Life Guards' Dragoon Music Corps
Life Guards’ Dragoon Music Corps, officially the Royal Swedish Cavalry Band (Livgardets dragonmusikkår, LDK), is one of Sweden’s three professional military bands. It traces its roots to the 1500s when King Gustav Vasa formed the first horse regiment. Today it is one of the world’s few mounted bands. The band leads the Life Guards at the King’s Guard in Stockholm, and its parades are a major tourist attraction.
The band is part of the Swedish Armed Forces Music Corps, which oversees all Swedish military bands. It is based at the Cavalry Barracks in Stockholm, where 80 horses are kept. The band has 27 brass players and 3 percussionists. Musicians perform mounted or on foot and give public concerts. Each year they perform about 140 times, including around 45 mounted King’s Guard parades.
LDK uses three horse breeds: black Shires carry the kettle drums; Altkladruber Grey horses carry the fanfare trumpeters; and Swedish Warm-blood Chestnuts carry the cornets, horns, bass trumpets, euphoniums and tubas. The full dress is Pattern 1895, worn in three versions: Full Dress Ceremonials, No. 1 Dress, and No. 2 Dress.
Their repertoire covers many kinds of music, and mounted performances are a daily feature. In summer they march to the Stockholm Palace; at times they have been deployed abroad to entertain Swedish forces, for example in Afghanistan. The band’s ensembles range from single fanfare calls to brass quintets and sextets, up to all 30 musicians performing together in a concert.
Historically, Gustav Vasa’s Life Guards began with two trumpeters in 1521 and grew over time. The Uppland Horse joined the Life Guards in 1526, and later became part of the Life Regiment of Horse with a mounted band. The band was influenced by Wilhelm Wieprecht’s reforms of mounted bands in the 19th century, and today it remains one of the few mounted bands in the world. After the Royal Horse Guards were disbanded in 1949, the Life Guards formed the mounted band. In 1971 professional bands were partly outsourced, and the mounted band shrank to a small core. Conscripts joined in 1990, and by 1992 it became a conscript-based unit again. Since 2011–12, the band has once more been a full-time professional military band.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 19:26 (CET).