John Philip Sousa

John Philip Sousa
November 6, 1854 – March 6 1932 (aged 77)
Portrait of John Philip Sousa taken in 1900
Place of birth	Washington, D.C.
Place of death	Reading, Pennsylvania
Allegiance	United States Marine Corps

John Philip Sousa (November 6, 1854 – March 6, 1932) was an American composer and conductor of the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries known particularly for American military marches.

Sousa is known to have composed at least 136 military marches, many of which included innovative instrumental effects became emblematic of the genre. Among his best known compositions are “The Washington Post” (1889), “The Liberty Bell” (1893), “Stars and Stripes Forever” (1897), and “Semper Fidelis” (1888), later adopted as the official march of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Because of his prominence and expertise in composing numerous marches, Sousa is known as "The March King". He also held a deep-seated belief that his talent was a God-given gift and that he had a particular responsibility to use that gift in a noble fashion. An American icon, he is arguably the most well-known American composer.

Biography

Sousa and the Marine Corps Band, 1893

Sousa was born in Washington, D.C., to John António de Sousa and Maria Elisabeth Trinkhaus. His parents were of Portuguese, Spanish and Bavarian (German) descent; his grandparents were Portuguese refugees. Sousa started his music education, playing the violin at the age of six. He was found to have absolute pitch.

When Sousa reached the age of 13, his father, a trombonist in the United States Marine Band, enlisted his son in the Marine Corps as an apprentice. He served his apprenticeship for seven years until 1875, and he apparently learned to play all the wind instruments while honing his skills with the violin. He then joined a theatrical orchestra, where he learned to conduct. He returned to the U.S. Marine Band as its head in 1880 and remained as its conductor until 1892.

During his tenure as the director of the Marine Band, Sousa transformed the ensemble into an organization of the highest musical standards. It was during this time that he composed many of his most popular marches including The Gladiator, High School Cadets, El Capitan, Washington Post, and Semper Fidelis, which became the official march of the United States Marine Corps.

Sousa then organized his own band in 1892. It toured widely, representing the United States at the Paris Exposition in 1900 before touring Europe. The Sousa band was comprised of some of finest instrumentalists in the country including cornet player Herbert L. Clarke and trombonist, Arthur Pryor. Sousa took great interest in bringing musical performances of the highest quality to the public and the Sousa Band was created in large part to accomplish this.

Sousa conducted the Seventh Regiment Military Band at the opening of Yankee Stadium on April 18, 1923. For many years, Sousa refused to conduct on the radio, fearing a lack of personal contact with the audience. He was finally persuaded to do so in 1929 and became a huge success.

On December 30, 1879, he married Jane van Middlesworth Bellis. They had three children. First child was John Philip Sousa, Jr (1 April 1881 - 18 May 1937). Second was Jane Priscilla (7 Aug 1882 - 28 Oct 1958). Third was Helen (21 Jan 1887 - 14 Oct 1975). All three are buried in the John Philip Sousa plot in the Congressional cemetery. Jane joined the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1907.

Sousa died on March 6, 1932, in his room at the Abraham Lincoln Hotel in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Other writing, skills, and interests

Sousa exhibited many talents aside from music. He wrote five novels and a full length autobiography, Marching Along, as well as a great number of articles and letters-to-the-editor on a variety of subjects. His skill as a horseman met championship criteria.

In his 1902 novel The Fifth String a young violinist makes a deal with the Devil for a magic violin with five strings. The strings can excite the emotions of Pity, Hope, Love and Joy- the 5th string is Death and can be played only once before causing the player's own death. He has a brilliant career but cannot win the love of the woman he desires. At a final concert he plays upon the death string.

In 1905 Sousa published the book Pipetown Sandy, which included a satirical poem titled "The Feast of the Monkeys." The poem describes a lavish party attended by a variety of animals, but overshadowed by the King of Beasts…the lion…who allows the muttering guests the privilege of watching him eat the entire feast. At the end of his gluttony, the lion explains, "Come all rejoice, You’ve seen your monarch dine." Sousa was said to explain the poem as nonsense verse, but there was definitely an egalitarian tone to it.

In 1920 he wrote another work called The Transit of Venus, a 40,000-word story. It is about a group of misogynists called the Alimony Club who, as a way of temporarily escaping the society of women, embark on a sea voyage to observe the transit of Venus. The captain's niece, however, has stowed away on board and soon wins over the men. [1]

One year after the 1882 Transit of Venus, Sousa was commissioned to compose a processional for the unveiling of a bronze statue of American physicist Joseph Henry, who had died in 1878. Henry, who had developed the first electric motor, was also the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

As a trapshooter, he ranks as one of the all-time greats, and he is enshrined in the Trapshooting Hall of Fame. He even organized the first national trapshooting organization, a forerunner to today's Amateur Trapshooting Association. Sousa remained active in the fledgling ATA for some time after its formation. Some credit Sousa as the father of organized trapshooting in America. Sousa also wrote numerous articles about trapshooting.

A Freemason, Sousa was fascinated by what the group considered mystical qualities in otherwise natural phenomena. According to Sten Odenwald of the NASA IMAGE Science Center[2], this played a significant role in the selection of the time and date of the performance, April 19, 1883, at 4:00 P.M. Dr. Odenwald points out that Venus and Mars, invisible to the participants, were setting in the west. At the same time, the moon, Uranus, and Virgo were rising in the east, Saturn had crossed the meridian, and Jupiter was directly overhead. According to Masonic lore, Venus was associated with the element copper, and Joseph Henry had used large quantities of copper to build his electric motors.

The "Transit of Venus March" never caught on during Sousa's lifetime. It went unplayed for more than 100 years, after Sousa's copies of the music were destroyed in a flood. As reported in The Washington Post, Library of Congress employee Loras Schissel recently found copies of the old sheet music for Venus "languishing in the library's files."[3] The piece was resurrected recently, in time for the 2004 Transit.

Sousa also composed a march, "Nobles of the Mystic Shrine," dedicated to the high degree freemasonry Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. The march is elaborately scored for traditional band instrumentation, harp and a variety of colorful percussion instruments, including tambourine and the Jingling Johnny (a percussion instrument of Oriental origin consisting of a vertical pole with a variety of hanging small bells and metallic jingling objects) and is considered one of his finest works in the march genre.

Sousa and recording

Sousa held a very low opinion of the emerging and upstart recording industry. In a submission to a congressional hearing in 1906, he argued that:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

Law professor Lawrence Lessig cited this passage to argue that in creating a system of copyrights in which control of music is in the hands of recording studios, Sousa was essentially correct. Sousa's antipathy to recording was such that he refused to conduct his band if it was being recorded. Many recordings of the Sousa band made before 1929 were made under Arthur Pryor's baton.

In 1925, he was initiated as an honorary member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national fraternity for men in music, by the fraternity's Alpha Xi chapter at the University of Illinois.

Legacy

John Philip Sousa is arguably the most well-known and most often performed composer in the annals of American music. His march, The Stars and Stripes Forever, has been recognized by the United States government as "America's National March." Composed on Chistmas Day in 1896, Sousa perform the march in almost all of his band's concerts and it was the last piece he conducted before he died in 1932. Perhaps no other American musician is associated so predominantly with the patriotic spirit of America.

Sousa possessed a strong conviction that attributes such as loyalty and honor were extremely important in life. One of his biographers, Paul E. Bierley, writes of the time he interviewed the Sousa band's road manager, William Schneider, and Mr. Schneider recalled, "In the years that I knew Mr. Sousa, he impressed me as being the man who tried to be the most honorable person who ever walked the face of the earth."

A further testimony to his character and professionalism was the loyalty and enthusiasm expressed by the musician who performed with him and excelled under his directorship. Sousa believed that being a musician was the noblest of professions.

Though Sousa himself decried the advent of recording technology, his music has been recorded by virtually every professional band in the United States and Europe and many symphony orchestras including the Eastman Wind Ensemble, The Goldman Band, the Cincinnati Wind Ensemble, The Cleveland Symphonic Winds, the Dallas Wind Symphony, the Czech Wind Ensemble, the New York Philharmonic, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Pops and the London Symphony Orchestra. There have been over 135 known recordings of The Stars and Stripes Forever alone. The United States Marine Band (known as "The President's Own") continues to perform and record his marches.

The creation of the low brass instrument, known as the Sousaphone, was one of Sousa's important contributions to the tradition of American band music. Some thought he merely wanted to have an instrument that was easier to march with when in fact, he was actually seeking to have an instrument capable of realizing fuller and richer sonority. In 1890 he approached one of the leading manufacturers of brass instruments, the C.G. Conn Company of Elkart, Indiana, with the idea creating a substitute for the small-bore helicon that was a staple in most bands of the era, including the United States Marine Band. His hope was to achieve a sound closer to that of the tuba in the standard symphony orchestras by having an instrument with a wider bore and a larger bell that pointed out and upward. The modern Sousaphone is now the standard bass instrument in virtually every college and high-school marching band.

Music

Marches

He wrote 136 marches; some of his most popular are:

• "The Gladiator March" (1886)
• "Semper Fidelis" (1888) (Official March of the United States Marine Corps)
• "The Washington Post" (1889)
• "The Thunderer" (1889)
• "The Picadore" (1889)
• "High School Cadets" (1890)
• "The Liberty Bell" (1893) (credits theme for Monty Python's Flying Circus)
• "Manhattan Beach March" (1893)
• "The Beau Ideal March" (1893)
• "King Cotton" (1895)
• "The Stars and Stripes Forever" (1896) (National March of the United States)
• "El Capitan" (1896)
• "Hands Across the Sea" (dedicated to the band of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets - the Highty Tighties)(1899)
• "Invincible Eagle" (1901) (Dedicated to Pan - American Buffalo Exposition)
• "The Freelance March" (1906)
• "Fairest of the Fair" (1908)
• "Glory of the Yankee Navy" (1909)
• "U.S. Field Artillery" (1917)
• "Processional (Wedding March)" (1918)
• "The Gallant Seventh" (1922)
• "Nobles of the Mystic Shrine" (1923)
• "The Black Horse Troop" (1924)
• "Marquette University March" (1924)
• "Pride of the Wolverines" (1926)
• "Minnesota March" (1927)
• "George Washington Bicentennial March" (1932)

Sousa wrote school songs for only four Universities in the country (including Marquette University and the University of Minnesota). The marching brass bass, or Sousaphone, is named after him.

Operettas

Sheet music cover, 1896

• The Queen of Hearts (1885), also known as Royalty and Roguery
• The Smugglers (1882)
• Desiree (1883)
• El Capitan (1896)
• The Bride Elect (1897), libretto by Sousa.
• The Charlatan (1898), also known as The Mystical Miss, lyrics by Sousa.
• Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1899)
• The Free Lance (1905)
• The American Maid (1909), also known as The Glass Blowers.

These operettas which Gervase Hughes calls "notable" (1) also show a variety of French, Viennese and British influences. (In his younger days, Sousa made an orchestration of HMS Pinafore and played the first violin on the American tour of Jacques Offenbach.) The music of these operettas is light and cheerful. The Glass Blowers and Desirée have had revivals, the latter having been released on CD like El Capitan, the best known of them. El Capitan has been in production somewhere in the world ever since it was written and makes fun of false heroes. Still more outspoken against militarism is The Free Lance, the story of two kingdoms becoming united, which found its way to Germany (as "Der Feldhauptmann") by the time the Berlin Wall came down.

Marches and waltzes have been derived from many of these stage-works. Sousa also composed the music for six operettas that were either unfinished or not produced: The Devils' Deputy, Florine, The Irish Dragoon, Katherine, The Victory, and The Wolf.

In addition, Sousa wrote The Mikado march, the elegant overture of Our Flirtations, a number of musical suites, etc.

(1) Gervase Hughes,Composers of Operetta, New York, 1962

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• John Philip Sousa Biography, The Library of Congress, August 3, 2007. Retrieved November 29, 2007.
• ReadingEagle.com Retrieved November 29, 2007.
• Berger, Kenneth. The March King and His Band The Story of John Philip Sousa. Exposition Press, 1957. OCLC 59434058
• Bierley, Paul E. John Philip Sousa American Phenomenon. Donald Hunsberger wind library. Miami, FL: Warner Bros. Publications, 2001. ISBN 0757906125
• Delaphine, Edward S. John Philip Sousa and the National Anthem. Frederick, MD: Great Southern Press, 1983. OCLC 10560054
• Lingg, Ann M. John Philip Sousa. New York: Henry Holt, 1954. OCLC 360927
• Newsom, John, ed. Perspectives on John Philip Sousa. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1983. ISBN 084440425X
• Bierley, Paul E. The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa, University of Illinois Press, Chicago/Urbana, 2006, ISBN 0-252-03147-4

External links

All links retrieved November 29, 2007

• The Sousa Archives and Center for American Music
• The Works of John Philip Sousa – Marches in MIDI format; from the The John Philip Sousa Home Page by David Lovrien, hosted by the Dallas Wind Symphony
• MIDI sequences of piano transcriptions of 48 Sousa compositions
• Harris, Neil: "John Philip Sousa and the Culture of Reassurance"
• Fennell, Frederick: "The Sousa March: A Personal View"
• Works by John Philip Sousa. Project Gutenberg
  • The Experiences of a Bandmaster
  • The Fifth String
• The Feast of the Monkeys – the "nonsense verse" that Sousa wrote.
• John Philip Sousa at Find A Grave
• Sousa discography
• Numerous Sousa photos

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