Our Veterans' Day Band Concert -- Hearing the Gettysburg Address Again for the First Time

Two things redeemed our Veterans’ Day concert by the Lake George Community Band from the deep, dark well of false patriotism and militarism into which we easily could have fallen.

First was a contemporary composition from 2003 commissioned by the NM Military Institute Regimental Bands of Roswell, NM. Each Time you Tell Their Story is a reading accompanied by concert band by Samuel R. Hazo:

No soldiers choose to die. It's what they risk being who and where they are. It's what they dare while saving someone else whose life means suddenly as much to them as theirs. Or more. To honor them, why speak of duty or the will of governments? Think first of love each time you tell their story. It gives their sacrifice a name and takes from war its glory.

This seemed a new way to express patriotism. Sacrifice is still the theme, but loss and grief are given larger status.

Second, we played a concert band piece which I assumed was old, but was published in 2009, was Lincoln at Gettysburg, a simple music setting for the great address. Lincoln’s speech seemed eerily current, and important for today because of the thoughts expressed about our nation, our values, and the internal war that continues to consume us. The first line is striking:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Liberty is claimed by all sides of current disputes, and oddly, we are more divided today than recently about the equality of people. Jefferson had not explicitly included colored slaves, native Americans, or Spanish residents of the thirteen colonies, and few who heard or read the Declaration of Independence would have thought of them. But when Lincoln was speaking of “all men” he was thinking of Negro slaves. Today when we hear “all men” most all of us hear it to be inclusive of women, gays and lesbians, transgendered people, as well as those of other races, ethnic backgrounds, and religions. That tells us how much we have changed! But Lincoln went on:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Yes we are so engaged, and while we are not yet again killing each other, our hold on liberties and equality are being challenged and tested. This reading seemed so modern and not of history but of today.

Lincoln was asked to dedicate a great burial ground, which still reeked of human putrefaction at the time of the speeches, four months after the battle. But Lincoln declined to glorify the dead or the battle they fought, instead saying that the dead had dedicated the field themselves.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This speaks of my America, which is not about the worship of guns, the revival of racial nationalism and the flag of the Confederacy, the acceptance of misogyny and sexual harassment, the increasing distance between not only rich and poor, but rich and the middle-class, the stupefying incompetence and false values of our Congress and Senate, and a man in the White House, unelected by the popular will of the people, who frightens children and makes women cry. All these things make us wonder if the deaths at Gettysburg were in vain.

Other works the band performed in addition to standard marches, included one that honored the death in battle of one of the first soldiers to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. I quote Walter Cronkite who explained once, that

Two forces drive war: National pride and human loss.  The first starts wars. The second sustains them. The first casualty creates an investment in blood that retreat would seem to dishonor.

No one wants to be first to die in a war, few will admit that a war was wrong when someone they loved died in it. and as John Kerry told Congress about the war in Vietnam, that no one wants to be the last soldier to die in a war.

My question is, "How can we glorify in any way the death of soldiers in a war so ill-conceived and false as our war in Iraq?" Is there a way to write music to express shame and regret? Composers today seem more inclined to express the power and destruction of war, and the loss of loved, real people.

The issue becomes political, because many went to fight in Iraq not for oil or even glory, but in revenge for 9/11. Revenge is famously unrewarding. We are more inclined to music that is inspiring, invigorating, exuberant, solemn and hymn-like, with emotional lyric lines, and crashing cymbals, with a lively and defiant finish. These are the words publishers used to describe the compositions we played for Veterans’ Day.

The problem of military music partly lies with the music publishers and the music education establishment. All protest music from the ‘60's has disappeared from the publishers’ lists. Patriotism and militarism sell. Remembrance and the hope of glory sell. The bands can draw crowds of veterans. Politicians applaud and give funds for music programs. Veterans organizations give money to community bands who agree to honor them! The military loves the assistance in recruiting new, young soldiers, who will be veterans soon enough, or among those honored fallen. And the music is written for other purposes: to provide music for a certain "grade" of performance, to provide examples and "studies" requiring difficult or unusual instrument fingerings and rhythms, to cut another notch on a composer's conducting baton and resume.

The sister of a bandmate won’t attend our concerts because she believes such music and performances glorify war. I agree. Those who attend are inspired and encouraged to feel that they now “support our troops.” Government policy is forgotten or never to be thought about. Martial music makes you want to march, but someone else tells you in what direction to go.