What is a fife exactly? I wondered when I heard about The Fifes & Drums of York Town. I don’t remember my fourth-grade music teacher mentioning the fife as we prepared for our Revolutionary War musical performance. Nor did I ever have a friend who proudly said they were taking fife lessons after school.
A little research revealed that the fife is a small, high-pitched, transverse aerophone that is diatonically tuned and has holes. Hmmm. I still didn’t know what a fife was. Simplified, it’s a wooden flute-like instrument, first played in medieval Europe. You hold it horizontally and play using your fingers and six holes for notes and blowing across one hole for sound—kind of like a flute but smaller and more piercing and shrill. Its high notes worked well in the military, where it needed to be heard conveying information above combat, verbal commands, and the drums that often accompanied it.
The Fife & Drums of York Town debuted in 1976 in honor of the Bicentennial Celebration of the American Revolution. Since then, they’ve continued to promote the corps’ mission of introducing the public to a historic sound not heard much in modern times and teaching youth about the instrument and its role in the Revolutionary War. Currently, around 40 Yorktown area residents—mostly under age 18—are members, and they have played at landmarks such as the Jefferson Memorial, the United States Capitol, Gettysburg Battlefield, the Virginia Governor’s Mansion, the Statue of Liberty, and the Eiffel Tower…