by Judi McWilliams
Over the past few years the Festival Nomad and I have had wonderful experiences visiting War of 1812 Re-enactments around Ontario. We find these re-enactments amazing and extremely interesting! In this NEW War of 1812 Discovery Series, I want to share with you some of our experiences, while attempting to shed some light into the actual historic.
Beating the War... (Part One)
My older sister, Carol, is an amazing “Drummer”. She plays the drums for the Newmarket Citizen’s Band in parades and concerts. She also plays the tympanis extremely well! My heart stands still when I am at a performance or when I know she has a solo or important piece to “nail”. Recently she attended a festival as a Festival Nomad Correspondent for our Ontario Festivals Visited website. She took pictures for her article, while marching down a hill in a parade, playing the drum. It was an amazing perspective and an amazing feet (although I’m amazed she did not trip over her feet). I asked Carol about her thoughts of playing the drum for re-enactment’s for the period for the War of 1812. As accomplished as she is at “drumming” she informed me that "Drumming for Re-enacting" was completely different and much more difficult! She felt it would take constant practice and time to be able to confidently do re-enacting drumming. Carol says Drumming is very serious business. To quote her, “1812 type drumming is actually very hard. There are about 16 different patterns that one will fit any song. The drummer was one of the most important people in the unit. They also had drum signals for all sorts of things - like "get out of bed", "retreat", etc. The fancier the drum the more $$$ the officers had and probably the better taken care of by the troops.” I took some time to do some research on “Drumming” and found out that there is a LOT more to Drumming then I realized.
(To be continued)
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