The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music  

Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment
The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation
Edited by Frank Gunderson, Robert C. Lancefield, and Bret Woods

Print Publication Date: Oct 2019 Subject: Music, Ethnomusicology

Online Publication Date: Jun 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190659806.013.26

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter explores how the repatriation of Civil War brass band music participates in
contemporary disputes about the deeply contested meaning and ownership of a particu­
larly turbulent moment in American history. Specifically, it questions how the framing of
Civil War brass music as a retrievable sonic agent of authenticity facilitates a simplifica­
tion of the past that negates issues of power and racism that were the root of this war.
Such a simplified interpretation of history, heritage, and citizenship ultimately privileges
Anglo American men. If repatriation enables communities to control representations of
past and present identities, then the literal and metaphorical “return” of Civil War brass
music to its “rightful” white male owners becomes a discursive strategy used to both pri­
vatize and police national memory.

Keywords: Civil War, brass, memory, masculinity, whiteness, heritage, citizenship, control, discourse, United
States

Introduction
IN the last few decades, a small segment of white American men across the United States
with considerable amounts of leisure time and disposable income have dedicated many
resources to researching, purchasing, refurbishing, and performing US Civil War brass
music. In doing so, they contribute to the commodification and circulation of a partisan
national origin story that celebrates the exceptionalism of a particular American sub­
group with whom they identify.

I argue that this performance of Civil War music can be fruitfully conceptualized as an act
of repatriation. Although the notion of repatriation has traditionally been limited to re­
turning dispossessed objects to disenfranchised communities, what happens when domi­
nant social groups appropriate that model and use it to engage in cultural reclamation
and musical revival?

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

It is important to distinguish between repatriation and revival, as I employ these terms.

Revival is a mimetic process that stimulates heritage by representing cultural practices
that proponents associate with the past and believe to be endangered.1

My exploration of these issues is informed by ethnographic data collected from 2010 to

2014 from brass band collectors, performers, and audiences at the Cornets and Cannons
Civil War Sesquicentennial Music Festival, Gettysburg Remembrance Day Commemora­
tions, Berkley Plantation commemoration of Taps, both Shiloh 150th anniversary battle
reenactments, an annual Cornet Conspiracy gathering, and nearly a dozen other con­
certs, reenactments, and observances, all related to Civil War memory. Most informants
with whom I had close interactions self-identified as upper middle class, highly educated,
white, male American citizens over the age of forty, most of (p. 454) whom were either
raised or resided on the East Coast and who had an ancestor who fought in the Civil War.2
These informants generously shared their time and knowledge with me, and I am grateful
for their willingness to contribute their perspectives and many intimate details about
their hobby and personal lives. Like other elements of the Civil War reenactment move­
ment, these brass band revivalists are deeply invested in the preservation of Civil War–
era history and music. They experience personal pleasure from their hobby and believe it
to be their responsibility to preserve the memory of the war. Although most of my infor­
mants had never met each other, they sincerely believed in the existence of a close-knit
community founded on a shared interest in Civil War brass music. While I respect these
hobbyists for their musical skills and uncompromising commitment to their cause, it
quickly became apparent that more was at stake in their revival than merely the preser­
vation of musical artifacts.

I focus my analysis particularly on one subgroup of Civil War brass revivalists who collec­
tively own approximately 2,000 Civil War–era instruments, many traceable to period in­
strument makers, regimental bands, and historical individuals. They call themselves the
“Cornet Conspiracy,” a name that refers to the competition for instruments that ultimate­
ly kindled their friendship.3 These men found each other while competing for antique
brass instruments on eBay. One member of the “Cornet Conspiracy” describes on his blog
how he became an eBay relic hunter: “I wanted badly to collect vintage brass . . . but
these were the days before the Internet and eBay, and you had to visit a lot of antique
stores in Florida before you’d find an old horn of any type. It was largely a matter of
luck. . . . My first authentic vintage pocket cornets [were] a J. W. Pepper Gautrot, and a
rare Boosey E-flat. This was in the course of collecting all types of vintage cornets which
became an obsession just short of addiction, starting in 1998 when eBay hit.”4 Collectors
shared with me similar origin stories that highlighted their shift to eBay bidding. “What
started this [collecting]? Mark Elrod’s Pictorial History. First book that turned me on to
the keyed bugle. I purchased an instrument on eBay and then learned how to play it. . . .
This keyed bugle [pointing to his horn] I bought on eBay and had restored by R—. Now I
perform with [three] bands.”5

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

A common obsession for Civil War brass music drove these men and other collectors to
spend enough time on eBay that their bidding wars became a form of socialization and
competitive community-making. As the men began to recognize the usernames of other
relic-hunters, they sent threatening eBay messages to each other while bidding on auc­
tion lots. Said one collector, “We met through eBay. Seriously, we were sending each oth­
er hate-grams.”6 Competition for instruments only intensified their sense of individual
and community purpose. While tracking other collectors’ bidding histories, they gathered
data about each other and discovered themselves to be middle-aged white American men
who resided in New York, Ohio, Alaska, Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, and Florida, who share
a considerable amount of expendable income, leisure time, and investment in Civil War
memory. They traveled in 2001 to Gainesville, Florida, for their first annual meeting to
compare their collections, and it was during this gathering that they “conspired” to coop­
eratively hunt for particular types of objects as a strategy to enlarge their individual and
group instrument collections. The fetishes and skills of each (p. 455) man contributed a
different expertise to the club.7 Said one member, “We were fighting over instruments on
eBay until we decided it was OK to let each other have instruments if we were able to
play them together.”8 This gentlemen’s agreement founded an exclusive community that
is recognized within the larger brass revival community as including some of the most ac­
complished collectors and performers of Civil War music.9

Brass revivals are not merely about reclaiming objects but also a reaction to a shared
sense of lost or missing cultural heritage. As instrument collection and performance real­
izes the sonic possibilities of these artifacts, intangible expressions of the impulse to
repatriate also occur. The correspondence and friendship of the Cornet Conspiracy on
eBay eventually led to their collaboration to return American Civil War music to locations
(both metaphorical and literal) where they believe that this heritage should reside. Some
of their philanthropic efforts include the donation of material musical culture to heritage
organizations, museums, and archives, as well as the establishment and managing of per­
forming ensembles. These activities were often conducted with the intent of encouraging
descendants of Civil War soldiers to engage with what they believe to be a significant and
unique heritage.10

The primary strategy by which brass revivalists recreate an audible heritage is to imper­
sonate mid-nineteenth-century military bandsmen in sound and appearance. This is a
form of escapism, creating an artificial experience of time and an opportunity to socialize
with like-minded people. In a way similar to what Thomas Turino has described in other
revivals, “the community isn’t imagined but actual; nonetheless, it is sporadic, temporary,
and geographically diffuse” (Turino 2008, 161). Although most visible on the East Coast,
brass bands and battle reenactments occur concurrently across the United States and
abroad. During the 2011–2015 US Civil War sesquicentennial observances, hardly a day
passed without a Civil War commemorative event somewhere in the United States, and
these heritage events often included brass band performances that announced gendered
and racialized reconstructions of an American past.

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

Conspiracy: The Sounds

Around nine o’clock in the morning on April 20, 2012, eleven casually clad men carried
armfuls of instrument cases onto the stage of a Southern concert hall and curiously
peeked over their shoulders to size up their competition while piling their arsenal in self-
claimed corners. The unsheathing of their instruments revealed E-flat and B-flat cornets,
alto and tenor horns, and baritone horns of various shapes, sizes, and lacquer hues.11
With so many more instruments than there were men on the stage, they transformed the
concert hall into a veritable museum of nineteenth-century musical instruments. There
was a ritualistic pattern to the way the men removed each artifact from its case, exam­
ined its body for imperfections, rolled their fingers over the valves, and then propped the
instrument on its side for display. When they seemed satisfied with their exhibits, they
turned to each other with handshakes, hugs, and group (p. 456) photographs. They spent
nearly an hour asking after each other’s families, comparing their instruments, inquiring
after the minute details of the design and history of their horns, expressing mock jealousy
or contempt for each other’s prized possessions, and swapping war stories about the ac­
quisition of their items and of being “sniped” by other collectors who outbid them for
prized artifacts.12 It was at once a fraternal reunion and a confrontation between skilled
competitors, a blend of comradeship and rivalry. This was the annual meeting of the Cor­
net Conspiracy.

By ten o’clock, they transitioned to a formal band rehearsal, and after warming up with a
couple of major scales, they arranged their chairs in a semicircle at the edge of the stage,
tuned to a cornettist, and rehearsed the William Tell Overture.13 One performer interrupt­
ed the rehearsal to deliver a critique, “That’s a piece-of-trash horn,” which garnered the
response, “I don’t feel comfortable on it,” to which another man replied, “Why don’t you
go get another one?”14 The musician in question exited with his devalued horn and re­
turned with a different instrument of the same type. As the rehearsal continued, the musi­
cians frequently paused for critiques, repairs, and inventory exchanges when players en­
countered intonation problems or uneven tone across an instrument’s range, or if the tim­
bre of one horn was too piercing. Seeming to aim for a homogeneous, mellow, and almost
muted sound quality, the band spent the first half hour of their rehearsal adjusting the
balance and timbre of the ensemble, and appeared most satisfied when they produced an
organ-like sound.

They devoted the remainder of their practice time to selecting and rehearsing the reper­
toire that they would perform later that afternoon in a public open-air concert, reminis­
cent of Victorian-era gazebo concerts, in front of the concert hall. The musicians agreed
that their repertoire should have a Southern theme since they were performing for a
Southern audience, but their opinions diverged as to what criteria constituted Southern
music. When the lead cornettist suggested that they play an arrangement of “Marching
through Georgia” because it had a Southern state in the title, another member declared it
to be inappropriate because it was a Union army favorite, but this was quickly rebutted:
“But they [the audience] won’t know it. They will see the title but won’t know the tune.”

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

The lead cornettist added, “When they hear it, they’ll love it, and it will be[come] South­
ern.”15

The series of decisions made by the Cornet Conspiracy during this rehearsal reveals an
acute awareness and attention to the active construction of heritage that is at the core of
Civil War brass revivals. With each instrument selection, critique of each other’s tech­
nique, and debate over repertoire, these collectors shaped a “Civil War” music heritage
that they, as cultural authorities, presented to a public audience as “authentic” represen­
tation of that tradition. The production of “heritage” by Civil War brass band revivals pro­
motes a culture of nostalgia and escapism that promises a beneficial and usable past
(Cullen 1995). I posit that it is not the things that they collect but the indexed meanings
that are associated with these musical artifacts that are the crux of this revival.16 These
musicians contribute to larger conversations about the meaning of Civil War music and,
more generally, of the war. Members of this ensemble believe that nineteenth-century
brass music represents a burgeoning national music ethos that was characterized by a
(p. 457) blend of European and American popular and art music traditions. Some claim

that their interpretation of this music tradition revitalizes the memory and sounds of the
common men who participated in this war.17 The series of instrument, timbre, and reper­
toire choices made by the Cornet Conspiracy suggests that Civil War memory can be sta­
bilized through music, which is why the sound quality by the Conspiracy band was of vital
importance.

While observing their 2012 annual rehearsal, I sat in the concert hall with a senior bands­
man who shared with me his insight about Civil War music.18 He told me that it is not the
composition, but the instrumentation that matters. Although he believed that repertoire
should correlate to the time period and function of the brass instrument during the war
era, it was not important if the audience recognized the melody. What was critical was
that individual timbres and ensemble blend be historically accurate, because these
sounds aid his imagination process and help him crystallize memories about American
history. What mattered was that the ensemble somehow “sounded” like a Civil War–era
ensemble, however this is supposed to sound. Many of the musicians with whom I spoke
are conscious and attentive to how their preservation and re-presentation of Civil War
music directly influences contemporary perceptions of American history. One collector ex­
plained, “Music is the best way to create the atmosphere in which a modern audience can
start relating to these people that breathed and loved, and had wives and girlfriends, and
somehow you start relating to that. Music is the most powerful way to take an audience
back to really thinking about these people, and you admire them.”19 To these collectors,
music confirms a truth about the past that is not obtainable through history books, and
this suggests that music can register unspeakable aspects of the past.

Reconstructing Civil War brass music is an active and physical experience. If, as Diana
Taylor proposes, heritage should be considered an embodied practice and the bodily
transfer of knowledge, then music becomes heritage through performative acts of collect­
ing, restoring, sharing, and listening (Taylor 2003; see also Rojek and Urry 1997; Smith,
2006). The practices of brass revivalists may be interpreted as transforming commodities

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

into living objects with which practitioners can interact, controlling them through touch,
movement, vibrations, and breath. Collectors have described their performances as
breathing life back into the metal and when accomplished as an ensemble, the blending
of instrumental timbres creates a sonic cohesion that enhances a sense of group homo­
geneity.20 The brass collectors described in this chapter value and try to replicate what
they call a “sweet” or “warm” sound that they imagine characterized the brass sound­
scape of mid-nineteenth-century America.21 Said one collector, “These instruments have
such a sweet, melancholy sound that carries well outdoors. The keyed bugle is so good at
producing a smooth, legato sound. The most comparable modern brass instrument would
have to be the flugelhorn. . . . I know that when I play different pitches from different
parts of the horn, it sounds really different in my head. The difference comes from the
cutting holes into the metal, so it feels different when the sound is coming out of here
[points to a hole in the horn near the mouthpiece] than when the sound is coming out of
here [points to the bell].”22 This aesthetic informs the criteria (p. 458) with which they
judge the authenticity of their music and that of others, and this is why the exhibition and
critique of instruments during the Cornet Conspiracy rehearsal was significant. The ob­
session with authenticity makes collecting an ongoing heritage test, and those who pass
the scrutiny of other aficionados can become influential cultural authorities.23

Revival: A Historicization
The “conspiracy band” examined here represents a larger impulse to return Civil War
sonic heritage to its “rightful owners.” Briefly historicizing this movement will help clarify
the political and discursive function of brass revival bands. Long and didactic relation­
ships between Civil War hobbyists and American educational, military, park, and media
systems have been instrumental in facilitating and legitimizing this revival. Financial re­
sources and access to archives and performance spaces by employees from these institu­
tions paved the way for other people to participate in Civil War music. One of the first
Americans to organize a Civil War reenactment band was Fred Benkovic, who began col­
lecting instruments while serving in World War II, as did Arne B. Larson, a band director
whose collection became one of the founding inventories for the National Music
Museum.24 Robert Eliason, a former curator of the Henry Ford Museum Musical Instru­
ment Collection and notable brass historian, collected and performed with the Yankee
Brass Band, and this type of public administrator–private collector identity continues to
be common among Civil War instrument collectors.25 The most celebrated Civil War brass
music collector is Mark Elrod, a former bugler and historian with the US Army’s Old
Guard Fife and Drum Corps and “The President’s Own” Marine Band, who teamed with
Robert Garofalo, Catholic University of America professor/conductor emeritus, to author
a two-volume pictorial history of Civil War–era instruments and formed the Heritage
Americana Band.26 As these examples suggest, leaders of the brass heritage revival have
often had professional ties to military, educational, and cultural memory (museums) insti­
tutions, and their heritage hobby seems to be a natural extension of their professions.27
Through enactments of cultural heritage, these notable participants began to create com­
munities of like-minded people who shared their passion for history and music.28
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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

Although it is unclear when the Civil War brass revival originated, it increased markedly
in vigor during the 1961–1965 centennial celebrations—a historical milestone that com­
pelled people to revisit and renegotiate the war’s contested legacies.29 At this time, inter­
pretations of the war began to be frequently revitalized through activities known as
“reenactments,” a selective, scripted performance, a mode of interpretive representation
that is similar in content and performance style to “living history.”30 Civil War reenacting,
as it developed in the 1960s and continues to the present, is a recreational activity most
commonly consisting of men in mid-nineteenth-century military dress with replica
firearms partaking in role-playing activities. In this context, the closer a reenactment
(p. 459) brings the actor to an affectively true experience, the more successful or authen­

tic the performance.

When the US Civil War Centennial Commission promoted reconciliationist commemora­

tions that celebrated military heroism at the expense of emancipationist histories to avoid
fueling regional and racial tensions during the civil rights movement, the Cuban Missile
Crisis, and the Cold War, the arts were elevated as a strategic means of celebrating the
war while deflecting analysis of its unresolved social problems. As David Blight main­
tains, where the memory of the Civil War was concerned, Americans “preferred its music
and pathos to its enduring challenges” (Blight 2001, 4; Cook 2007, 34–41). The social in­
security that coincided with the centennial may have signaled a promising future for mi­
norities, but it seemed to the dominant class to signify a world spinning out of control.
Rapid cultural change continued in the latter half of the 1960s and into the following
decade as the second wave of feminism, the counterculture movement, and antiwar
protests threatened patriarchal governance. This correlates with Michael Kammen’s as­
sessment that nostalgia becomes more prominent when a community is experiencing cul­
tural anxiety, transition, and a sense of discontinuity with its past, and that “all three of
those tendencies became apparent in the sixties and then were manifest during the sev­
enties” (1991, 618).31

Reenactments continued after the zenith of the centennial, and as government funding
for these activities waned, the privatization of events greatly influenced the development
of regional differences in how Civil War reenactments were organized, received, and per­
formed. A large number of participants became extremely devoted to the hobby for vari­
ous reasons relating to individual and group identity, nationalism, escapism, nostalgia,
and profit. For many working- and middle-class white suburban men, the Civil War of­
fered a retreat to a past era when demonstrations of patriarchal power were evident in
nearly all forms of public life and could even be heard in the music of brass bands. A
burst of collecting, performing, and recording this music during the 1960s laid the
groundwork for the movement to restore Civil War sonic heritage in the following
decades.32

A period of heightened heritage discourse developed during the 1970s and 1980s, while
racial, ethnic, and religious diasporic groups developed strategies to defend their distinc­
tive cultural identities in public. Demands for civil rights and refusals to assimilate into
the dominant culture by black, Native American, and Chicano nationalists deconstructed

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

the myth of a cohesive American identity and ushered in an era of multiculturalism (Kam­
men 1991, 620). In recognition of the era’s great innovations in social history, museums
adopted heritage enactment as a strategy to resist unproblematized representations of
linear social progress that focused almost exclusively on narratives constructed around
the accomplishments of powerful white men. American heritage and living history muse­
ums featuring costumed enactment to supplement or replace more traditional exhibits
and collections boomed during the 1970s and 1980s. These museum activities bore simi­
larities to reenactment hobbies in that both presumed it was possible to resurrect the
past through performance (Magelssen 2007, xxi). Museum curators and social historians
alike strove to balance status quo narratives with ones that (p. 460) replaced white men
with minorities, women, children, and people from lower socioeconomic classes, and
which would engage tourists with themes of social conflict and social cycles (Magelssen
2007, 21). This and other movements to reinsert the lived experiences of women and mi­
norities into the retelling of American history coincided with an increase in minority mu­
seums, archives, and heritage groups. Demands for community recognition, self-defini­
tion, and equal opportunities led to the repatriation of land, material objects, and public
displays of minority arts.33

These efforts were interpreted by many white Americans as threatening the existing so­
cial order, and legislative resistance and the development of reactive political strategies
were two responses the dominant culture used to counteract minority power movements.
There was a return to traditionalist expressions of patriotism in the rhetoric of conserva­
tive politicians, and minority nationalist efforts were confronted by lobbyists and legisla­
tors whose fears of white power erosion influenced new monolinguistic and anti-immi­
grant legislation (Kammen 1991, 638). As some white Americans appropriated the
rhetoric and display of “heritage” as a tool to reaffirm their racial and patriarchal domi­
nance, white heritage organizations exhibited newfound confidence about publicly cele­
brating their lineage (Kammen 1991, 644). By framing themselves as an endangered com­
munity under threat by women and minorities, many white men began to reclaim their
historically bestowed power by reconstructing American nationalist narratives in their im­
age. Not coincidentally, a renewed interest in Civil War history during this time allowed
many people to channel anxieties about cataclysmic social upheaval into reclaiming and
reshaping historical legacies. This past became a source of agency for contemporary
Americans because the manipulation of historical memory seemed to offer a way to si­
lence minority voices. The 1980s saw renewed interest in reenacting among middle-class,
suburban white men, and this fed into the establishment of a significant share of
America’s Civil War revival bands. This renewal continued through the 1990s and intensi­
fied into the twenty-first century, as eBay and other forms of digital commerce greatly
aided revivalist passions to collect, restore, and trade artifacts, recruit reenactor-musi­
cians, and disseminate information about Civil War brass music.

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

Return: What Was Lost?

Here I circle back to examine the types of meaning that can be generated by the return of
Civil War brass music. If heritage is not a product but a meaningful process, then I argue
that this brass revival attempts to reclaim two particular heritage traits: race and gender.
Evidence that the American brass band functions as a signifier of white male heritage is
reflected in the visual and audible performance of this music by revivalists. One way this
community reconstitutes its sonic heritage is through returning individual instruments
with traceable histories to other collected instruments from the same regiment. Reuniting
and reusing these instruments in revival bands, according to participants, salvages their
sonic possibilities. Civil War brass enthusiasts are drawn to a blend (p. 461) of technical
proficiency, military order, and expressive sentimentality that conjures a sensitive soldier-
musician archetype with which they may empathize or identify. Preservation and perfor­
mance of sonic artifacts and, by extension, a soldier-musician archetype by brass band re­
vivalists, thus becomes a form of collective remembering. One member of the Cornet Con­
spiracy described this process as follows, “You know, I heard this story on NPR about a
descendant of those who were in the Holocaust, who plays music on their instruments,
and I guess it’s kind of similar to that. It gives you empathy for the owner. It’s the closest
I will get to time traveling. It establishes for me almost a spiritual connection with those
who played two hundred years ago. That’s really why I continue to play.”34

Significantly, however, this type of memory facilitates deep and powerful ownership of the
past while bypassing less desirable aspects of nineteenth-century life such as slavery and
war violence. Their efforts are in earnest. The ideologies perpetuated by this form of po­
litical activism are too deeply embedded in the heritage production process for most prac­
titioners to recognize.35 But it is precisely this absence of reflection about the causes and
enduring consequences of the Civil War conflict that makes the continuation of this hobby
a highly political practice.

What has been “stolen” from the brass band revivalists is not a set of historical instru­
ments but a form of imagined manhood, referred to briefly earlier in the chapter, that
may be described as the “citizen-soldier,” or what Michael Kimmel terms the “heroic arti­
san,” which is mythologized by the “cult of the fallen soldier.”36 This mythical man is ra­
tional, honorable, and exists in a world of other men who judge each other on the basis of
bravery, honor, and skill. According to Kimmel, “He is free in a free country, embodying
republican virtue and autonomy. And he is white” (1996, 151). This form of masculinity
encapsulates a memory of the mid-nineteenth century that disentangles historical actors
from the causes and consequences of the war. Furthermore, it reconciles Northern and
Southern military histories by focusing on the shared aspects of white American man­
hood.37

Brass bands that function within this discursive framework are exclusive music fraterni­
ties that facilitate male bonding and reinforce social privilege by providing space for
white men to reaffirm the masculinity of one another and their ancestors.38 This space

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

hearkens back to the nineteenth-century gendered separation of public and private

spheres, by excluding the full participation of women.

Ultimately, Civil War brass music revivals work as a strategy to retrieve lost identities and
diminished social entitlements. When during my fieldwork I found myself surrounded by
uniformed collector-musicians at a coffee shop in downtown Frankfurt, Kentucky, I asked
a bandsman why he dons a wool suit and carries a dented horn. He turned to me softly,
brushed the hairs of a thick gray mustache away from his lips, and explained in so many
words that because schools no longer teach the war as they did, we are losing his past.39
Our coffee shop chat burned in my mind as one of the fleeting moments when a bands­
man deviated from his instrument fact script and engaged deeper questions about the
stakes of brass collecting. In other instances Civil War reenactors explained their craft to
me as a response to social (p. 462) phenomena including the safety, isolation, and commer­
cialization of ever-expanding American suburbia; the loss of power at home and in the
workplace; the perceived threat of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-English-speaking immi­
grants to Christian family values; the disregard of our nation’s founding fathers by the
nation’s youth; and what they identify in a variety of ways as the feminization of American
culture. What has been lost to these men is not necessarily a musical heritage, but their
sense of masculinity, a racialized form of gender that they can see and hear in Civil War
brass music. Collecting and performing Civil War music creates a site of negotiation
across racial and gender social axes to audibly remasculinize themselves, what Kimmel
has described in other similar cases as the impulse to “return to the scene of defeat and
retrieve lost manhood” (1996, 311). Even Richard Crawford’s descriptions of the Civil
War brass musician point to this extramusical value: “Indeed, the image of musicians in
paramilitary garb signals that artistry is not the only impulse they serve, perhaps not
even the primary one” (2001, 272). We may, therefore, consider the celebration of male
privilege as part of the aesthetic achievement and appeal of this music tradition.

It may seem as though this revival is no different from men’s lodges or wilderness re­
treats, but what differentiates these revivals is that the repatriation of sonic heritage is a
public statement made by a group to promote their vision of the past and to influence the
production of a national consciousness. Thus, sonic heritage becomes a resource to sup­
port a type of exclusionary citizenship. As David Glassberg notes, certain elements of the
past must be remembered while others are forgotten in order to create group cohesion,
and therefore all communities are formed at the expense of other groups (Glassberg
1996, 13). Practitioners of brass band heritage celebrate the sounds of the white Ameri­
can Civil War experience while insisting that their rituals have nothing to do with women
or people of color. The logic here is that if the rituals in question do not explicitly engage
with these issues, then the tradition must only be about music. Thus, the enactment of a
perceived sonic heritage becomes cloaked in the politics of its ideology, rendering partici­
pants unlikely to interpret their actions as having any political motivation or conse­
quence.

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

That the “heroic artisan” is imagined to be a white man is important because it reaffirms
his primacy in American history narratives. The militant yet unarmed brass musician in
military garb becomes emblematic of the “everyman,” and his imagined white identity is
crucial because if the actors, achievements, and sacrifices associated with this war are
remembered as white, then the universal white male emerges as the founding father of
the modern nation that is understood to be born from this conflict. Implicit to this her­
itage crafting is a racial discourse in which whiteness in the United States is affirmed as
homogeneous and stable.

Civil War hobbyists facilitate male bonding and legitimize benchmarks for American citi­
zenship entitlements by relying on a contemporary Caucasian framework. Bonding among
bandsmen depends on an unspoken understanding of whiteness as biologically visible and
indicative of European descent. Despite a rhetoric of authenticity that (p. 463) permeates
their sport, Civil War reenactors do not observe the nineteenth-century “variegated”
racial hierarchy that regulated unprecedented numbers of immigrants from European na­
tions (including Ireland, Scotland, and Italy) by marking them in stark contrast to Anglo-
Saxon Protestants.40 What during the US Civil War were perceived to be distinctly lesser
nonwhite races in the Anglo-Saxon model of whiteness became twentieth-century white
ethnicities under the Caucasian paradigm. Americanizing Europeans into a single race
during the twentieth-century operated as a citizenship project that historian Matthew
Frye Jacobson (1999) describes as a realignment of privilege along the black-white color
line during Jim Crow.

The Caucasian model affords white people the privilege to selectively and temporarily po­
sition themselves as ethnically exceptional (with-heritage), while retaining the privileges
of whiteness that distance them from those who are overdetermined by their (nonwhite)
ethnic identity. Caucasian-ism was, and remains, a powerful rhetorical device to build
coalitions and claim entitlements through whiteness. This locates the criteria for full
American citizenship within a framework of lineage that selectively includes massive mi­
grations of European peoples who are today easily interpreted within the United States
as part of the white racial category, yet excludes African, Latino, Asian, and other immi­
grant groups. The application of such a model to US Civil War memory almost entirely
erases the memory of Indigenous American and African American peoples who did not
have as much primacy in the war as citizen-soldiers. Paul Shackel contends that patriotic
and heritage commemorations are a method to control the past by returning the ideals of
cultural leaders and authorities to develop social unity and maintain social inequalities in
society (Shackel 2003, 659). When viewed according to Shackel’s model, the repatriation
of Civil War sonic heritage is really about mediating contemporary relationships between
racial, ethnic, and gender groups in the United States.

These actions raise questions about the relationship between sonic heritage and social
empowerment. If social power can be harnessed by sounding authority, then music col­
lecting is not only competition for material goods but competition for social prominence.
David Lowenthal writes:

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

The past is everywhere a battleground of rival attachments. In discovering, cor­

recting, elaborating, inventing, and celebrating their histories, competing groups
struggle to validate present goals by appealing to continuity with, or inheritance
from, ancestral and other precursors. The politics of the past is no trivial academ­
ic game; it is an integral part of every people’s earnest search of a heritage essen­
tial to autonomy and identity.

(Lowenthal 1994, 302)

In contemporary performances of Civil War music, we can hear a competition to control

the official national narrative, to police the boundaries of national citizenship, to privilege
limited interpretations of the past.

(p. 464) Repatriation: New Application

In this chapter, I have argued that musical repatriation can be understood not only as a
return of dispossessed objects to subjugated communities but also as a discursive strate­
gy to control representations of past and present identities. Although I recognize the pos­
sible danger of applying the term “repatriation” too broadly, I also see the value in using
the concept of repatriation as a model for critically examining the complexities of her­
itage construction. I wish to allow for the possibility that repatriation models can be ap­
propriated by powerful social groups. In this case, Civil War–era brass instruments are
treated as fragments of the past to be gathered and strung together by revivalists to re­
store what they interpret to be an endangered historical truth. The displacement and sub­
sequent return of heritage described in this chapter are not of one nation-state taking
from another, but instead, the tracing of a white American musical lineage that testifies
for the existence of a unique “Civil War” sonic heritage. Invoking past sounds through
music relics is significant because it implies ownership of the past, which in this instance
involves the privilege of constructing a sonic nationhood, and the entitlement to control
social inclusion or exclusion from that representation. As is often the case with musical
heritage, here the dominant social group constructs a hegemonic vision of nationhood
that legitimizes the continued prosperity of people who occupy privileged social positions.
To own implies mastery over something, which is evident in every stage of their music re­
search, purchase, restoration, practice, critique, and public presentation. I argue that the
repatriation of Civil War brass band music provides fertile ground for examining the cul­
tural politics of sonic heritage. Trafficking in the return of musical objects and sounds as­
sociated with discrete historical events and eras exerts physical and intellectual owner­
ship over the musical past. By studying the resulting representations and justifications for
selectively preserving tangible and intangible sonic heritage, we can better understand
the values that individuals and communities assign to history, a process robust enough to
determine which pasts are remembered or forgotten.

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

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Notes:

(1.) Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998, 149); Livingston (1999, 68). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

writes: “Despite a discourse of conservation, preservation, restoration, reclamation, re­
covery, re-creation, recuperation, revitalization, and regeneration, heritage produces
something new in the present that has recourse to the past.”

(2.) Although contextual identifiers resulting from the localities of my data collection re­
main, to reduce the risk of deductive disclosure, my key informants are identified in this
chapter by pseudonyms. Prominent leaders (past and present) of music revivals may be
identified by name.

(3.) They use the term “conspiracy band,” to describe a loose community of rival music
collectors. While this term may describe numerous bands of collectors, the particular
group of collectors uses the term “Cornet Conspiracy” to distinguish themselves from
similar clubs. eBay inc (2005); Nussbaum (2009); Faust (n.d.).

(4.) DeCarlis (n.d.).

(5.) Josh, interview with author, April 19, 2012, Athens, Georgia.

(6.) Cornet Conspiracy Brass Band, group interview with author, April 20, 2012, Athens,
Georgia.

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

(7.) Don, interview with the author, April 20, 2012, Athens, Georgia. There is a symbiotic
relationship and money flow within the ensemble among bidders, buyers, and repairmen.
Don explained,

They all collect instruments but specialize in different things. Several members
make a living restoring and repairing instruments. That one [man] created the
group. They didn’t like each other at first until he brought them together. They’re
from all over the country. That one is an attorney. Some are professional musi­
cians. They really play. Not just this stuff, they play other music too. That one is a
jazz player. That one went to Eastman. Several guys in the group make a living re­
pairing these things, because they don’t look like that when they first buy them.

(8.) Josh, interview with author, April 19, 2012.

(9.) During our group interview, the most pressing concern from members of the conspir­
acy band was to learn how many instruments each man owned. At one point during our
interview, one of the collectors interrupted my questions to start a tally. “I want to know,
down the line, how many horns each of us own. . . . There are more instruments between
us than any museum has, that I know of. There must be 2,000 some instruments between
us.” Collector 1: 200, Collector 2: 30, Collector 3: 90, Collector 4: 100, Collector 5: 200,
Collector 6: 850, Collector 7: 160, Collector 8: 50–60, Collector 9: 275, Collector 10: 120,
Collector 11: 20–30. Cornet Conspiracy Brass Band, group interview with author.

(10.) The Cornet Conspiracy described here is but one of many Civil War music communi­
ties that perform or loan their collections to be performed. These ensembles often model
the identity of their ensemble after a documented nineteenth-century ensemble, which is
usually referenced by the name of the revival band and the adornment of regimental uni­
form costumes. There is much overlap in the rosters of these clubs, as most members of
the conspiracy band described in this paper are also active members of other Civil War
brass revival bands.

(11.) Nineteenth-century brass instruments possessed different valve combinations, tub­

ing lengths, mouthpiece designs, and bore sizes than standard contemporary Western
brass instruments. Differences in instrument design and production are compounded with
a natural softening of the metal and a history of dents and repairs that impact the timbre
of each instrument.

(12.) Cornet Conspiracy Brass Band, group interview with author; DeCarlis (n.d.).
“Sniped” is one of many militaristic terms these collectors use when describing their hob­
by. “Sniping” is a colloquial term used by online auction users and researchers to de­
scribe a form of late-bidding behavior where the agent submits a bid at the last possible
moment during a fixed closing time auction. Of interest to longstanding collectors of simi­
lar objects is the anonymity of snipers among other bidders. Increased frequency of snip­
ing is attributable, in part, to companies such as Esnipe, which places last-minute bids for
customers. See Axel Ockenfels and Alvin Roth, “Last-Minute Bidding and the Rules for

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

Ending Second-Price Auctions: Evidence from eBay and Amazon Auctions on the Inter­
net,” American Economic Review 92 (September 2002): 1093–1103.

(13.) Although the “William Tell Overture” is a nineteenth-century opera overture by

Gioachino Rossini and not purposefully composed for Civil War brass bands, wind ensem­
bles from this era frequently performed arrangements from symphonies and operas. How­
ever, this overture’s American association with The Lone Ranger and other pop culture
references may explain its popularity and frequent performance by revival bands.

(14.) The University of Georgia Symposium on American Band History, open rehearsal
with Cornet Conspiracy Brass Band, April 20, 2012, Athens, Georgia.

(15.) The University of Georgia Symposium on American Band History, open rehearsal
with Cornet Conspiracy Brass Band, April 20, 2012, Athens, Georgia.

(16.) See Smith (2006, 11). She goes on to argue that heritage is the construction and
performance of a hegemonic discourse that regulates cultural practices.

(17.) Cornet Conspiracy Brass Band, group interview with author.

(18.) Don, interview with the author.

(19.) Bob, phone interview with the author, January 25, 2012.

(20.) Josh specifically commented on this, stating that this music tradition “is not dead”
because “there are a number of skilled players who keep it alive.” Josh, interview with the
author, April 20, 2012, Athens, Georgia; Lewis (2015).

(21.) Cornet Conspiracy Brass Band, group interview with author. The language that
brass collectors use to describe their sound is very similar to the nostalgic rhetoric that
Gage Averill (2010) found in his study of barbershop quartets.

(22.) Josh, interview with the author, April 20, 2012.

(23.) Holyfield and Beacham (2011) call this type of cultural authority a “memory broker.”

(24.) Dudgeon (1993, 118); Historic Brass Society (2009); National Music Museum (n.d.).
Benkovic founded the First Brigade Band in 1964, often cited as the first regularly per­
forming Civil War brass revival band.

(25.) Dudgeon (1993, 118); Herbert and Wallace (1997, 142).

(26.) For a biographical interview transcript of Elrod’s collection and career, see Lewis
(2015); see also Elrod and Garofalo (1985), Borowicz (1990, 126), and Dudgeon (1993,
118). Some of the musicians whom I met have played Elrod’s instruments, and occasional­
ly described Elrod as a role model.

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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

(27.) This certainly is not an exhaustive list. Dozens of ensembles and collections have re­
vived interest in US brass heritage. These hobbyists commonly volunteer and perform at
museums, parks, and schools. They also create and distribute sound recordings and lend
their collections to archives for public display.

(28.) There were extramusical benefits to these clubs. Bringing together men so similar in
interest and status in individual revival bands and at reenactments and festivals has be­
come a form of professional networking. Professional resources, such as access to
archives, performance spaces, gigs, equipment, and publicity, help popularize and legit­
imize the hobby and its participants. Therefore, the status one accumulates within this
community of music collectors can extend well beyond the brass world.

(29.) Crawford (2001, 272–293); McWhirter (2012, 7–32). Music was intricately tied to the
processes of representing the Civil War from its very outbreak. The mid-nineteenth-centu­
ry brass band carried with it a music of European descent and presented progressive sto­
ries about speedy changes in instrument designs, amateur music collectives, masculine
heroism and competition, and audible homogeneity that appealed primarily to white
Americans who envisioned themselves as models of democracy during a period of rapid
and uncertain social change. Similar to the reception of brass bands during the nine­
teenth century, the performance of American patriotic songs and western European
themes on European-derived instruments by contemporary musicians dressed in Western
military garb suggests that the American identity is undeniably rooted in a shared west­
ern European heritage.

(30.) Reenactment is one mode of living history performance that Jay Anderson defines as
the reasoned attempt to simulate life in another time. See Anderson (1984); Turner (1990,
123).

(31.) Kammen describes this period in American history as the “heritage syndrome.”

(32.) Druesedow (2003, 240–254); Hamburger (1996, 620–650). Many contemporary col­
lectors cite books and recordings from the centennial as their inspiration to join this her­
itage movement, the most important recording being Fennell and Gabel (1961), a double
album of brass music performed on period instruments with added sound effects and nar­
ration.

(33.) It is important to note that these events took place during the same time that
America’s post–World War II class system hardened and the country’s national economy
began to shift toward a global market, and that white anxieties were complex and often
displaced in reaction to minority power movements.

(34.) Josh, interview with author, April 19, 2012.

(35.) Identifiers that I shared with my informants (including my whiteness, class, national­
ity, musician-identity, and interest in Civil War historical memory) may have helped facili­
tate conversations with collectors, musicians, audiences, and nonmusician reenactors.
Most of the musicians I met were incredibly articulate in their descriptions of Civil War
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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

music, but even my most knowledgeable informants seemed unsettled by questions about
diversity. When confronted with uncomfortable questions, bandsmen generally redirected
the conversation to their instruments.

(36.) For discussions of “the cult of the fallen soldier,” see Kimmel (1996, 16); Savage
(1997, 167); Blight (2001, 38).

(37.) It would be understandable to assume that the deep North-South regional divisions
from which Civil War armies were organized would remain a hotly contested element in
the Civil War commemoration and reenactment, but this is not usually the case among
white participants. David Blight (2001) identifies three camps of Civil War remembrance:
the “emancipationist” vision, in which we conceptualize the war as a struggle over the fu­
ture of race relations in the United States; the “reconciliationist” vision, in which collec­
tive forgetting of racial questions allowed Northern and Southern whites to mourn each
other’s losses and bond through their shared sense of whiteness; and the “white suprema­
cist” vision of confederate redemption from which Lost Cause mythology blossomed. A
primary determinant of which camp one’s memory falls into is not determined by ances­
tral or geographic positioning, but by a conscious decision to either heal the regional divi­
sions between the white North and South or justice for people of color. It should be noted
that the ideology articulated by the majority of collectors, bandsmen, and audiences
whom I encountered aligned with Blight’s reconciliationist vision. Their glorification of a
common military experience, laced with themes of courage, pain, and dedication to a
cause (whatever it may be) overshadowed deeper examinations of class conflicts and race
relations in the United States. Their emphasis on the common noncombative experience
of bandsmen is also in keeping with reconciliationist ideology. Memory scholars frequent­
ly note that white male Civil War hobbyists tend to be attracted to the rebel character and
material scarcity of the confederacy, and often alternate in their collection and perfor­
mance of Northern/Southern military culture. (See Turner 1990; Horwitz 1998; Blight
2001.) The professional class of these collectors explains a slight, but not divisive, tension
between the reserved presentation of Civil War brass music revivalists and some of the
more rambunctious military battle reenactors, who are more numerous and diverse in so­
cioeconomic identity. In my experience with brass collectors, concerns about instrument
makers and collection completeness take precedence over regional concerns; however, an
instrument is generally interpreted to have added value if it can be attributed to a partic­
ular regiment or musician.

(38.) Kimmel (1996, 291–328). According to Kimmel, these types of masculine hobbies
“celebrate cultures with elaborate rituals for men, all the while protesting that such ritu­
als have nothing to do with women. Since the rituals exclude women, they must only be
‘about’ men and manhood” (319).

(39.) Ron, interview with author, September 1, 2011, Frankfurt, Kentucky.

(40.) For more about nineteenth-century American racial categories and the history of
how this hierarchy morphed in the public consciousness, see Jacobson 1999. Jacobson ar­
gues that three systems that determined whiteness over time in the United States are
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The Politics of Repatriating Civil War Brass Music

capitalism, republicanism, and citizenship. He writes, “To trace the process by which
Celts and Slavs became Caucasians is to recognize race as an ideological, political deploy­
ment rather than as a neutral, biological determined element of nature” (14).

Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment

Department of Music, The University of Virginia

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