Word: fife
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Small lives are not the stuff of spectacle. They are not performed on a vast screen to the fife and drum of a Colonel Bogey March. Unfortunately, Director David Lean seems to have become so obsessed with historical immensity (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) that he has lost the capacity to focus on the troubled existence of ordinary people. The loss is plain in his wide-screen nightmare, Ryan's Daughter...
...Minute Portrait. Porter was born in 1792, while Washington was still in office. He grew up in Maine, went to school for six months when he was twelve, and then turned his back on his family's prosperous farm. In 1807 he set out for Portland carrying a fife and a fiddle. Within eight years he was making money as a traveling musician, a teacher, a sign and house painter, a soldier, a builder. With typical Yankee ingenuity, Porter tried each occupation from as many angles as possible. Once he mastered a skill, he proceeded immediately to teach...
Though its origin was British, "ancient" fife-and-drum music has been best preserved in America, and especially in Connecticut, where it is a folk tradition passed down from generation to generation. The earliest American corps on record was founded in Annapolis in 1717. During the Revolutionary War, General George Washington issued an order stating: "Hours are to be assigned for all the drums and fifes of each regiment, and they are to attend them and practice; nothing is more agreeable, and ornamental, than good music." Because soldiers might have confused rehearsals with actual calls to arms, the Continental Army...
...festivities began a day ahead of time as early arrivals gathered in the Deep River Inn, a bar on Main Street, to shout greetings, swap tales and compare instruments above the din of indoor fifing. Drummers, however, are usually kind enough not to play their instruments indoors; instead they rattle their sticks on the Formica tabletops. Unlike contemporary bands, fifers and drummers shun all modern innovations. Calfskin heads are used on drums instead of plastic ones, and a system of rope and leather ears is utilized to keep the heads taut, rather than metal rods. The fife must...
Muster Day was a montage of sound and color as the 63 participating corps, resplendent in their scarlets, blues, grays and whites, drummed and fifed their way through the streets of Deep River to a ball field on the outskirts of town. There, each group performed a medley of its favorite tunes in a five-hour fife-and-drum fest that left many of the uninitiated benumbed. The tunes ranged from Yankee Doodle and other Revolutionary War melodies like Road to Boston and The World Turned Upside Down, to such Civil War favorites as Marching Through Georgia and The Battle...