UC San Diego

Wind bands are ubiquitous in the United States, where secondary and postsecondary school bands and community bands populate every county in every state. Wind band cultures, however, are not thoroughly researched nor critically considered in the music academy. While wind bands take on unique individual and regional cultural traits, they can also be characterized as vestigial structures from a period of full scale militarization during World Wars I and II in which military bands served patriotic and civic functions directly tied to the war effort. As such, the wind bands which proliferated in the immediate postwar era and became institutionalized in high school and university settings in the decades following are inextricably linked to the white masculinist militarism which established the cultural norms of the wind band prior to its expansion and diversification. This dissertation takes this contentious inflection point as its point of entry into outlining a study of the American wind band along axes of gender and race. Following an illustration of the wind band as a white masculine institution, I attend to the ongoing practice of diversity programming for wind band conductors and composers and explore the reasons for its precariousness in the present political moment. Furthermore, this text delves into the lives and work of Frederick Fennell (1914 - 2004) and Percy Grainger (1882 - 1961) as conductor and composer (respectively) examples of white masculine articulations in wind band culture who both negotiated the norms of white masculinity at the postwar juncture and whose reputations live on as model figures of such norms. This dissertation interrogates these norms and builds out a space between them and beneath the surface of their (and the wind band’s) white masculinity to construct two frameworks with which one might adopt to unravel white masculine norms phenomenologically and collectively: masochistic listening and critical pedagogy. Informed by archival research and autoethnographic participation as a wind band musician and conductor myself, I ultimately argue that, despite wind bands’ increasingly diverse and heterogeneous participant demographics, its white masculine institutional status and financial ties to the military industrial complex give cause for its routine deployment in service of white supremacist, patriarchal ideologues. This fate illustrates the need for a more direct approach than has been offered by past practitioners–one that disturbs the wind band canon and destabilizes the hierarchical structure of the wind band itself.