Music and manners; personal reminiscences and sketches of character

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

139-140

text excerpt

[S]uch reminiscences as I have retained of music and musicians in Belgrade are exclusively connected with the foreign element of that capital's population. When I first paid it a brief visit, nearly twenty years ago, the mighty fortress for the possession of which Moslem and Christian have so often and fiercely fought in times long past, was still in the hands of the Turks, and the first music, or that which was intended to be so, produced for my especial delectation, as the honoured guest of the worthy old Pasha in command of the garrison, was of a nature to all but petrify me with astonishment and and consternation. Having gleaned from the British Diplomatic Agent, with whom I was staying, that I was a music-lover, His Excellency Ali Riza, bent, in the fulness of his heart, upon giving me the greatest artistic treat of which he could dispose, despatched the full band of the artillery regiment constituting the bulk of his garrison, to the court-yard of the British Agency at an early hour of the morning after the banquet at which he had entertained me with profuse Oriental hospitality. This band, some forty strong and brass to a man, except the drums and a peal of silver bells intermingled with horse-tails, received orders to take up a position exactly under the bedroom window of the newly-arrived English Effendi, and there, at precisely seven a.m., to open upon him with the March of Sultan Mechmet — by many degrees the most vigorous concerted piece in the Ottoman military orchestral repertoire.

excerpt from 'Music and manners; personal reminiscences and sketches of character' pp. 139-140 (262 words)

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