UI Professor Honored For Study Of Town Bands

With their polished instruments, handsome uniforms and boxy top-hats, community band members of yesteryear knew music could play an important part in society.

“Even in those days when communities were struggling, one of the first things they did was to form a band,” University of Idaho music professor Mary DuPree said of American communities from the 1860s to the 1920s.

She says small towns took such pride in their bands that they routinely used tax money to purchase expensive military-style uniforms and brass and percussion instruments, as well as to hire full-time professional band masters.

For her four-year study of bands in seven Idaho communities, as well as her work to found a 13-year series of touring musical ensembles, DuPree, 54, has been awarded a Governor’s Award in the Arts in the area of support of arts education.

DuPree started her band research in 1992 by traveling around the state, reviewing old newspapers, historical photographs and talking with elders about community bands. At the end of the project in 1995, she took a slide show around the state, showing how music shaped many of Idaho’s communities.

Still-thriving bands in Lewiston, Twin Falls and Pocatello performed at presentations in their cities.

As an arts advocate, DuPree says it’s frustrating to see school districts across the country cutting art and music budgets.

Cutting funding “is depriving students of the opportunity to express themselves in a very constructive way. Aside from all the warm and fuzzy things, we’ve discovered that performing on string instruments improves cognitive skills and mathematical processes.”

But while the arts have taken some hits of late, she sees an imminent resurgence.

“I believe the arts will regain their importance in the schools and communities. Music has always responded to society. The good stuff keeps coming back.”

DuPree says she’s thrilled by the resurrection of swing music.

“It’s an old music and dance style and it helps bring about awareness of the culture it came from in the 1930s. That’s an absolutely fascinating part of American history.”

During the last two years, DuPree has been working on developing interdisciplinary courses at the university that use team teaching to combine arts, humanities and social sciences.

Last year she team-taught a course that studied the way nature is expressed and portrayed by famous writers, painters and composers.

She says such courses dare students to think “horizontally,” by looking at a subject across several different areas, instead of vertically.