Bandstand? (Sound Illustration Challenge: Day 7)

Well no, it isn't a bandstand. But nonetheless, here is a nice march to pretend it is. It's a pretty lunatic (fittingly - see below!) march by that most singularly individual composer, the American Charles Ives. I used to have a tape of the Band of the Coldstream Guards playing this in the open air in London, complete with traffic noises. I probably recorded it in 1973, when BBC Radio 3 celebrated the centenary of Ives' birth. My tape ran out before the piece finished, and it was years before I found out how it ended. This performance, while lacking the traffic, seems a suitably raucous climax to a stimulating week of sounds and images! I particularly like the way they have applause at the beginning, in case the audience doesn't feel like it at the end!

And the bandstand that isn't was a place for the patients at Pen-y-Fal, which used to be a psychiatric hospital (originally a Lunatic Asylum), to take the air in the enlightened notion that fresh air would help them. Now the hospital has been converted to luxury housing, and the residents don't seem to use these bandstand-like edifices for anything. Shame.