You might be invested in this hobby to perform with your Fife and Drum corps, to build a community of historic researchers, to hang out with your friends, to have an immersive experience, and/or to educate the public.
All of these reasons – and you can be motivated by multiple of them! – are excellent reasons to be involved in the hobby.
This article is for those of you who are specifically interested in educating the public and talking to people about who you represent – and will help even those of you who are nervous about how to do this.
After 20+ years of reenacting and 8 years of museum interpretation, I have learned a lot about how to engage the public, talk about the role of musicians, and develop demos.
Here, I’d like to share some tips and advice for taking to the public.
Have a Mission Statement
It may sound a little weird to think about having a mission statement as just a lone person, but internalizing this mission is one of the best tools you can have in your back pocket.
What is a Mission Statement?
Just like a business or nonprofit has a mission statement that guides their programs and activities, you want a mission statement that guides the general theme of your talking points.
For example, at Old Fort Niagara our primary mission statement is:
- To break down the myth that Fifers and Drummers were simply used to build morale by demonstrating to the public the role and value of music as communication.
This mission statement ultimately focuses every conversation I have with visitors at Old Fort Niagara, as well as shapes every formal demonstration I perform there.
Let’s talk a little bit more about how you can construct your own.
Breakdown of a Mission Statement
If you go back to my OFN mission statement, you might notice that it actually breaks down into two parts:
1. A point of common knowledge between you and your audience
2. The idea or concept that will be your major guiding theme
So what does that mean?
When talking to the public about a foreign concept and the far distant past, it’s always best to begin with some sort of common knowledge – as it is with most things!
For your mission statement, try to think of some common element that your audience are all likely to more or less be familiar with.
At Old Fort Niagara, we find that most people recognize Fife and Drum as a band of music and generally answer that they’re most valuable function was for morale or entertainment.
By starting with this myth, we create a starting point for a conversation.
After you’ve got the conversation started, you can move in to your major theme.
In our Niagara example, you see that theme is the idea of music as communication. We’ve kept our theme fairly broad so that it can fit to a number of different topics that we might discuss or be asked about.
Some Mission Statement Suggestions
Here are some additional mission statements you might find useful as you develop your own:
- While we tend to think of drummers as little boys, fifers and drummers in the 18th century military were adult, professional musicians employed as communication devices.
- Myth = little drummer boy
- Theme = professional musicians; communication
- A lot of people assume using music for communication signals sounds very difficult to learn, but these signals were designed to be short, simple, and very effective for memorizing.
- Myth = drum signals are hard to learn; music is a weird form of communication
- Theme = signals are short, simple, repetitive = easy to learn / easy to employ
- It’s true that historically military drummers played cadences to keep soldiers in step, just like they do today, but this function was far more significant in military tactics than we often realize.
- Myth = drum cadences just for staying in step
- Theme = staying in step was vital for linear warfare = drum cadences were vital for tactics to be employed effectively
All of these examples ultimately fall back to “music = communication”, but they’re a little more specific.
In the first example, I’d personally focus on the skills of these fifers and drummers as professionally trained musicians. I’d probably play some ceremonial beatings or complex duty calls.
In the second, I’d focus on the signals themselves, playing a few examples to show the audience how simply they are to learn. (Beatings like The Retreat or The Preparative are great examples.)
In the third, I’d focus on field signals, especially how The Retreat and The Charge work. I do a demo like this that is basically a discussion of line tactics / infantry demo, but with the focus on how the drum can move men around the battlefield to accomplish those goals.
How Do I Use A Mission Statement When Talking to the Public
What’s so great about a mission statement is its flexibility.
If you design your mission statement well and have a good sense of what it means, you can transform that mission statement into a 20-minute formal demo or a 1-minute response to a question.
This works so beautifully because the theme becomes your touch point.
In the Old Fort Niagara example, every few sentences we would say some variation of “music = communication”.
The point is to stay focused around this theme and emphasize the theme repeatedly in order to drive your point home in a logical, coherent manner.
So how might this work? Next, I’ll break down how you might organize a demo and organize a few sample questions all around this idea.
Sample Demo
I’m going to use the Old Fort Niagara example to help us think about crafting a formal demonstration.
First things first: a formal demo is all about driving home your mission statement.
For Niagara, this means a formal demo must absolutely instruct the audience on the role of music as an efficient form of communication.
To do this, you might start by making an outline of the different defining factors of a military drummer and his role. For example, your outline might end up looking like this:
- Description of rope tension snare drum
- Field signals to maneuver army and battle
- Duty beatings to communicate daily duties and camp
- Distinctive uniform
Now, you could just elaborate on these four points and it would be a good demo.
But if you want a great demo, then you want to elaborate on these four points while constantly emphasizing your touchstone that theme of “music = communication”.
Here’s how that first point would look:
Describe a rope tension snare drum
- Length of drum is two-three times longer than a modern concert snare
- Longer drums have more resonance, aka their sound travels farther
- Snare drums have cat gut snares on the bottom creating the distinctive snap or crack
- These snares help to add some pitch that distinguishes their sound from cannons and muskets
- Over overall, rope tension snare drums are literally designed to project their sound well and be distinctive from other common camp and battle noises
Notice that I’m doing two things here: 1) I’m describing some of the most important features of a rope tension snare drum, but 2) I’m picking features that fit the theme.
I’m not simply naming the parts of the drum. I’m picking the parts of the drum I want people to focus on.
What I want people to understand is how the design of the snare drum allows this drum to be a good communication device.
Here’s how I would do the same thing to talk about our uniforms:
- Most drummers during the Revolutionary War era had “inverse colors” or distinctive uniforms so they were easy to tell apart from the regular soldiers.
- Why? In battle, if you need your “walkie-talkie”, do you want to hunt them down or do you want to find them quickly?
Of course, there’s a ton more I could say on this subject. We could certain talk more in-depth about the lace, unit distinctions, lace design, etc. But at the end of the day, the only thing important to stay on our theme is that “distinct uniform = easy to find = better communication device”.
How to Rely on Your Mission Statement to Answer Questions
I say this in the most affectionate and polite way as possible – you can usually tell the difference between a reenactor and a museum interpreter by the way they answer a visitor’s question.
Reenactors have a lot of knowledge and passion to share history and relatively few opportunities to do so, and so their answers often tend to dive in deep and/or meander around.
A good museum interpreter, however, will answer the question using their mission statement. This is really important because it helps them to focus their answer on the most important details and not confuse the audience / lose interest.
It also helps them to keep hitting on their touchstone so that when the visitor walks away, unfortunately having forgotten a good deal of the details, they’re left with that major theme that was repeated over and over again in the answer.
What’s also great about using your mission statement to answer questions is that it helps you to quickly focus your own mind when someone presents a new question that you don’t have a ready-made answer for.
How to be Prepared for Audience Questions
If you really want to walk in to a presentation or living history feeling super prepared and confident, you should have a few roughly prepared answers to common questions.
Take a moment to write down the most common questions you’ve heard or even questions that you have. Here’s a short list of what I’ve heard over my years:
- How old were musicians in general?
- Where do musicians stand in battle?
- Were musicians targets in battle?
- How did soldiers learn all the duty calls?
- Why is your uniform different from everyone else’s?
- How did musicians learn the music?
- How did you (as a modern-day drummer) learn this historic music?
Don’t try to memorize your demo or your answers verbatim, otherwise you’ll likely stumble as you try to give a prepared statement. Instead, take some time now to just outline some general thoughts so that a basic answer is quickly available to you.
When I answer questions, I use a basic formula like this:
- Provide a broad answer in terms of the mission statement
- Give 1-3 facts / examples / details that prove my point
- Wrap up by emphasizing the mission statement
Here’s an example based on Old Fort Niagara’s mission statement:
How did the soldiers learn all the duty calls?
- Broad Answer: The simple answer is through repetition and drill.
- Examples / Details:
- A duty drummer beat the signals during drill, which soldiers – especially new recruits – spent a long of time doing.
- The signals themselves are designed to be simple and repetitive. Think of any commercial jingle – they’re simple, repetitive, and catchy and that’s why they get stuck in our heads.
- A lot of battlefield signals had a second meaning used in camp. This way, soldiers heard these battlefield signals every single day in their daily life, to help reinforce their memory.
- Wrap Up: Using music as a communication device is really effective because the brain absorbs music and so – just like we learn commercial jingles and our favorite songs with ease – the soldiers mastered these signals pretty quickly.
Notice that in my answer I hightlighted some of the value of drummers – they were used for field signals and daily camp duties.
This answer also breaks down the musical value of the signals, again reinforcing the idea that music = communication makes a lot of sense.
Why You Need A Mission Statement
I can’t overstate how valuable a mission statement really is.
Your mission statement defines what you care about as an interpreter.
This keeps your demos logical and organized, and helps your audience to know precisely what to focus on.
If you really want to be a great interpreter and get better at educating the public at events, these are your next steps:
- Come up with a mission statement
- Outline a demo and add details that emphasis your theme
- Come up with a handful of ready crafted answers to some popular questions, always keeping your mission statement in mind
If you want to develop your ability to talk to the public and become a better interpreter, keep an eye out for additional blog posts in the category “How to Talk to the Public?”.
To feel more confident in your answers as you talk to the public, make sure you have plenty of knowledge in your back pocket. Check out some of my other posts on the history of rudiment, duty calls, snare drum, etc.
