The Friends of Fort George recently hosted an entertaining hour of music and history at Navy Hall to conclude the 2025 Fireside Friday series of informal lectures.
Fort George National Historic Site music and volunteer coordinator Peter Alexander led a talk entitled Music of the Garrison, during which he informed close to 30 people about the many roles played by musicians during the War of 1812.
Visitors to the fort in the past or to events such as the annual Canada Day parade through Queen St. and the Candlelight Stroll are likely familiar with the 41st Regiment of Foot Fife and Drum Corps. As Alexander explained, the members of that historic assemblage had specific purposes for the music they played.
“They were embedded in the company,” said Alexander while holding up a tenor snare drum. They were capable of performing duty calls, playing on the march and playing for ceremonies. There was at least one fifer and drummer ready to go 24 hours a day. People were able to hear them playing throughout the town.”
At that point, Alexander donned his snare drum, Parks Canada education and military coordinator Gavin Watt and longtime Fort George historian Peter Mitchell both picked up their fifes, and the trio played a brief version of Reveille, the soldiers’ wake-up call.
Alexander went on to explain how the fifes and drums were also used to set a cadence for soldiers to march from place to place.
“The drums could estimate your beats per minute,” he said. “If you’re moving at 75 beats per minute, take a 30-inch step and you could figure out your miles per hour. Cadences were drum parts that were repeated over and over again while the fifes played melodies. When they hit one the soldiers loved, they would start singing as well.”
The sound of the musicians marching with the singing soldiers, potentially a mass of 500 men, would have signalled to an opponent the size of the approaching force. Even just one fifer and a drummer would signal a force of 100 men, said Alexander.
Interestingly, across the river, the soldiers at Fort Niagara may have been playing the same cadences and signals.
“There were occasions in which without being able to detect who the enemy was, you might run towards them or you might run away from them,” Alexander admitted. “At the Battle of Châteauguay (near Montreal) a group of buglers sounded on the flank of the Americans, making them believe there was another entire force approaching.”
Once on the battlefield, the musicians would set aside their instruments and shift to a supporting role for the soldiers, other than a bugler who would signal the regiment to advance or retreat based on his call.
Alexander explained that the musicians of the 41st would have been expected to read music charts, though many of them had probably learned to play by rote. He passed around reproductions of drum and fife manuals they would have used, written by Samuel L. Potter, a British drum major in the Band of the Coldstream Guards.
Besides the musicians in the Fife and Drum Corps, some officers were also talented musicians. Fort George would also have been the home to the 41st Band of Music. Besides playing together to entertain fellow soldiers in the fort, music was also a way for them to mix with the community, establish relationships and bring culture to the citizens of Newark.
Bands consisted of at least one soldier per company who was allowed to learn an instrument as long as he was prepared to fall into line immediately as a soldier. Alexander said a lost claims sheet is on file in the Fort George archives outlining a list of instruments lost by the 49th regiment during the Battle of Fort George.
On that list was an instrument called a serpent, made of pear wood and covered in leather. It’s “not really a woodwind, not really a brass, and it’s torturous to play because it has no sense of tuning. You have to sing the tones to get it to work.”
At that, Alexander laboriously demonstrated exactly how the various tones on the exotic-looking and rarely seen horn are made.
The 41st Regiment band would have provided music for community events and functions, such as executions and funerals. There are specific references to the band playing at various places in both Upper and Lower Canada, including a detailed account of a party at Mr. Dillon’s Tavern in Montreal. Watt and Mitchell then picked up clarinets, while Alexander grabbed a double-reed bassoon, and the trio played the British naval anthem Heart of Oak, written in 1759.
The modern-day version of the 41st Regiment of Foot Fife and Drum Corps came together in the late 1980s at the behest of Alexander, who estimates that over 200 youth between the ages of 10 and 14 have taken part in the Parks Canada music program, during which they learn to play reproductions of period-specific instruments..
Dan Laroche, manager of Fort George, says the proceeds from the four Fireside Fridays, hosted by the Friends of Fort George for the third straight year, are used to support programs like the Fife and Drum Corps, helping to fund their travel to events such as the Battle of Fort Erie reenactment and events across the border at Fort Niagara.
Laroche and Peter Martin, Parks Canada’s special events coordinator, have already begun planning for next year’s Fireside Fridays, which will take place in February.