There’s More Than Oom-Pah to Marine Band

WASHINGTON —  “If the Army and the Navy ever look on heaven’s scenes,” boasts the foot-tapping Marine Hymn, “they will find the streets there guarded--by United States Marines!”

But the Marine Band can quickly drop the oom-pah and put together a snazzy old-fashioned string serenade. They fiddle away at Viennese waltzes for White House receptions in their bright red-and-blue dress uniforms.

“I’ve stood there and listened to them, and heard them go from Mozart to Stevie Wonder,” said Lt. Col. Timothy W. Foley, the band’s director and as such the traditional music advisor to the White House.

Americans are used to the traditional marching Marine Band. There were 99 staff sergeants, gunnery sergeants, master sergeants and master gunnery sergeants marching in President Clinton’s inaugural parade. (Despite their titles, they have no combat mission.)

But concertos, string quartets, harp music?

The Clinton family likes rhythm and blues. In 1991, the future president sat in, playing the saxophone, for some of the numbers played by a Marine dance band at the Arkansas governor’s mansion in Little Rock.

President Warren G. Harding did better. He played every band instrument except the trombone and the E-flat cornet, and sometimes joined rehearsals in the White House during the early 1920s.

“We play what’s appropriate,” Foley said. “The Clintons like the harp on private occasions, and the harp and flute.”

The 143 members of the band, a third of them women, break up into many kinds of musical formations, depending on the function. For St. Patrick’s Day, they assembled an Irish music group.

They do 450 public performances a year, all of them free, and 200 others at the White House on such occasions as the National Mayors Conference.

Nearly two centuries ago, the band became official when President John Adams signed a bill creating the U.S. Marine Corps. They will celebrate their 200th birthday next year.