Kenneth Force, 83

‘Toscanini of military marching bands’

Kenneth Force, who as the leader of the Merchant Marine Academy Regimental Band from 1971 to 2016 was one of the nation’s foremost experts in the art of military pomp, died Oct. 7 in Rye, New York. He was 83.

A former student of his, Marianne Lepre, said the death, at a long-term nursing facility, was caused by respiratory failure brought on by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Military music arose as a means of communicating orders to troops, but it has long since become a ceremonial custom, with trumpet-tooting and drum-rolling tunes like “Hail to the Chief” and “The Red, White and Blue.”

A military man might say that Force exerted full-spectrum dominance over this territory.

At one time or another, he conducted the U.S. Marine Corps Band, which performs for the president; the band of the Black Watch, a Scottish infantry battalion; the bands, in Britain, of Her Majesty’s Grenadier Guards, Welsh Guards and Royal Marines; and the Dutch Royal Military Band.

He performed at 10 presidential inaugurations, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s to George W. Bush’s.

“It’s not likely anyone is keeping score,” Peter Applebome of The New York Times wrote in an Our Towns column in 2009, “but there can’t be too many people who have participated in more inaugurations than Captain Force, now 68 and something of a Toscanini of military marching bands.”

He earned that distinction principally as director of music at the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, on Long Island.

His band members were not aspiring musicians; they were midshipmen training to receive Bachelor of Science degrees, U.S. Coast Guard licenses and officers’ commissions.

At inaugurations, the student musicians got to play while marching past a presidential reviewing stand.

“I always tell the midshipmen that you will never forget the memory of passing the president of the United States,” Force told the Times.

At each inauguration, his band blared the classic 19th-century song “A Life on the Ocean Wave.”

“What we do doesn’t change,” he said. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age.”

Force kept tradition alive in several ways. He rearranged old band tunes for modern instruments — work he compared to repairing antiques — and he composed new political homages, including “First Lady March” and “Presidential Pets March” (which includes barks and meows).

He and his band were sought after by organizers of great American events. They played at Miss America pageant parades; atop the Brooklyn Bridge for its 100th anniversary; on the field during World Series; on the courts of the U.S. Open after 9/11; and aboard the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 when it carried World War II veterans to Normandy, France, in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of D-Day.

In 1989, the Times credited Force with making his band sound like “a giant walking organ.”

Kenneth Richard Force was born March 24, 1940, in the Queens borough of New York City, where he grew up, to Alvina and George Force. His father was a banker.

Force got his musical training playing trumpet in the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, in Broadway pit bands and in the band of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus.

Force received a bandsman’s diploma from the U.S. Naval School of Music in Washington in 1958, a bachelor of music degree from the Manhattan School of Music in 1964, and a master’s degree from the same institution the next year.

He wrote his master’s thesis on British military bands.

On one occasion, in the late 1990s, he waged a battle that united his passions for military music history, preservation and teaching.

— The New York Times