Captain Kenneth R. Force, '57
Director,US Merchant Marine Academy
Regimental Band
The article below is a slightly edited version of an article that first appeared in the New York Times on January 14, 2009. (Photo: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times.)
WHEN CIRCUMSTANCE DEMANDS POMP
By Peter Applebome.
(The New York Times. January 14, 2009)
Capt. Kenneth R. Force still remembers his first inauguration. He was a kid trumpet player, just out of high school in Queens, in an Army band of music students stationed in front of the Treasury Building. He heard some applause, looked up, and there was Dwight D. Eisenhower coming by in his car, arms up in a triumphant V as he began his second term. It was 1957.
But Captain Force also remembers the nine inaugural celebrations he has attended since then, as director of the United States Merchant Marine Academy Regimental Band ... It’s not likely anyone is keeping score, but there can’t be too many people who have participated in more inaugurations than Captain Force, now 68 and something of a Toscanini of military marching bands. Tuesday will be his 11th.
“I always tell the midshipmen here at Kings Point that you will never forget the memory of passing the president of the United States,” he said. “I can remember every president I ever passed. But what we do doesn’t change. In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age.”
To call Captain Force a band director is a little like calling Paul and Ringo old rock musicians. He wrote his master’s thesis on British marching bands at the Manhattan School of Music. He has conducted the Royal Marine Band in Rotterdam, the Royal Military Band in the Hague, the Band of Her Majesty’s Welsh Guards and many others.
But his niche within a niche is inaugurations and political marches. He has composed political homages of various stripes, including “The First Lady March,” for Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the quite amazing “Presidential Pets March,” complete with barks, yips, yowls and meows, in honor of the nonhuman residents of the current White House.
For the 200th anniversary of the first inauguration, he researched the music of the time and wrote “A Cantata on George Washington’s Inauguration in 1789.” For the 100th anniversary of Grant’s Tomb, he re-scored the music of Ulysses S. Grant’s inauguration for modern instruments.
Captain Force’s fascination began a year or two after the Eisenhower inauguration, when his Army band was dispatched to greet arriving military bands from Britain at the Governors Island ferry slip.
“It was like St. Paul on the Damascus Road,” he recalled. “Off the ferry marched the Band of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines Plymouth with pith helmets and a sound like an organ. You could actually hear their feet march when they went piano. And I just said, ‘This is it, man. I got to do that in this country.’ ” ...
Captain Force worries that music is being pushed out of school curriculums, and he doesn’t like the move toward brassy corps-style bands — trumpets in the air, fancy and thunderous percussion, no clarinets and flutes.
“I’m a traditionalist — military bands, Verdi opera,” he said. “That other stuff is like acid rock. I’m like Frank Sinatra.”
Not surprisingly, Sinatra’s Sinatra remains John Philip Sousa. “Sousa said in a minute and 45 seconds what it took Beethoven 45 minutes to say,” he said.
Captain Force now walks with a cane, so he sends his band off and then watches on television. Still, after 10 inaugurations, he sees a particular significance in Barack Obama’s. “I’m already writing a President Obama march,” he said. “I’m checking some of the folk music of Kenya, looking for something with Kenyan roots and American roots. Anyone can write a two- or three-chord march, but the key is to have something unique.”
Another article about Captain Force appeared in the New York Times on November 5, 1989.
Here is another site about the USMMA Regimental Band,
