ORCHESTRA DOES ADMIRABLE WORK, said the headline in the Bangor Daily News on Feb. 24, 1908. The subhead continued, “The New Bangor Symphony Plays Splendid Program Before Invited Guests.”
The Bangor Symphony Orchestra had reappeared. Members of this “new” orchestra had been rehearsing for the last three years, and they would rehearse for yet another year before the Queen City’s most esteemed entertainment gem would return to entertain a public gathering. Back then the symphony’s future was anything but certain when only invited guests were welcome.
Among the invited guests at the rehearsals a century ago were newspaper reporters. They explained what had happened to the orchestra, which had been founded in 1896 before taking a four-year break from public performances beginning in 1905. The original orchestra “went to pieces for lack of support, not from any deficiency of merit,” said the Bangor Daily News. The Bangor Daily Commercial, always looking for ways to disagree with its rival, blamed the orchestra’s lapse on “death and removal. … it was impossible to continue the high character of work that had been established and it was deemed expedient to discontinue the concerts at least until the depleted ranks should again be filled.”
Between 1896 and 1905, the orchestra’s performers had increased from 15 to about 25. Now it was about to re-emerge with close to 40 players. One man, conductor Horace M. Pullen had seen the orchestra through its current crisis, quietly continuing to recruit musicians and conduct rehearsals. The popular musician was best known for his dance orchestra, which played for many society events, as well as his dancing and violin lessons. Many of Bangor’s best musicians no doubt played for both orchestras.
The new symphony was the “largest orchestra that has even been rehearsed in the city,” said the Bangor Daily News. It was no “scrub band,” as one member had modestly described it. “In reality it is the most perfect machine that has ever been composed of local players,” said the ever-enthusiastic reporter. He would invoke the machine metaphor — placing adjectives like perfect, expert and smooth in front of the word — over and over again as the months passed.
The orchestra was better balanced than ever. Whereas it used to have a brass section that “raised the roof,” and sometimes only two or three first strings to counteract the blare, now it had a half dozen with Harold C. Sawyer as concertmaster. Sawyer sometimes directed Pullen’s dance orchestra at society functions.
Now that the symphony had been “put through its paces” by Pullen, as the Bangor Daily News put it, it was not going to be “hid under a bushel.” Public concerts would soon be in the offing. Perhaps these concerts would be followed by a “hop” at which “men with both legs broken will be dancing.” But no public concerts would be held that year, the disappointed reporter had to announce on March 9. Next year would be the year.
More public rehearsals were held in the winter of 1909. The fine work of violinist Sawyer and cellist Adelbert W. Sprague, head of the music department at the University of Maine and a future BSO conductor, were duly noted on Feb. 22 by the Bangor Daily News. A real concert would be held in March at City Hall, then located at the corner of Hammond and Columbia streets. Billed as a “pop concert,” it was scheduled for March 17 — St. Patrick’s Day, a century ago.
“The original Bangor Symphony Orchestra in its most inspired days could not come within speaking distance of the organization of 40 musicians, which held its final rehearsal prior to Wednesday night’s concert. …,” opined the BDN on March 15. If the musicians played the way he had just heard them, “it will sweep people from their feet.”
Would formal dress be required? This important question had been raised by someone. Mr. Pullen had asked the newspaper to state that everything would be entirely informal, and that “high hats and claw hammers had better remain amongst the moth balls. …”
The program included Mendelssohn, Offenbach, Saint Saens and Victor Herbert. “The Shamrock” by Myddleton (“rather a quaint number”) had been included to appease any Irishmen in the audience. Over and over the papers had said the pieces would be “heavy” enough to attract classical aficionados, but “light” enough to entertain those who cared little for high culture. Dancing afterwards would feature 12 numbers — waltzes, two-steps, five-steps and round dances.
On that St. Patrick’s night, a terrible snowstorm — “boisterous weather,” according to the BDN — hit the city. But the show was sold out at 50 cents a ticket — 10 times the cost of a movie ticket. The balcony was full. Wooden folding seats were set up downstairs on the floor, only to be moved later for the dance that was to follow the concert. A thousand people attended, the newspapers estimated. The concert was so perfect — “neither pause, hitch nor uncertainty” — that it was announced immediately in the papers that another would be given on April 21.
Bangoreans were proud of their orchestra, and so the world would be, if it only knew. “A Boston man who visited Bangor recently and who heard one of the rehearsals said afterwards that he thoroughly believed that the country might be searched in vain for a city the size of Bangor, which could produce forty players working together on the class of music and with the finish shown by the local orchestra,” the Bangor Daily News proclaimed jubilantly on the morning the Bangor Symphony Orchestra made its triumphal return to the stage.
Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wer@bangordailynews.net. Some information for this column was derived from “First 100 Years: A Story of the Nation’s Oldest Community Orchestra,” edited by Cindy Reilly.