Asked to conjure images of American military bands, one might settle on smartly uniformed parade musicians, weary players gathered around a campfire, or over-the-shoulder brass instruments gleaming from a small-town bandstand. In Sound the Trumpet, Beat the Drums, Bruce P. Gleason, himself a former army bandsman, complicates these images by documenting the history of military musicians who performed, at least part of the time, while mounted on horseback. Gleason’s study of these often-overlooked musicians is timely. For more than a generation, popular conceptions of warfare have centred on the modern, mechanized military or on the infantry units familiar from World War Two films. Thanks to a revived interest in World War One, the 2011 film War Horse, and a wave of historical television dramas depicting real or imagined equestrian worlds (Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey and Westworld come to mind), audiences have been provided with new images for battle and warfare. Gleason’s book not only expands our understanding of American military music, it also goes a long way toward historicizing these popular images of the past and providing them with a meaningful soundtrack.

Arranged in 11 chronological chapters, the book begins with origins. Gleason posits that crusaders brought the tradition of mounted musicians from the Middle East to Europe and demonstrates that the practice of playing on horseback was well established in the western world by the fifteenth century; an intriguing bit of evidence is a 1405 statute dictating that commencement musicians in Bologna should be paid more if mounted (p. 4). While interesting, these origin details play little role in the New World history Gleason will tell, and the first chapter (‘Middle Eastern and European Traditions and the Birth of the Mounted Band’) threatens to derail that story before it begins.

In the second chapter (‘American Revolutionary War and 1812 to Mexico’), Gleason explains that, although common in Europe, cavalry units found their place in the United States only through a series of fits and starts. Indeed, elucidating the tenuous position of mounted musicians in America will be a major theme of the final chapter, but for now Gleason notes that many of those colonists who were wealthy enough to become accomplished horsemen where loyal to the crown, and thus had little role in the nation’s military development. Furthermore, both the draft horses and the firelock weapons used by the middle and lower economic classes were ill-suited to cavalry work, and mounted units thus failed to find an easy home in the young United States (pp. 21–2).

Nevertheless, in 1777 Congress approved four cavalry regiments for the Continental Army, each of which included a small body of musicians for signal work on the battlefield and in camp (pp. 22–3). As the new nation’s revolutionary forces were disbanded soon after the war, this early beginning proved short-lived. The units raised for the War of 1812 similarly had only a brief existence. Gleason’s real story thus does not begin until the 1820s and 1830s when Congress began to authorize cavalry units for service along the western frontier. Mounted bands were present during the Mexican–American War and appear in descriptions of the bloody encounters between federal forces and the Native American population. From these scattered origins, the number of horse-mounted bands exploded – like their more familiar infantry counterparts – during the American Civil War (‘Civil War and the 1860s’). With a military now well established, mounted bands saw their heyday in the immediate postbellum period, a story Gleason brilliantly documents through chapters on ‘The 1860s and Plains Indian Wars’, ‘The 1870s to 1890s’, ‘Spanish–American War Era’ and ‘Turn of the Twentieth Century’.

The advent of trench warfare and mechanized weaponry – not to mention the challenges of transporting horses to Europe – meant that the American cavalry did not play a significant role in World War One, and after the conflict the tradition was largely relegated to ceremonial use, a story told through chapters entitled ‘Mexican Expedition, World War I, and the 1920s’, and ‘The 1930s, Federal Units’. One particularly well-documented chapter (‘Rise of the National Guard’) notes that while the cavalry may have been falling out of favour in the US Army, the number of mounted bands in the guard actually increased during the interwar period (p. 163). Nonetheless, the final chapter (‘The 1940s, Demise of the Tradition’) shows that by the end of World War Two, the United States had given up all of its mounted army units, and thus all of its mounted bands.

Gleason’s chapters, which mark this story by focusing on specific conflicts, do not follow a fixed format but touch on similar topics: instrumentation (with a particular eye toward the various manifestations of trumpets, cornets and percussion), the training of bandsmen (who might have begun with little musical or equestrian experience but often became skilled on several instruments and on unfamiliar animals), the duties of the players (which included performances for both military and civilian events as well as service in combat), and the training and transportation of horses (which often led to humorous or disastrous results). While his book is more about the organization of mounted bands than the music they played, Gleason does note that their repertoire included patriotic tunes, regimental melodies, marches, and instrumental arrangements of popular songs. Many of the ensembles also gave dismounted concerts, which were likely to include dance numbers, solo features, and transcriptions from the orchestral and operatic repertoire. Gleason reproduces a Washington, DC programme from 1901 that included selections from Donizetti, Rossini and Verdi, alongside lighter numbers (pp. 112–13).

In covering this material Gleason wisely chose to include a number of less-familiar military conflicts as it was on the frontier that horse-mounted units found their greatest success. For American music scholars tired of the endless examinations of musical life in the major east coast centres, this refocusing on an often-neglected portion of the country comes as a welcome change: in Sound the Trumpet, Beat the Drums we discover the musical worlds of Fort Riley, Kansas, Fort Niobrara, Nebraska and many other less well-trod locales. Gleason’s book also offers a welcome chronological variation. Thanks to a number of scholars, we now know a great deal about music during the American Civil War and we are learning more about the period surrounding World War One, but the decades between these two conflicts have received far too little attention. As it happens, this historical moment, the late 1860s through the turn of the century, was the most fertile for mounted bands and forms the heart of Gleason’s book. If for no other reason than providing a well-documented examination of postbellum musical life on the American frontier, Sound the Trumpet is a valuable addition to any musicological library.

Of course, Sound the Trumpet does much more than document an overlooked location during a neglected time, and the author’s scholarly strengths are several. First, he has a remarkable command of secondary literature related to the military, and his ability to explain the often-opaque language of that world far exceeds that of most other musical writers. Indeed, anyone wading into the world of military music – mounted or otherwise – will find this book valuable for getting the terminology right. To give but one example: a footnote in chapter four clearly details the chronology of the overlapping ranks held by George Custer who simultaneously served in the Regular Army and the Volunteers (p. 66, n. 22). Second, Gleason has clearly amassed an impressive body of primary sources on mounted bands, from government documents at the National Archives and Records Administration, to rare accounts written by military musicians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to interviews Gleason conducted with former band members and their descendants. Some of his most interesting sources are photographs of mounted bands, many of which are reproduced here (Sound the Trumpet, Beat the Drums is quite lavishly illustrated, with nearly 40 images). Furthermore, Gleason makes good use of his illustrations, often identifying lesser-known instruments and interpreting the information found on uniforms. Finally, this study – thankfully – is not limited to the regular army, but also encompasses the national guard and state militias, organizations that kept the mounted tradition alive just as it appeared to be petering out.

Sadly, Gleason’s strengths often dovetail with the book’s faults. His clear and elegant prose is too often interrupted by an attention to military detail that can easily overwhelm the reader. At one point an interesting discussion of life at lonely military outposts is disturbed by a listing of headquarter company stations active in January of 1867, complete with a lengthy footnote listing their commanding officers (p. 64). Similarly, he spends a full paragraph and a lengthy footnote listing the various cavalry bands stationed in the United States and the Philippines in July of 1905 (p. 115–16). Such masses of data distract from any central theme and are likely to overwhelm the reader more interested in music than in military organization and protocol. Much of this problem could have been alleviated with a more robust use of charts and tables; thankfully, detailed data on National Guard Bands in chapter ten is relegated to an easily-skipped table (p. 164–7).

Similarly, while Gleason’s impressive command of military source material is on display, his engagement with recent historical and musicological work is less obvious and frequently underdeveloped. In explaining the volunteer companies of the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, for example, Gleason turns to Marcus Cunliffe’s thesis of a joining mentality, in which Americans – native born and immigrant alike – came together in clubs that allowed them to be ‘liberated from domestic and commercial preoccupations’, and reinforce communities, real or imagined.Footnote ¹ While moments like this reveal how thoroughly Gleason has mined the secondary literature, he does little to transfer such cultural theories to the bandsmen themselves; in this case writing only ‘several of these pre-National Guard units hosted bands’ (p. 90). In short, there are sections in the book where bands seem an afterthought to military history. When he does turn to the secondary literature on bands, Gleason is too beholden to the seminal but now dated work of Henry George Farmer and David Whitwell, and I was disappointed not to see more engagement with the recent work of James Davis or even Lavern Wagner, whose edition of band music from the Benjamin H. Grierson Collection could have proved useful in Gleason’s discussion of the 10th Cavalry Band (p. 65).Footnote ² Indeed, throughout this text, the author seems more engaged with military than music history (with the exception of some excellent forays into organology).

The book’s central flaw, however, is the lack of a principal argument: only in the final chapter is there an attempt to articulate the sorts of questions that might make this study truly important. Unfortunately, Gleason’s questions, which he calls ‘unanswerable’, are not particularly interesting. He asks: would mounted bands have survived if World War Two had played out differently, and did the fact that the United States had a relatively brief affair with mounted ensembles make them easier to give up (pp. 188, 190)? In the end, Gleason’s questions are about the demise of the tradition he is exploring, rather than the life of it. Questions related to the latter are, of course, plentiful, but Gleason leaves them unanswered, and in most cases unasked: what, exactly, differentiated mounted bands from their infantry cousins (other than horses)? Was their repertoire different, did they share instrumentation, did they serve similar functions, did men join them for the same reasons, did officers and audiences value them in the same ways? Questions such as these are hinted at in the text, but the reader would have been better served by a clearer articulation of the book’s goals beyond mere documentation.

This criticism, however, should not be overvalued. Yes, a clearer argument running the length of the book would have been welcome. Indeed this reader, after finishing the first two chapters, wondered whether the book was worth continuing, or whether it would descend into trivia. While the trivial does play a role here, once Gleason reaches his stride in the 1820s the book is illuminating despite its faults. I remain unconvinced that mounted bands were a tradition distinctive enough to warrant a book (they may have been, but Gleason does little to prove it), but I am thoroughly glad that I accompanied him on the journey. Despite its shortcomings, Sound the Trumpet, Beat the Drums will serve as an excellent introduction to the world of military music for a generation of scholars.