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- Jan 8, 2012
"No braying horn or screaming fife
At dawn shall call to arms."
--from Bivouac Of The Dead
While music played an important role in the lives of soldiers, field music, which regulated life in the camps, was regarded by many with same level of affection as an annoying alarm clock.
Those who've been at reenactments where the drums start pounding outside your tent at dawn and fife and bugle calls pierce the air seemingly minutes after you've finally fallen asleep, have some idea of what the real soldiers had to put with on a daily basis, not just for a weekend, but day after day for years on end.
"The omnipresent and ferocious sound of fifes, drums and bugles was an indisputable separator between the civilian and soldier worlds..." serving as a constant reminder of the soldier's difficult and demanding life. Reveille, drill call, fatigue call, this call, that call, all day long. “If you had to be drummed out to the notes of that infernal drum three or ten times a day, according as it happens, you would growl, I know, when you heard it beat,” groused Colonel Mason Tyler Whiting of Massachusetts.
Such was the disdain for field musicians that they received the questionable honor of having a song written about them. The “Upidee Song” presented a sadistic bugler who took great delight in tormenting his colleagues: “He saw, as in their bunks they lay,/ Tra la la! Tra la la!/How soldiers spent the dawning day./Tra la la la la/‘There’s too much comfort there,’ said he, ‘And so I’ll blow the ‘Reveille.’
And I used to wonder why there weren't more monuments to field musicians.
warfarehistorynetwork.com
At dawn shall call to arms."
--from Bivouac Of The Dead
While music played an important role in the lives of soldiers, field music, which regulated life in the camps, was regarded by many with same level of affection as an annoying alarm clock.
Those who've been at reenactments where the drums start pounding outside your tent at dawn and fife and bugle calls pierce the air seemingly minutes after you've finally fallen asleep, have some idea of what the real soldiers had to put with on a daily basis, not just for a weekend, but day after day for years on end.
"The omnipresent and ferocious sound of fifes, drums and bugles was an indisputable separator between the civilian and soldier worlds..." serving as a constant reminder of the soldier's difficult and demanding life. Reveille, drill call, fatigue call, this call, that call, all day long. “If you had to be drummed out to the notes of that infernal drum three or ten times a day, according as it happens, you would growl, I know, when you heard it beat,” groused Colonel Mason Tyler Whiting of Massachusetts.
Such was the disdain for field musicians that they received the questionable honor of having a song written about them. The “Upidee Song” presented a sadistic bugler who took great delight in tormenting his colleagues: “He saw, as in their bunks they lay,/ Tra la la! Tra la la!/How soldiers spent the dawning day./Tra la la la la/‘There’s too much comfort there,’ said he, ‘And so I’ll blow the ‘Reveille.’
And I used to wonder why there weren't more monuments to field musicians.
Military Music of the Civil War - Warfare History Network
Music, from strident command signals to the serenading lilt of regimental bands in camp was an integral part of a soldier’s life during the Civil War.
warfarehistorynetwork.com
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