Composer

Biography

Alexander Lithgow (1870-1929) was born in Glasgow.

Lithgow was brought to Invercargill as a boy by his migrant family. He was taught to play the cornet there by W.V. Siddall, who like Lithgow, would become a conductor of the Woolston Band. Lithgow himself conducted Woolston in 1901.

He wrote his most well-known work, Invercargill March, in 1908 and dedicated it to the citizens of Invercargill as a momento of the many pleasant years he spent there as a boy. The work’s popularity is widespread throughout the world’s brass band fraternity and it has become the unofficial anthem of a city which remains a stronghold of New Zealand banding.