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thedrifter
06-24-03, 07:35 PM
Foley Fine-Tunes 'President's Own'
Posted June 19, 2003

By Stephen Goode

Col. Timothy W. Foley became the 26th director of the United States Marine Band on July 11, 1996, the organization's 198th birthday. The Marine Band debuted at the then-under-construction White House on New Year's Day 1801, when John Adams was president. In March of that year it played for Thomas Jefferson's presidential inaugural, and a tradition was set: the U.S. Marine Band has performed at every presidential inaugural since that time.

Jefferson, who played the violin, dubbed the band "The President's Own," and it is a moniker that has stuck. Americans are familiar with its performances at the White House and on the 50-day tours that members of the band take every fall, a practice begun a century ago under John Philip Sousa, the group's legendary 17th director and the composer of such great marches as "The Stars and Stripes Forever."

Foley began study of the clarinet back in his hometown of Berwick, Pa. "I wanted to play a musical instrument and my folks decided to give me a clarinet because the clarinet was the least expensive. They figured that if I quit after a couple of weeks, why then they wouldn't have invested too much in it," he tells Insight.

But the instrument took. Foley worked with a Philadelphia orchestra clarinetist while still in public school and then studied at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. He's been with the Marine Band since 1968, when he began as an assistant solo clarinetist. He eventually became assistant director and now is director. Insight spoke with Foley at his office in the Marine Barracks on Capitol Hill, the Marine Band's home and the place where it provides popular concerts on Friday evenings every summer. It's Website is www.marineband.usmc.mil.

Insight: The Marine Band has a great tradition behind it. In July it will be celebrating its 205th birthday. How much does that tradition play in your thinking about what the band should be doing, what music it should play?

Col. Timothy W. Foley: It's a huge part in your thinking. You do think of yourself as a part of a historical and musical continuum. The Marine Band is, after all, the oldest musical organization in the country on a continuously active basis.

It's our mission to provide music for the president and the commandant of the Marine Corps. The only president we didn't play for was George Washington. You're aware of looking backward and forward. You're thinking about where the band came from, and you think about keeping the flame alive and looking forward to where you want the band to go.

We're all about tradition, but we don't want to do the same thing over and over. We've got to be out in front in terms of the music we perform, the people with whom we perform, the people we commission to write music for us. Our overall musical standard must be that of the leading musical organization of our kind.

Q: You're a band that plays all kinds of music, not just marches and patriotic tunes. But perhaps the public isn't aware just how versatile your musicians are.

A: When people talk about the Marine Band they sometimes refer to us as the "Marine Marching Band." The two words, "marching" and "band," seem to go together. But actually we're not a marching band. We do march - at the summertime Marine Barracks concerts on Friday, and when we do a funeral in Arlington [National Cemetery] we march from the chapel to the grave site. But other than that, next to nothing, so the band is really a sit-down concert organization, which we have been since we came to Washington and played concerts on the banks of the Potomac River in 1801 when we were getting established here in the nation's capital.

We've got about 110 musicians. There's one singer and 25 string players, brass, wind, percussion. We have a chamber orchestra, a dance band, a country band.

What makes the Marine Band unique is the same thing that makes the Marine Corps unique. The Corps doesn't have the SEALs and the speciality elite groups that the other services have. You have one organization - the Marine Corps - that does it all. And it's the same way with the Marine Band.

The Marine Band is an umbrella organization. So we have a country group, but they're not here just to play country music. Our country fiddle player, for instance, is actually our principal second violinist. And our female singer and guitar player happens to be a very fine French-horn player, which is her primary duty. It's the same way with our dance band.

We don't have a ceremonial band. Other bands will have a specific group of people who are devoted primarily to performing ceremonies, whether it is funerals at Arlington Cemetery or the tattoo or patriotic openers for conventions. But if you see the Marine Band playing a funeral at Arlington Cemetery, they are the same musicians who that morning were playing at the White House for the president and who that night may be playing a concert over at the Capitol. In the Marine Band, everybody does everything, and the band is likely to participate in more than 500 public and official performances every year - opera, ballet companies, whatever, we do it.

Q: The Marine Band keeps up on contemporary music and even commissions new works that it will premiere, which makes it an ever more unusual organization.

A: Walt Whitman was a regular attender of our concerts when he was working as a government clerk here in Washington from about 1866 to 1872. He regularly attended Marine Band concerts and wrote reviews of those concerts. He talked about hearing the Marine Band play the music of [Carl Maria von] Weber - his Der Freischütz, for example. And he wrote about hearing [Johann] Strauss waltzes, and overtures by other composers. These were among the popular and contemporary works of the 19th century, so contemporary music was in the band's repertoire then as it is today.

The other thing we do from time to time is commission very fine musicians to write music for us. Most recently we commissioned a piece by composer David Rakowski, Ten of a Kind. We premiered it a couple of years ago. Last year, it was the runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize. I think it should have won.

Q: How did you happen to choose Rakowski?

A: This is what usually happens. We had performed a piece of his music, a very fine piece. He never had written any band music, but we contacted him and asked if he might be able to find time to write a piece for the band, which he did.

By the same token, I just recently spoke to a composer up in Philadelphia, Melinda Wagner. We had played a wonderful concerto that she wrote for flute and string orchestra. That piece won a Pulitzer Prize, and she's in big demand. But she is a friend of David Rakowski and I very much wanted her to write something for us, so I enlisted David's help to tell her "the Marine Band's a great organization, you should do a piece for them." She's busy, but she will be doing something for us.

Sometimes we've had a composer who volunteered. A young fellow, a wonderful composer who is composer in residence at Towson [University in Maryland], came in and said, "I love the Marine Band and I want to write something for you, gratis. Take it and play it for me." He wrote this wonderful percussion concerto which we have yet to premiere because it's difficult and we need a lot of rehearsals to do it justice.

It's not that we do a lot of commissioning. I wish we could, but obviously we have to do it within the limitations of our budget. I want something new that's not an imitation of what someone else has written.

Q: Is the legendary John Philip Sousa the man every subsequent director of the Marine Band regards as the template of what the band can achieve?

A: You can't deny the fact that he was the most significant and important director that the band ever had. But looking back before Sousa, who was director from 1880 to 1892, there were other notable musicians who led the band.

The director of the Marine Band during the Civil War, for instance, was Francis Scala [director from 1855 to 1871]. He had trained in Italy, started out with the band as a clarinet player, ascended to drum major and eventually was made director. He and the band performed Saturday-afternoon concerts on the White House grounds, and he did an awful lot to develop the band's musical skills and sophistication.

Very early on there was a director of the band named Charles Ashworth [director from 1804 to 1816]. He was the second director, and the first person in this country to write out a method book for drumming, the first person to codify basic sticking techniques. So the band has played an important part in American musical history from the beginning.

Q: As director, you've developed the band's "Music in the Schools" program.

A: We were looking for something we could do here in Washington, so we started this basically chamber-music program using a woodwind quintet, a brass quintet and a string quartet. They go to local elementary schools and give about a 45-minute concert for children in which they talk about the Marine Band and perform patriotic music, some marches and some classical music.

The musicians write the programs, and they've done one about John Philip Sousa, another about [Joseph] Haydn, one about the history of the Marine Band. They go into the schools in their uniforms and interact with the students. It plants in them all the seeds of awareness that this Marine Band is a great institution.

Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight.
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Sempers,

Roger
:marine: