A march is defined as a piece of music which has a strong and regular rhythm. This type of music can be categorized into a particular genre because it is specifically developed for being played while marching like the typical beat of German marching songs. Because it is generally and most often performed by a military band,
up till the sixteenth century marches were still something that weren’t known and only makeshift fife embellishment was used. However, the sixteenth century marked the first penning down of marches and the nineteenth century witnessed an extensive advancement in terms of brass instruments, extravagant orchestras and German soldier songs.
Marching music has its origins in military and drums and especially snare drums are a must for playing marches in addition to other musical instruments like fife, horns, brass instruments, woodwind instruments all of which characterize German soldier songs. An interesting fact pertaining to it is that when played at paces which are multiples of the regular human heartbeat then it has an amazing hypnotic effect on the soldiers who are marching. This is why German marching songs were extensively used. March music can be broadly classified into four different kinds, namely Latin American march music, Asian march music, American march music and European march music.
German marching songs feature an extremely strict tempo, like 110 beats in one minute. Also, it is easy to identify this kind of music because they sound like polka or folk music due to a strong ‘oom-pah’ which is attributed to the playing of brass in a low not