactive. |
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