Hello group,  I have identified one of the formerly unknown Wurlitzer
165 band organ tunes, tune #7 on roll #6505.  It is a march in 2/4
meter with a very exciting and spectacular arrangement that just gets
better and better as it goes along!

The song title is "Under the Big Tent", a march composed by Ned Brill,
who was the leader of his own concert band, featured with the Barnum
and Bailey Circus!

Here's a link to the march as played by the replica 165 band organ
built by Mr. Johnny Verbeeck, which currently plays on the carousel
at Seabreeze Park, Rochester, New York.  Thanks to Dan Robinson for
posting this YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRrjBQJgp_M
 

Here is the copyright registration from "Catalog of Copyright Entries,
Musical compositions, Part 3," published by Library of Congress
Copyright Office:

  UNDER THE BIG TENT; march by Ned Brill; pf. [10656
  (C) Apr. 26, 1913; 2 c. May. 1, 1913; E 309534;
  F. J. A. Forster, Chicago.

Notes: "pf" means pianoforte, meaning that the copy of the sheet music
Forster submitted to Library of Congress for deposition purposes was a
piano copy.  This does not necessarily mean that the piece was composed
for piano first (the text on the sheet music proves otherwise, anyway),
it simply means this is the copy Forster happened to send LoC at
the time.

Some publishers copyrighted the band and orchestra scores to pieces
separately, while others did not bother to copyright the band and
orchestra arrangements, or waited a year or two to copyright non-piano
editions, probably since these were harder to plagiarize than a piano
or piano/vocal score, and they usually did not sell as many copies as
a piano score, either.

(If you think about it, there were many more homes and businesses with
pianos than there were bands and orchestras in the country, and also,
each band or orchestra only needed one copy of the score for all of
the players, whereas each pianist, amateur or professional, would want
their own copy of the sheet music.)

The other two numbers in the copyright registration are important:

"10656" is the index number, used to look up this particular registration
entry in the multiple 1913 volumes, via the big end-of-the-year annual
1913 index.  (In this index, pieces are listed alphabetically by
publishers and composers).

"E 309534" is the most important number, since this is the actual
copyright registration number, and theoretically (I say this, because the
Library of Congress does not always have everything easily accessible,
things are lost or misplaced from time to time), you could submit a
request to Library of Congress for a copy of this sheet music using
this registration number, and they could find it and copy it for you.
Now, of course, that the sheet music for this public-domain march is
online (and I have provided links to it in this article), you don't
need to do this!

The cover of the piano score has a photo of Mr. Brill, and the text at
the top of the cover reads "Featured by Ned Brill's concert band with
the Barnum & Bailey Circus".

Here's a link to a free copy of the piano score.  The piece was
written and published for band, but most publishers published piano
solo reductions of most of these numbers for commercial reasons.  Don't
worry -- the tune and sheet music is now public-domain, to use and
perform it as you wish!

http://digital.library.msstate.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SheetMusic/id/203/rec/2 

_And,_ courtesy of the wonderful sheet music site, "Band Music PDF" at
http://www.bandmusicpdf.org/index.html  here's a link to the full and
complete original published concert band score (also public-domain):

http://www.bandmusicpdf.org/search/media/bmpdffiles/UnderBigTent.pdf 

(According to the web site, that particular copy of the score is
available courtesy of the North Royalton, Ohio, Community Band Digital
Library.)

This piece was published in 1913 by Forster Music Publisher, one of
the top four or five most major popular music publishers in Chicago in
1913, in terms of their marketing and distribution of their music.

Although they only copyrighted and published (on average) about 25
pieces a year -- compared to, say, the approximately 400-500 per year
copyrighted and published by American popular publishing kingpins M.
Witmark and Sons and Jerome H. Remick -- Forster was still great at
getting all of their publications in the hands of the big phonograph
record and music roll companies, to be made on records and rolls.

I discovered the sheet music to this piece by accident, while browsing
through 1913 sheet music to potentially learn and perform this year, at
the Charles Templeton digital sheet music collection, at Mississippi
State University:

http://digital.library.msstate.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SheetMusic/id/203/rec/1 

In my opinion, the reason this march arrangement is so great is because
the unnamed Wurlitzer arranger simply used Mr. Brill's original published
concert band score, reducing it and adapting it appropriately for the
Wurlitzer 165 scale, with appropriate registration to match the
orchestration in the original arrangement.

Luckily, the Wurlitzer 165 scale is mostly-chromatic in the melody
(it is missing only top D-sharp), and also is mostly chromatic in the
accompaniment and trumpet sections (missing only a couple of
accidentals) so that the march really doesn't need to be mutilated like
so many other complex marches were to fit other, smaller band organ
scales.  (Of course, the simpler, diatonic marches are exceptions to
this and do work very well on organs with limited scales.)

Following along on the band score, the only part that really seems
mostly absent in this arrangement is the trombone and baritone
counter-melody line.  This is unsurprising, because the Style 165 organ
scale doesn't really have any dedicated section that is in the right
pitch range to play this line.

The so-called "trombones" on the Wurlitzer 165 really play more of the
tuba part most of the time because they are slaved to the bass section
whenever the trombone register is activated, they do not have a
dedicated section of their own like most earlier brass military band
organs (and also like most European organs) do.

The 165 trumpet section can and (depending upon the arranger) sometimes
does take over some of the counter-melody parts, but in my opinion, the
arrangers are wiser leaving it playing actual cornet and trumpet parts,
because the pipes are pitched in this range and sound more like soprano
horns (trumpet, cornet. etc) than tenor horns (baritone, trombone, etc).

I would really love to hear this great march on other large band and
fairground organs in the future.  I think that if the arrangements are
carefully done, and respectful of the original score, it will sound
great!

And yes, you folks have my permission to re-print this "discovery"
in the COAA Carousel Organ journal and/or the AMICA Bulletin and/or the
MBSI Journal, if you'd like.  (I put "discovery" in quotation marks
because anyone with both this recording and the sheet music to the tune
could have "discovered" this, I just happened to do so, by chance.)

Much more importantly than the identification of this tune, please
enjoy the links to the "Templeton" and "Band Music PDF" sheet music
sites.

Sincerely,
Andrew E. Barrett
August 9, 2013

 [ Good sleuthing, Andrew!  Listen closely in the video at time 1:21
 [ and thereafter -- I hear an accordion 'shaking' in a Chicago polka
 [ band!  :-)  -- Robbie