Circus Music Lives

Circus Culture is alive and well. Young creatives have taken to learning the trades of the sideshow as well as the entertainments of the center ring. Acrobats and rope climbers entertain in trendy neighborhoods and people enroll in clown college with all earnestness.  But what of a musician enamored by the sounds of the circus? Where can you hear the real thing when the mainstream troops have turned to canned sound for their accompaniment and the avant-garde favor Eastern European phantasmagoria? (Even if it is kind of awesome.) Fortunately, a select society of amateur enthusiasts has been researching and rehearsing the real thing for decades. The beauty of America is that, even before the internet, you could always find people to share and encourage your marvelous obsessions. In 1971 Charles Bennett Jr. and Art Stensvad gathered fans of circus music into Windjammers Unlimited and the organization is still going strong today. Membership holds steady at over 500 members and they produce a bi-monthly newsletter, The Circus Fanfare, to share goings on and new discoveries in the genre. They also meet every summer to practice, record and perform the music together, and every winter to play for an actual circus at their annual convention. According to their websit