My colleague Detlev, from our Austrian office, is passionate about collecting railroad memorabilia, including a rare niche: 19th-century railroad music. These pieces were written to celebrate new rail lines, stations, and locomotives—performed once or twice and then forgotten. Until now.
Detlev generously shared some of this music with me. The challenge? It was written for piano, which I don’t play. Enter a friend of mine, Gabe Stone, adjunct music professor at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg Virginia, who was immediately intrigued. As it happens, he leads the W&M Cornet Band as a side project, which performs 19th-century music on antique instruments. He is always on the lookout for "new" music and railroad music seemed to be just the thing for such a quirky ensemble.
To adapt the pieces, I proposed a student project: transcribe Detlev’s piano scores for horn band. The result? Three pieces—The Railroad March (1828), Berlin-Potsdamer Eisenbahn-Galopp (1838), and The Locomotive Quickstep (1846)—were rewritten by the students and rehearsal started in mid-March. It was a challenging practice time with much of the music having to be adjusted on the fly to compensate for the eclectic variety of instruments used by the ensemble. We are so very blessed to be living in a time when A=440 is a standard
! The set list for the concert was rounded out by some old favorites including a pre-Sousa version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and a few Hymns.The concert took place on May 1 at W&M. The band, made up of students, community musicians, and I—played on authentic 130+ year-old instruments complete with tuning quirks true to the 19th-century sound which makes some of the passages sound "off" to our modern ears, but it was the best compromise we could come up with and as true to what a mid-19th century person would have experienced on a Saturday afternoon in the park. Among the instruments were two rare 4-valve trombones, including one I played—a Zazvonil once used in the Vienna Opera House, and a Pavel Zalud. What is important to keep in mind is that, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time these railroad compositions have been heard in over 175 years. If anybody knows about these works being performed in recent times, we would certainly like to hear about it!
Thanks to Detlev’s generosity and Prof. Stone’s enthusiasm, railroad music has now found a home in the W&M curriculum, inspiring students to rediscover and revive a long-lost genre. While by no means a perfect performance, all of us learned valuable lessons and gained priceless experience that could only have be gained by immersing ourselves in the music of 19th century, instruments and all. Next year, the project is to blend new railroad works with baseball music of the same era. That should be interesting!
