Triumphant Celebration and Sombre Commemoration

13th Century manuscript depicting Charlemagne’s (left) triumph over Baligant, Emir of Babylon (right).

Since time immemorial man has marched into combat to the sound of drums, flutes and trumpets spurring him on. The advent of mechanised industrial warfare has in no way removed the connection between music and war.

Where music traditionally served the practical function of improving morale and issuing instruction on the pitched battlefields of centuries past, music in more recent times has served to shape our view of war, both on the contemporary Homefront and generations after.

Oral tradition predates and supersedes the written. Music belongs to this oral tradition and speaks to the heart in a way that the written word never can.

Man has always had this urge lingering in his heart. Such cross pollination between noble works of literature and oral folk tradition can be seen as early as the 11th Century in the example of the epic French saga entitled the “Song of Roland”.

Culture, in the noble school of Roger Scruton, is an inherited instruction on how to think and how to feel. The 19th century boom in composing and codification of “Military Marches” has left a mark that is still visible in Western armed forces to this day. In this article we will take a look at British, American, Austrian and German (as well as fictional) tunes that straddle the line between triumphant celebration and sombre commemoration.

The first work on our list is Katherine Jenkins’ performance of the classic “I vow to thee my country”. A sombre and versatile hymn, often sung at remembrance day events, this rendition being performed for the commissioning of Britain’s new state-of-the-art aircraft carrier the HMS Queen Elizabeth in 2017.

Based on the 1908 poem “Urbs Dei” (The City of God) written by UK ambassador to the USA, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, the musical score was composed by Gustav Holst who intended to give the poem an equally majestic and noble backing.

While neither jingoistic nor nihilistic, the words invoke nostalgia for a long lost Kingdom which only lives on in the hearts of those that remember her. It calls upon those that love her to lay upon the altar the final sacrifice of their very lives, so that, in time, once more she may enjoy gentle peace.

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

Another, rather different, tune that many may be unknowingly familiar with, is that of the 17th century “March of the British Grenadiers”. Today such imperial pomp and splendour can only be heard on the parade ground, with infantrymen smartly dressed in their iconic 19th century red tunics and bearskin caps.

Here one can see a brilliant example of a ceremony called the “Trooping of the Colour” (regimental flag) on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday celebrations in 2019.

Televised live to millions around the world, the Grenadiers advance at a quick march in close formation, all the time playing their instruments on the move.

Another tune, known around the world, even if not by name, is the catchy “Colonel Bogey March”. The tune, performed here by the Prince of Wales division of the UK Army, was immortalised in the whistling of the iconic film “The Bridge over the River Kwai”.

Getting its name from the sport of golf, the military march was composed by Lieutenant F. J. Ricketts in 1914 under the pseudonym Kenneth J. Alford. The inspiration for the tune came from a golf whistle that Ricketts heard while playing on the course. The addictive tune stuck in his head and the Military March was born.

Far from the fairways of England, in the heart of Europe, Imperial Vienna just 21 years earlier, Wilhelm August Jurek composed the Deutschmeister-Regimentsmarsch.

The military marching beat, like the “Colonel Bogey March”, is indeed demonstrative of the general pan-societal militarisation of Central Europe in the years directly preceding the disastrous First World War. Furthermore, like it’s British equivalent, it does not carry the same bellicose tone of similar contemporary Prussian tunes.

The spirit of Prussia (a kingdom historically located in Northern and Eastern Germany), in many ways is the manifest juxtaposition of Austria in the Germanic world. Prussia, as the ache-type of militarism, still lives on in a muted way in today’s Federal Republic of Germany.

The Prussian heritage of the German Armed forces, a fact ironically only reinforced by the recent 1990 reunification with Communist East Germany can still be heard today in the form of Yorck's March and Prussian Glory echoing in the German Chancellery and Presidential Bellevue Palace.

This Prussian heritage, while strikingly incompatible with Bavaria cultural consciousness, provides the modern republic with a continuity to a pre-National Socialistic past. A form of reclaiming the past, albeit a grey one, and healing the trauma of recent decades.

In stark contrast, the United States of America has no such obvious historical woes to overcome. Indeed, the best known US military march is that of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, also known by the lyrics of its chorus, “Glory, Glory Alleluia”.

Still sung to this day, the battle hymn provided a state approved narrative account of the Union’s cause in the American Civil War as a campaign to realise Christ’s justice on Earth.

The work, written in the opening months of the war, is a hybrid of a church and patriotic hymn, espousing the view that only by force of arms can the eternal march of truth manifest itself.

More recently, the US has adopted a more instrumental approach. It can be speculated that, intentionally or otherwise, this abandonment of lyrics and triumphant course can be seen as a move to adopt a more secular, less politically charged tone, designed to appeal to an America much more culturally diverse in composition.

The instrumental course of the recently produced work “"Army Strong”, while no doubt beautiful, is nonetheless universalist in nature. In this effort to appeal to the lowest common denominator in the name of inclusivity, the musical tradition of the US Army loses its ability to establish and foster a profound connection to the people it seeks to represent.

Just as music can celebrate, it too has the power to commemorate and even mourn. In this genre, no work can hope to surpass that of the Benedictus of Karl Jenkins’ 1999 Mass entitled “The Armed Man”.

Jenkins, Welsh by birth and composer of earlier works such as the incomprehensible yet rhythmic “Adiemus”, dedicated his work to the victims of recent Balkans wars, hoping for a new millennium of peace on the continent.

Recent decades have presented a further challenge to the potential of music to connect with the individual. Namely that of the transition from live performance to remote digital consumption. Music was not intended to be consumed in isolation, each atomised individual seeking to appreciate the beauty of music while segregated from the community at large. Where an orchestra unites, headphones divide.

Only as of recent has this challenge led to a reactionary rediscovery of live music. Rightly considered the best literary work of the 20th Century, JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”, has captivated the hearts and minds of young people around the world, first in print, then in cinema and now once more in a spectacular hybrid model of simultaneous live orchestral performance and film screening.

The Battle of the Pelennor Fields, composed by Howard Shore produced for the cinematic adaptation of “The Return of the King”, provides the backdrop to the unforgettable Ride of the Rohirrim in the relief of the siege of Minas Tirith.

This downhill cavalry charge, in a manner not unlike the charge of the Winged Hussars at the battle of Vienna in 1683, resonates deeply with the heart of western man. It constitutes what, using the terminology of Donald Rumsfeld, we can call a unknown known. Tolkien, while a master of subtlety and adroitness, disdains the relativism of ambiguity. He leaves us with no doubt whatsoever that the selfless sacrifice of Théoden and many of his men is noble and glorious, a triumphant manifestation of loyal fraternity and righteous heroism.

Here, the epic speech of Théoden, King of Rohan and Lord of the Riddermark, fulfils the role of lyrics, adding meaning to the already dramatic instrumental chorus.

Peter Jackson, the director of the film adaptation has Théoden declare to his lieutenants; “Forth and fear no darkness”. Then as Tolkien writes, Théoden cries out to his men; “Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake, fire and slaughter! spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!.”

Mass slaughter of the assembled besieging enemy masses ensues and the viewer is left with chills down his or her spine, with a heart rate exceeding that which only the most intense athletic exercise can produce.

Not all musical works instil such passionate reactions in one’s heart. The 1848 Radetzky March, while aiming to be equally triumphant, is much more upbeat and lighthearted in tone.

Like Howard Shore’s “Pelennor Fields”, Johann Strauss Sr.’s Radetzky March is a work which does not exist in a vacuum, but needs to be contextualised to be properly understood. It owes its unashamedly triumphant tone to a series of stunning Austrian military victories over the ascendent forces of liberalism and nationalism in 1848.

While the Radetzky March can be heard every New Year’s without controversy, it’s equivalent across the English Channel has no such luxury.

In the anglo-sphere, the patriotic ballad “Rule Britannia”, dedicated to the fending off of the French challenge to UK maritime hegemony has polarised public opinion in Albion.

The nations, not so blest as thee,

Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;

While thou shalt flourish great and free,

The dread and envy of them all.

"Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:

"Britons never will be slaves."

To the Radetzky March, deeply intertwined with the former Habsburg monarchy, there is no protest to its rendition across Central Europe today. Even in the lands of the former belligerents that participated in the Empire’s destruction, the clap filled tune can the joyful heard to this day.

In a way this points to how the Radetzky March has lost a sense of its meaning and become sanitised, devolving into a happy-clappy party tune, thus demonstrating the weakness of instrumental course without lyrics.

Rule Britannia, albeit at the expense of bitter controversy (most notably surrounding the annual flagship event of UK society, “The Last Night of the Proms”), has retained its meaning as a statement of British exceptionalism. However one views this statement of cultural and military superiority of the North-Western European Isle, the patriotic anthem serves as a key marker of political affiliation and provokes an intense discourse on the nature of, and appropriate expression of, UK and particularly English identity.

Music has always been an important marker of identity, delineating the in- and out-group. Recent decades, whether provoked by globalisation or Europe’s relative decline in geopolitics, a new supranational European political identity has sought to be cultivated by the power of music.

One speaks of course about the adoption of Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy", from the concluding movement of his 1824 9th-Symphony.

The instrumental, parred with 1785 lyrics from Friedrich Schiller, is a call to fraternal unity and peace amongst nations. The tone of the work, aimed at a European population ravaged by an age of Napoleonic Idealism, is a hybrid of lyrics, indicative of late 18th century universalist enlightenment, and an instrumental that can be seen as positively proto-romantic.

Speaking of the ravages of war. The following orchestral work, entitled “Another Rain” composed by Martin O'Donnell, provides the backdrop to the sci-fi universe “Halo”, based on a (hopefully) fictional 26th-Century near apocalyptic war in which humanity fights for its very survival against an alliance of alien species bent on our destruction.

The war, while unquestionably fought in self-defence, nonetheless does not carry with it declarations of triumphant celebratory victory, but rather survival, a near-escape from near and total annihilation as a species.

Seeking to give a new meaning to the term “total war”, this piece written to accompany the eerie post-battle destruction inflicted upon humanity’s home-world, Earth, haunts the imagination and brings home the core universal truth of war, just or otherwise, that of struggle and loss.

Man, by his nature, seeks to celebrate his triumphs and commemorate that which is lost. The line between the two is never clear, but straddling this line is music, a language that speaks to his heart and satisfies what words alone seldom can. As romantic poet Heinrich Heine once declared; “Where words leave off, music begins”, a quote only outmatched by his French counterpart Victor Hugo who likewise said; “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”

Niall Buckley,

November 2021.