General Taylor Storming Monterey

About this recording

By Simon Knaeble; recording by the Music Division of the Library of Congress.

Provider

Library of Congress

Date created

September 27, 1974

Duration

3:18

File

MP3

License

This work is believed to be in the public domain. Users are advised to make their own copyright assessment and to understand their rights to fair use.

Source

Original audio housed by Library of Congress

Related media

• 
• 
• 

Learn more

• Search LEARN NC for bands, Mexican War, music, and Zachary Taylor.

In the classroom

From the Library of Congress:

On September 27, 1974, the Music Division of the Library of Congress recreated a typical concert of brass-band and vocal music from mid-nineteenth-century America. Recorded selections from that concert are presented here. These recordings are the result of several years of research by Jon Newsom of the Music Division and many more years of experience and study by Frederick Fennell, founder and former director of the Eastman Wind Ensemble and professor of music at the University of Miami, and Robert E. Sheldon, then of the Smithsonian Institution’s Division of Musical Instruments and presently Curator of Musical Instruments in the Music Division, Library of Congress. Because the purpose of these recordings is to demonstrate the style and quality of the popular music of the era, the musicians use instruments appropriate to the period.…

From the manuscript band books of the Manchester Cornet Band (founded in 1854), first set, no. 17.

This is a curious composition. While we do not know its date, it was probably written not later than 1848, the year Zachary Taylor was elected President on the strength of his brilliant military success in the Mexican War, and despite the efforts of his commander, fellow Whig, and political rival, General Winfield Scott. Many popular compositions celebrating Taylor’s victories appeared during his political campaign, though this particular work is not known to us in a published form. But it is almost certain that such a piece would not have been composed after Taylor became President, and especially not after his death in 1850.

The saxhorn instrumentation was not really established by 1848, and an original instrumentation of the contrasting brasswinds, from the soft, mellow ophicleides and keyed bugles to the more “brassy” trumpets and trombones, is a distinct possibility. As it is, one part-book which calls for a “horn in F” probably was intended for a trumpet in F; it certainly appears to be a soprano part and not a characteristic horn part for the period.

A piccolo part was not added to an already problematic arrangement from which an E-flat soprano part seems to be lacking. Here, the part marked “1st E-flat,” possibly intended for the E-flat tenorhorn in its octave-doubling role, supplied the melodic soprano part. But there is no bass drum part, and since it was felt that Monterey could not be stormed without it, Dr. Fennell wrote one.