Joshua Gailey is a PhD candidate in musicology at Yale University and his dissertation focuses on the factors that influenced the development of the school band movement during the Progressive Era. The fact that this episode falls on the birthday of John Philip Sousa is a happy coincidence!

Topics:

• The institutionalization and standardization of the concert band in the early years of the 20th Century as part of the larger social reform movements of the era.
• The “Golden Age” of the wind band during the 19th Century and how it performed European music, particularly the high art that hadn’t come to America yet.
• The founding of NAfME and the early goals of music education during the Progressive Era.
• Early marching bands and the role of marching in the early development of school bands and the development of standardization through early band competitions sponsored by the MSNC.
• The role of instrument manufactures in the development of the school band and the reality behind the myth of Harold Hill.
• The historical background of gender bias band music.

Links:

• Joshua Gailey
• Ingolf Dahl: Music for Brass Instruments
• Alfred Reed: Armenian Dances Suite
• David Maslanka: A Child’s Garden of Dreams
• Making the March King by Patrick Warfield
• Women’s Bands in America: Performing Music and Gender edited by Jill Sullivan
• The Society for American Music

Biography:

Joshua Gailey is a PhD candidate in Music History at Yale University, where he is writing a dissertation that examines how the public school wind band was used as a tool for enacting progressive-era social reforms in the United States and charts the emergence of the American school band industry in the first decades of the twentieth century. Joshua hails from Port Angeles, WA, and he graduated from the University of Washington with bachelor’s degrees in Music History, Trumpet Performance, and Italian Studies. While at the UW, Joshua performed with the UW Wind Ensemble, the UW Symphony Orchestra, and the Seattle Chamber Brass Quintet, as well as with numerous other local orchestras. His teachers at the UW included David Gordon, Justin Emerich, and Allen Vizzutti.