Background
Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore was born on the 25th of December, 1829, in a hamlet near Dublin, Ireland.
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Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore was born on the 25th of December, 1829, in a hamlet near Dublin, Ireland.
Gilmore was intended for the priesthood, but showing no inclination for it, he was put to work as a boy in a shop in Athlone. He was far more interested in the regimental band of this garrison town, however, whose conductor eventually put him through a course of harmony and counterpoint, than in his work.
When the Irish regiment in Athlone was transferred to Canada, Gilmore, by that time an excellent cornetist, accompanied it. Before he was twenty-one he left Canada to establish himself as a military band leader in Salem, Massachusets, and later, he established his reputation in Boston with his famous “Gilmore’s Band, ” which he took on extensive tours through the United States.
In 1861, Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore accompanied the 24th Massachusetts Regiment to the field as its bandmaster, and in 1863 was put in charge of all the army bands in the Department of Louisiana. In New Orleans, in 1864, he originated the “monster band concert, ” an aberration of musical good taste peculiar to the period.
Held to celebrate the inauguration of Gov. Hahn, it united a chorus of five thousand adults and children, and an orchestra of five hundred pieces supported by drummers, trumpeters, and artillery.
At the “National Peace Jubilee” (1869), and the “World Peace Jubilee” (1872), both in Boston, he further indorsed the idea that “if eighty musicians make good music, eight hundred must make music ten times as good”.
At the first of these monstrous musical festivals, Gilmore conducted an orchestra of one thousand performers, plus a chorus of ten thousand, and “a bouquet of artists, forty strong. ”
In the second, orchestra and chorus were doubled, and their din was increased by a battery of cannon, electrically fired, and half a dozen church bells, with members of the Boston Fire Department in full uniform beating out the “Anvil Chorus” on fifty anvils. In spite of their vulgarity these, Gilmore monster jubilees, as Elson says, “planted the seeds of good music in hundreds of villages where they had not existed before”. After his second Jubilee, Gilmore left Boston for New York, and though he used bells, cannon, and anvils at his Chicago Jubilee of 1873, he later declared that he was through with “tornado choruses. ”
While Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore was in St. Louis, conducting his band at the Exposition of 1892, he died suddenly, leaving his wife and one daughter.
Gilmore can be seen as the principal figure in 19th-century American music. In New York, Gilmore was for a number of years bandmaster of the 22nd Regiment, New York National Guard, making tours with his men in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Though Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore always had a taste for the sensational in music, he was a splendid drillmaster, and his performances never lacked brilliancy.
When Manhattan Beach was first opened in the eighties, it was Gilmore who, with young Sousa, Victor Herbert, and Anton Seidl, drew the multitudes thither.
As a composer, he left military band numbers, dance-pieces, and songs, which were popular in their day, and from New Orleans he brought the patriotic air, “When Johnny comes marching home again, ” the words of which he wrote under the nom de plume of Louis Lambert.
Musically, he was the first arranger to set brass instruments against the reeds, which remains the basis for big band orchestration. His arrangements of contemporary classics did a great deal to familiarize the American people with the work of the great European musical masters.
Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore was married to Ellen O'Neill, who gave birth to their common daughter Minnie L. Gilmore.
