Thomas Wiggins: The Battle of Manassas

Thomas Wiggins was born blind, but at an early age his ability as a pianist to reproduce sounds he heard meant that he was taken on tour and put on show. Thomas was from and African family taken into slavery in the USA.
One of his compositions was “The Battle of Manassas” with the pounding bass sounding like gun fire. He uses tunes to represent the opposing sides as Beethoven had done in “Wellington’s Victory” and Tchaikovsky was to do in his 1812 Overture.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.