Free concert series -- Garfield Park, Indianapolis, IN

Free concert series – Garfield Park, Indianapolis, IN

July 1, 2010

One thing you should know about me is that I love free things: free food, free events, free stuff. So, I was ecstatic when I found a free concert series that runs every Thursday in July at Garfield Park’s MacAllister amphitheatre. Garfield Park, Indianapolis’ oldest park, is located on Indy’s southside on Shelby Street between Raymond Street and Southern Avenue. Tonight’s music was brought to us by the Greenwood Community Band. The weather was beautiful at 7pm when the music fired up.

Because of the July 4^th weekend coming up, most of the program was from the canon of classic American pieces and patriotic music. A couple of good ol’ marches got the people in the mood, followed by a medley of Civil War songs. I swore the song “Jesus Loves the Little Children” was in the medley. And actually, it was. The words were written by a preacher named Clare Herbert Walker, who lived during the Civil War, even though he would’ve only been five-years-old at the beginning of the war. But his words were later sung to the 1864 tune of “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!”, written by George Fredrick Root. So, I wasn’t mistaken.

A medley of famed theatre composer George M. Cohen songs brought back a ton of memories for me, because during my freshman year in high school, we did a musical based on George M. Cohen songs. I even think I remember most of the lyrics. Mostly. They then played the song “Shenandoah” which I’ve played many times in piano lessons, band, and choir. They performed a nice arrangement; I wish I knew who did it.

A few folk songs are a must to be included. Then the famous “Colonel Bogey March,” made famous by a great movie called “Bridge Over the River Kwai.” I’m sure everyone has heard this song, but they probably have no idea where it comes from. Originally a book by Pierre Boulle (under the title “Le Pont de la Riviere Kwai”) was published in English in 1954, and the film was produced three years later. The famous bridge that Boulle wrote about doesn’t actually cross the River Kwai. He was mistaken and assumed that the “death railway” crossed the River Kwai, where in reality, it crossed the Mae Khlung.

As appropriate, they did the salute to the armed forces, playing each of the regiment songs from each of the branches of the military. I had my daughter stand up for the Army to represent my step-son who is active duty in Afghanistan, and my son stood for the Marine Corps, in honor of my husband, who was sitting at home finally getting to play Red Dead Redemption in peace.

At this time in the program, a choir comprised of men and women from various churches calling themselves the Festival Choir joined the band on stage for the remainder of the concert. They started out with Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” (Berlin [born Israel Baline], originally wrote the piece in 1918 while serving in the US Army at Camp Upton in New York, but put it away because it didn’t fit a revue he was working on. Later, Woody Guthrie didn’t care for it, so he wrote a “This Land is My Land” as a response. This piece has also been proposed to become the national anthem.), followed by “America the Beautiful” (a poem originally written by Katharine Lee Bates and originally called Pikes Peak, later put to music by Samuel A. Ward who never saw the popularity of his most famous piece. It’s been proposed many times to replace the national anthem with this song.). Next came “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (an American abolitionist hymn written in 1861 by Julia Ward Howe. The tune was written around 1855 by William Steffe with two sets of different lyrics, and was originally a campfire devotional song.), and finally ending with John Phillip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” (composed on a ferry in Europe on Christmas Day in 1896. Most Sousa bands adhere to the Sousa practice of using one or three piccolo players [never two] during the trio section. Congress designated this as the National March of the United States.) I had no idea that “Stars and Stripes Forever” had lyrics, but apparently it does, written by the composer himself. The official version is played by the United States Marine Band and is in the key of E-flat, which is a nice key to play in. I like E-flat.

It made for a very enjoyable evening, even though I spent the vast majority of the concert teaching my 4-year-old and a 1-year-old about bands, choirs and instruments, and eating cookies and finding dropped toys, and noticing the people walking dogs in the park and planes flying overhead, while the sun slowly edged behind the trees and the cymbals crashed.