Monday Music Matters: Why the Band Still Plays on Veterans Day
Updated: Oct 8
Monday Music Matters | History
Every nation gets the songs it deserves. Bands are how those songs outlive the people who first sang them.
On Monday, November 9, 2026, at 7:00 PM, The Desert Winds present their annual Veterans Day Salute at Congregation Ner Tamid, 55 N Valle Verde Drive in Henderson, Nevada. Our guest conductor for the evening is Dani McCracken.
November 11 began as Armistice Day, named for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, when the guns of the First World War finally stopped. In 1938 Congress made it a national holiday and dedicated it to the cause of world peace. The world had other plans.
The Cobbler Who Built a Holiday
The Veterans Day we know came from Emporia, Kansas, and from a shoe repairman named Alvin J. King. King never served. He was fifteen when America entered the First World War, and by the second one he and his wife had helped raise his nephew, John Cooper, who was killed in action in Belgium. After the war, King befriended the surviving men of his nephew's company, and he decided that Armistice Day was too small a thank you. In 1953, Emporia celebrated the first Veterans Day. The town raised money to send King and his wife Gertrude to Washington. Their congressman, Ed Rees, carried the bill. On June 1, 1954, President Eisenhower, a fellow Kansan, signed it into law. Congress later named Emporia the founding city of Veterans Day, which feels right. The holiday did not start in a capitol. It started in a shoe shop.
From an Emporia shoe shop to a national holiday.
And it has always had a soundtrack.
The March King Went Back to Work
In May of 1917, John Philip Sousa was sixty-two years old and the most famous bandmaster on earth. He could have stayed home. Instead he accepted a lieutenant's commission in the Naval Reserve and went to Great Lakes, where he expanded the existing Navy band and helped establish a music school. Recruits flooded in to say they had played under Sousa, and soon Great Lakes was shipping trained bands out to bases and ships. The March King spent the war to end all wars teaching other men to march in time.
Percy Grainger arrived from Australia as a piano virtuoso. In June 1917 he enlisted as a bandsman with the 15th Coast Artillery at Fort Hamilton, signed up as a saxophonist, and wrote home that he longed for the day he could blow his oboe well enough to play in the band. He became an American citizen in uniform in June 1918. The composer who would give us Lincolnshire Posy learned the inside of a band by sitting inside one.
Gustav Holst tried to enlist and was rejected for bad eyes, bad lungs, and bad digestion. He dropped the "von" from his name, signed on with the YMCA, and sailed for Salonica to organize music for British troops waiting to be sent home. While he was teaching homesick soldiers in Greece, London was giving The Planets its first public performances.
The Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall commissioned Ralph Vaughan Williams's Folk Song Suite, a cornerstone of our repertoire to this day. It premiered there on July 4, 1923, played by a military band in a military music school.
Sousa, Grainger, Holst, and Vaughan Williams: four paths connecting military service and music.
Eternal Flame
There is a memorial in this country with a flame that never goes out. It burns for the recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military decoration, and it is the only memorial of its kind.
Brian Balmages wrote Eternal Flame for that flame. It is a concert overture for band, about five and a half minutes long, premiered in the summer of 2023, so it is still a young piece. That matters to me. The men in this story are a century gone. Balmages is here, writing now, and he chose to spend his craft on remembrance.
He does not wave a flag at you. The piece opens with broad, Olympic-style fanfares and settles into long, stately themes, and if you listen closely you will catch him weaving in the tune we know as "America," the way you catch a familiar face in a crowd. It is never loud about it. The publisher's note says it plainly: the piece is not overtly patriotic. It is after something harder and more honest than patriotism. It is trying to be permanent, the way the flame is permanent.
That is a harder job than it sounds. Anybody can write a fanfare. Writing grief with its shoulders back, pride without swagger, that takes a steady hand. Balmages asks the band to play like people who understand the difference. Every entrance has to mean it. Every release has to let go clean, because this music is not about the noise we make. It is about what keeps burning after the noise stops.
The United States Marine Band put it on record. On November 9, it is ours.
Why This Music Still Shows Up
That is the bloodline. The repertoire concert bands live on was commissioned by armies, taught by soldiers, and carried home in kit bags. Every Veterans Day program is a reunion, whether the audience knows it or not.
On November 9, that bloodline takes the stage. The program centers on music built for exactly this kind of night, including Eric Whitacre's setting of the national anthem, alongside our annual salute to every branch of service.
Attend the Veterans Day Salute in Henderson
So The Desert Winds will be at Congregation Ner Tamid on Monday, November 9, at 7:00 PM, two days before the holiday Alvin King built. Not as decoration. As descendants. The music is in good hands because, for more than a century now, it has been in trained ones.
Bring a veteran. We will bring the band.
If you served, or love someone who did, tell me their name and their branch below. We read every one, and we play better for knowing them.
Learn more about The Desert Winds concert ensemble.
Historical sources
Alvin King's family and the origins of Veterans Day: U.S. House Report 108-196.
The Great Lakes band existed before Sousa's 1917 appointment: Navy Band Great Lakes history.
Folk Song Suite commission and premiere: Bowling Green State University program notes.
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