The Circus Song
Another instalment in the "Kat researches something a bit random" series, featuring Czech composers and a Canadian connection!
As promised, a brief departure from my diarizing this week. Instead, a trip into the realm of “things my household randomly gets curious about, that I then feel compelled to go down a rabbit hole researching,” though this one is nowhere near as in-depth as my dive into Quakers and chocolate.
Some weeks ago, my kid wanted to know about the origins of “the circus song.”
As soon as he asked the question, I knew exactly what piece of music he meant. When you hear the words “the circus song,” does a specific tune pop into your mind? It does mine, and it’s this one.
It was easy enough to Google “the circus song” and scroll through. The one we were looking for was in the top ten results, a piece originally composed by Czech composer Julius Fučik.
Fučik (pronounced foo-chick) was born in Prague, and studied composition with Antonín Dvořák (pronounced d’VOR-zhak1 - as this video will teach you). Fučic went on to become an incredibly prolific composer of over 400 marches (and polkas, waltzes, and more). He composed so much for military band that he became known as the “Bohemian Sousa” (more on that later).
In 1897, Fučik was a military band leader in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and stationed in Sarajevo, where he wrote the piece that started me down this garden path.
A brief historical aside: Sarajevo is the capital of what is now the nation of Bosnia Herzegovina, and it was the capital of Bosnia while I was a kid too, under the umbrella of Yugoslavia. It’s an old and beautiful city, founded, in its current state, when the Ottoman Empire took over the region in the 1450s. Big chunks of the Balkans were under Ottoman rule for hundreds of years, and there are a lot of Turkish influences in Serbian cuisine and culture too, though you’d never get most Serbs to admit that specific favourite dishes aren’t authentically theirs alone.
Bosnia was annexed by the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1908, and became a historically notable site a few short years later, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited the city in 1914 and was assassinated by a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip, which kickstarted World War I. Princip was a young revolutionary supported by the Black Hand, a Serbian secret military [terrorist] group interested in the unification of the southern Slavs. Gavrilo Princip probably isn’t a name you had to learn in school, but everyone from my neck of the woods did. After WWI, Bosnia became part of the freshly-unified Yugoslavia, and in 1992, it declared independence, and Sarajevo once again found itself front-page news when the Serbs began a brutal three-year siege of the city (the longest siege in modern history), pelting it with over 300 shells per day, cutting off water and electricity, and killing an estimated 12,000 people and wounding 50,000. Joe Sacco, whose incredible ‘90s non-fiction graphic novel, Palestine, has been mentioned a lot recently for obvious reasons, also wrote two brilliant ones about the Bosnian war, called Safe Area Goražde, and The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo. I highly recommend them all.
So, back to the circus. In 1897, Julius Fučic composed a piece that he originally named Grande Marche Chromatique. However, after encountering a particularly thrilling gladiator scene in Henryk Sienkieweicz’s novel Quo Vadis, he retitled the piece Entry of the Gladiators. Dudes have been thinking about the Roman Empire for centuries!
Just four years later, a Canadian composer named Louis-Philippe Laurendeau created an arrangement of the march for wind bands, and published it under a new name, Thunder and Blazes. The circus song we all know (and love?)!
Thunder and Blazes wasn’t just a march, it was a Screamer.
Screamers had a brief run of popularity between 1895 and 1955, when they were being composed or arranged specifically for circuses. Big Tops could be counted on for a few things: clowns, exotic animals, trapeze artists, a boisterous ringmaster, and fast, high-energy, loud-ass music. Some piped it in through huge amps, but many had live bands or orchestras playing in the tent. What they needed wasn’t just any ol’ ditty, but a soundtrack bombastic enough to whip audiences into a total frenzy as elephants, tigers, acrobats, and assorted other wonders galloped through the ring. Screamers were born just before the turn of the century, and Laurendeau was a pioneer, capitalizing on a major trend when he published his version of Fučic’s piece in 1901.
Often, as in this case, Screamers were really just marches, but played much, much faster. As Fučic composed it, Entry of the Gladiators was played at 118bpm. Laurendeau’s Thunder and Blazes version is closer to 150bmp.
When I was a child, we often visited my grandmother in the small city of Požarevac, where she moved from the tiny 500-person village where my mom (and all her ancestors going back at least two or three generations) were born. It was the ‘80s, and travelling circuses were still an enormously popular entertainment across Europe, so whenever one passed through town, she took me. She also took me to the track for the horse races, but that’s another story. I understand now that some of those old-school circuses were cruel (to animals, and to people) but at the time, they were pure magic to me. I was captivated by circus traditions for decades, and continue to be.
I don’t remember Thunder and Blazes specifically playing in the circuses of my childhood, but it well may have. What I remember is the smell of hay and popcorn, the way the adults gasped when acrobats sometimes performed without a safety net (a totally demented level of risk-taking that I didn’t understand as a kid, because I thought it was impossible for anything to go wrong under the sacred canopy of the Big Top). I remember my mom telling me the story of how she ran away with a circus as a teen, working as the ringmaster for a summer before moving to Belgrade to study acting and live with her dad. This was in the early ‘60s, after her parents’ not-so-friendly divorce.
I tried to get to the bottom of why Thunder and Blazes was so popular as to become almost synonymous with circus. Nobody online seems to address this question, or even ask it. Perhaps it is simply the catchiest Screamer, a fact that is self-evident to circus music scholars and fans alike.
Instead, I’ll leave you with this beautiful snapshot of Canadian circus life in the 1970s: the National Film Board of Canada documentary High Grass Circus, which you can watch for free on the NFB site.
p.s. remember the mention earlier of Fučic as the “Bohemian Sousa”? The Sousa in question is John Phillip Sousa, an American composer of over 130 marches who was known as “the March King.” Many of Sousa’s compositions appeared regularly in the circus Screamer repertoire of the early 20th century. Except, that is, for his most famous, The Stars and Stripes Forever, which was only played in circuses in case of emergency - like, a lion escaping, the big top catching fire. In fact, the piece was known in circuses and theatres as “the Disaster March” and was played for one purpose only: to subtly notify staff of a truly serious situation and allow them to sort out an evacuation plan without causing panic.
Mispronunciations of Dvorak are a slightly random but very serious pet peeve of mine.
Absolutely for me, this one come to my mind! The iconic circus song! I can see the clowns performing their antics, smell the pivot and sit in the edge of my seat watching the trapeze artists! I love the circus!
🎪 🤡 🤹♀️