The Savannah morning news., 1903-01-13
WHENCE COMES
THE GERMAN BAND.
The stroIIInE Musicians Known to
City Streets.
From Blackwood's Magazine.

lily SAEtthbs
From Blackwood's Magazine.
The inhabitants of the northwest Pal
atinate generally are of a rowing dis
position. The shoe hawkers of Pr
masens the brush dealers of 'Romberg
and the showmen and peddlers of
Karlsbefg are to be met with all over
the valley of the Rhine. But these
must yield the palm in numbers and
enterprise to the Musikanten of the
| Hardt mountains, who have made the
whole world their own. They are not
so often seen on the continent as they
formerly were. but they go to England,
the Cape, Australia, the States, Cam
ada, Brazil. Argentina, and one band
has ventured as far as Chill. II any
one ever reaches the North Pole and
finds the inevitable Scotchman smok-
ing his pipe on the top, he is sure to
be tossing coppers to a German band
from the Pfalz. In my experience (and
l speak with the authority of spe-
cialist) I have known of only two bands
that did not come from this district;
the one was from Nassau, the other
from Pforzheim in Baden. 1t is COM
puted that there were at one time over
5000 Musikanten in the valleys of the
Lauter and the Oden, and
in the valley of the Clan,
which receives the waters of these
streams and discharges them above
Kreuznach into the Maize, tributary
of the Rhine. In these three valleys
a pedestrian might safely ask his way
in English and in winter, when many
of the Musikanten are at home, II you
meet a promiscuous company of ten in
an inn, seven or eight are sure to know
at least one foreign language. There
are single villages which could muster
as many as 200 players. But even
without making a voyage of discovery
and establishing the habitat of the
Musikanten by scientific methods, II
would surely not have required extra
ordinary detective powers to infer their
common origin from the identity of
much of the music that the bands play.
Any one who has kept himself abreast
of the street music of his generation
must have in the musical chambers of
his memory many simple dance tunes
peculiar TO German bands and COM
mon to them ALL These are unpub-
lished compositions by the local band
masters, or Melsters, as they are called,
and they are passed on from one band
to the other. One Meister OF my ac-
quaintance has already reached opus
300 Apart from these anecdota, which
cannot be cited here, piece which was
invariably included in the repertory OF
the smaller bands was Gungl's ''Krieg-
ers Marsch:" two other pieces COM
monty played were "Abscheids-Po
naise." by Flotow. and the familiar
"Morgenstern" waltz of the elder La
bitzky, which is now a school-room
classic.
The patient reader will naturally in
'quire how old this musical industry is,
and what led the crofters of the Hardt
in particular to pursue 1t. Though 1t
is not recorded in the "Germania" of
Tacitus among the ancient institutions
of the Fatherland, its origin goes back
at least beyond the memory of living
men, perhaps to the beginning of the
last century. The veteran Kiliian,
born not later than 1915. assured me
that peripatetic bands existed long be-
fore his day. More than a hundred
years ago the Prince of Leinnigen, who
was the first husband of the mother of
Queen Victoria, cleared a forest on his
domain. and, planting there commu-
nifty of gypsies, beggars, and Migrants,
named their village after himself
Karlsberg. The Matzenberger, as they
are locally called, are known far and
wide as peddlers and wandering mu-
sicians, and formerly bore question
able reputation.
But larger political and economic
causes must have been at work to con-
vert a whole region of crofters into a
conservatoriurn of street music. Rhen-
ish Bavaria, ceded by the treaty of
Luneville in 1902. was held by France
till 1916. Neglected then by her step
mother, though subsequently united by
Bavaria, she was so isolated from the
rest of the country that she always
Jagged behind in trade and commerce.
Mushroom Ludwigshaten and prosper
Gus Neustadt and kaiserslautern at
test the rapidity with which the rest
of the Palatinate has advanced since
1870 but the uplands of the Hardt, to