According to some soldiers' Civil War diary accounts, when their unit settled down for the evening to rest by the fire and listen to the company band, they occasionally got a response from the enemy.
"A Union band would start up and play a couple tunes, and it would waft over the hillsides and Confederate troops would hear it," said Paul Niemisto, associate professor of music at St. Olaf College, "and the Confederate band would muster up its instruments and play something back, and then the union troops would play something back again."
"It was a way of volleying back and forth and not shooting each other," said Paul Maybery, musicologist and conductor of the Yankee Brass Band.
Bands will recreate this scenario with six bands on the banks of the Cannon River during Northfield's third Vintage Band Festival. The four-day festival runs Thursday-Sunday, with more than 100 performances by local and international bands.
According to Niemisto, the festival's artistic director, in the mid-1800s, the band-instrument industry took off. "It just exploded during the Civil War," he said. "They can be heard at a distance, and they could actually help to control troop movements, not only to do inspirational marches and play for funerals, but they could actually do signaling," he said.
Niemisto, who will play euphonium with his Finnish band Boys of America, said 19th-century brass instruments are "much softer, much more mellow [and] sweet" than their modern counterparts.
Maybery compared modern brass bands to mid-19th century brass bands: "One is atomic, and the other is wood-burning."
The festival lineup ranges from Austrian or Swedish bands playing age-old scores to modern bands who relive old traditions.
