March Timpani

The title names the effect and the opening delivers it: one note struck over and over in the middle of the keyboard, then the same note falling away in bare octaves to the bottom of the instrument, which is a pair of kettle drums rendered on a piano. The march itself is in A flat, and the two pitches doing the drumming underneath it are A flat and E flat, exactly how timpani would have been tuned for it. Imitation was what audiences bought tickets for: Wiggins gave them a rainstorm, a railroad, the guns at Manassas. Here he gives them the drums.

It was printed in New York in 1880 by J. G. Bethune, which is to say by his manager. John Bethune, son of the man whose household had owned him, ran his touring life from 1875 until he was killed in a railway accident in 1884. The dedication is to Joseph Poznanski, the pianist Wiggins worked with in those New York years and the man who wrote his new pieces down for publication: Wiggins was blind and composed at the keyboard, so somebody else's hand always stood between his music and the page. Much of his catalogue reached print under invented names, which makes a piece that carries his own and thanks the man who notated it worth noticing.

The transcription follows the performance as played, with the left and right hands on separate MIDI channels. That is more useful here than usual: the drum writing lives in the left hand, so muting the right leaves you alone with the part of the piece the title is about.