During my National Service (NS) in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) Bands, I followed the SAF Central Band to Canada in August 2008 to participate in the Festival International de Musiques Militaires de Québec (translated: Quebec City International Festival of Military Bands). It is an occasion where military bands from many different countries gather together to perform music. Countries involved that year include Germany, Australia, Belgium, Chile, South Korea, the United States, France, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, Russia and Singapore.
During the segment of the festival known as the Military Tattoo, each band would take turns to perform and showcase displays in an indoor stadium. Being from different countries, the performances by individual bands had a vast variety of style due to the differences in their cultures. However, at the end of the tattoo, during the Grand Finale, every band was gathered together in the stadium to perform songs together. The last song of the finale was Amazing Grace, where a Korean musician played a solo on a taepyeongso, a Korean relative of the suona (the Chinese equivalent of an oboe), after which at least five hundred other band instruments, including bagpipes, drums, and singers, joined in as accompaniment. After the finale, the audience, consisting of mostly locals, applauded very loudly, even to the extent of a standing ovation. They must have been amazed by how a seemingly backward instrument which they have never seen before was able to play such a familiar tune beautifully and hence show such a great amount of support for the Korean musician.
Prior to the actual performance, a handful of people from a particular band started an impromptu music-making session and played some popular songs like Star Wars. Subsequently, other people from other bands started joining in the fun, adding to the texture by playing their instruments too. I was rather fascinated by the fact that a single song can bring people of different cultures together to form a band of its own without any planning beforehand.
From the most recent lesson of ES2007S about culture, I learnt that there are many things which are universal throughout all cultures. One of them is music, which seems to be supported by the scenarios mentioned earlier. Although interpreted differently by each culture, music was still able to bridge the gaps between the cultural groups, uniting them together.
Here is a video of the Amazing Grace at the Military Tattoo:
