At the time the instruments in our band were made, there were only two community orchestras in the United States. One became the Boston Symphony and the other, the New York Philharmonic. But there were hundreds of community bands.

Music written for these bands is a reflection of the social customs, political climate, and patriotic pride in the developing nation. Compositions included mainstream popular 19th Century composers (including Septimus Winner and Stephen Foster), patriotic airs, dance music, orchestral transcriptions, marches, and quicksteps.

 

The Dodworth Saxhorn Band provided three innings worth of music for Ken Burns' popular Baseball series on PBS. You can also hear us play "Gee, It's a Wonderful Game" on the Baseball music CD (you can listen to a track or purchase it on Best Buy's Web site).

Our library includes copies of music manuscripts and early arrangements from the Baseball Hall of Fame, as well as adaptations designed to suit the Band's 19th Century instrumentation. These numbers span the early years of baseball from mid–19th Century to the 1920's.

To help our audiences get a fun picture of old time music, the Dodworth Saxhorn Band has done things like riding elephants or old–fashioned bicycles whilst playing.

Our repertoire consists primarily of music from the mid 1800's. The music is typical of that found in community bands of the era: patriotic airs, orchestral transcriptions, arrangements of popular songs, marches, quicksteps, and ballroom numbers such as quadrilles, waltzes, polkas, gallops and schottisches.

Most of these numbers are original to the era and were obtained from the Library of Congress and other collections, while others have been edited for clarity and errors or scored as they would have been for the time.

—On Staff Magazine