Word: drum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...drum is silent. Nothing seems very worth while any more. Remember when it used to compete with the Lowell House bells for sound and impracticality? Those were the days. Now its frame is rotting, the cowhide rips, and down at Soldiers Field, spectators no longer think thunder showers are coming...
...dance orchestra to play the missing parts. The stringed additions brought the membership to 45 men. But even by 1929, when there were 60 regular players, improvisation was sometimes necessary. The late Malcolm (Mal) H. Holmes '28, beloved conductor of the band, was pressed into service on a bass drum, although his musical experience had been previously limited to the violin. Leroy Anderson '29, then conductor of the group, and now a widely known composer and arranger, asked Mal to fill in on the drum. "But I don't know anything about the drums," the violinist protested...
Holmes, who died in 1953, left a far more resounding impression on the band, however, than a few clouts on a drum. After his death, the Boston Globe wrote: "Holmes was the man who brought the Harvard Band from nothing to where it now is. He was the envy of more than one football coach at Harvard. They always wondered how he produced the technical skill, and, more important, the clean which distinguished the Harvard toot ensemble. . . It takes something extraordinary. . . It takes something extraordinary to inspire college undergraduates these days. It takes something special to get off a death...
While no one complained of such a clamor, there is no doubt that the band, now under G. Wright Briggs '31, has come up with unusual sound provoked b y unusual musicians out of unusual instruments. The best-known of course, is the mammoth bass drum obtained in 1927. That year the band played for the Associated Harvard Club meeting in Philadelphia, and in appreciation, the group told' the band to go out and buy itself a bass drum. It did go out and buy a bass drum. The biggest one in the world, in fact, specially made...
Even larger than the six-foot six inch drum (eight feet high on its special carriage) is the band's gigantic sousaphone, one of the largest in existence. No one is sure just when it was purchased, but it seems clear that some enterprising bandsman picked it up for a mere $100 when it was unintentionally put on an inventory sale. Its mate, made by an English locomotive factory for John Phillip Sousa, is now in a New York music store, definitely not for sale at any price...