We speak often about “tradition” in music, particularly in the world of the military and wind band. We invoke it to justify repertoire choices, organisational structures, even aesthetic priorities. Yet we rarely pause to ask a more uncomfortable question: who was actually allowed to define that tradition in the first place?
One of the earliest serious attempts to write a history of the military band — not merely as a collection of instruments or a catalogue of regiments, but as a cultural and organisational phenomenon — was undertaken in the late nineteenth century by a French scholar named Marie Bobillier. For most of its early readers, however, this fact was carefully obscured. Bobillier published her work under the male pseudonym “Michel Brenet”, because a woman writing authoritatively about military music was unlikely to be taken seriously in her own name.
This was not a matter of modesty, nor of literary fashion. It was a practical necessity. Bobillier was deeply knowledgeable, rigorously trained, and intellectually ambitious. But authority in musical scholarship — particularly in subjects associated with the military — was assumed to belong to men. To be heard at all, she had to disguise herself.
What makes The Military Band remarkable is not simply the circumstances of its authorship, but the quality of the thinking it contains. Bobillier does not treat military music as a curiosity or a footnote to “serious” musical history. Instead, she recognises it as a living institution, shaped by politics, education, taste, and social function. She is concerned not only with what military bands played, but why they played it, for whom, and to what end.
Reading her work today, one is struck by how familiar her concerns sound. She writes about the tension between artistic ambition and practical function; about the dangers of complacency and routine; about the importance of education and leadership within ensembles. These are not antiquarian observations. They are questions that continue to animate debates about band music in the present.
And yet, we often behave as if such debates are new — as if the problems of repertoire quality, institutional purpose, and musical seriousness emerged only in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Bobillier’s book quietly undermines that assumption. It reminds us that many of the issues we struggle with today were already being identified, articulated, and argued over more than a century ago.
There is a further irony here. A tradition that prides itself on continuity has, in this case, failed to carry forward one of its most perceptive early voices. Bobillier’s work fell into relative obscurity, not because it lacked insight, but because its author did not fit the image of who was supposed to speak with authority. The history of the military band, like so many other histories, was shaped not only by ideas, but by exclusions.
I first encountered The Military Band while working through a wider body of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on wind and military music. What immediately struck me was the clarity of Bobillier’s prose and the seriousness with which she approached her subject. This was not a marginal or apologetic text. It was confident, critical, and engaged with the central questions of musical culture. It deserved to be read — and read widely — in its own right.
Translating the book into English has been, for me, an act of recovery rather than reinterpretation. My aim has not been to modernise Bobillier’s arguments or to retrofit them to contemporary concerns, but simply to allow her to speak again, as directly as possible, to today’s readers. The result is a voice that feels both historically grounded and uncannily present.
If we care about the future of the military band — about its artistic health, its cultural relevance, and its intellectual seriousness — then we owe it to ourselves to listen carefully to its early critics and historians. That includes those whose authority was questioned or obscured in their own time.
Sometimes, the most traditional act is not preservation, but recovery.
This essay grew out of my work translating The Military Band by Marie Bobillier (1894), published in English for the first time.
The book is available here: books.by/maximes-music