A Sousa Reader: Essays, Inter views, and Clippings ed. by Bryan Proksch (review)

John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) has long attracted the attention of band aficionados and those interested in American culture during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This was a golden era of the professional band movement in the United States. It was a time where the concert band served as an extremely popular form of entertainment.

While Sousa was not the earliest popular bandmaster, he was undoubtedly one of the most well-known. At the high point of his career, the Sousa band played regularly for audiences numbering in the thousands. The band toured regularly, both nationally and internationally.

Sousa became an extremely popular celebrity of the time, an action that Sousa certainly helped to advance. He became an American icon. His life story was the subject of "Stars and Stripes Forever", a 1952 Hollywood classic film starring Clifton Webb as the famous band leader. The "March King" was even featured on the two-cent Famous American Composers stamp issued in May 1940.

Sousa is a recognised American composer, and his marches and operettas were very popular during his lifetime. His marches continue to receive countless performances from all kinds of bands, including military, school, and community ensembles. As he was very patriotic, so are his marches. John Philip Sousa IV describes his famous great grandfather in the book's foreword as the "Pied Piper of Patriotism" (p. xiii). Composed in 1888, Semper fidelis is the official march of the United States Marine Corps. His most famous composition, The Stars and Stripes Forever was composed in 1896 and is the official National March of the United States. It is difficult to imagine Independence Day in the United States without hearing The Stars and Stripes Forever.

Many of the early publications about Sousa, including his own autobiography Marching Along, focuses primarily on his popularity as a musical and cultural figure. During most of his career, he fostered his own image through embellishing facets of his life story. As Patrick Warfield writes, "the plethora of tall tales should not be terribly surprising: the March King was, after all, a character, and John Philip Sousa wrote the drama in which he played" (Patrick Warfield, Making the March King: John Philip Sousa's Washington Years, 1854-1893, [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013, 1]).

Published by GIA Publications, A Sousa Reader: Essays, Interviews, and Clippings is a collection of articles, letters, interviews, and other material written by or about the famous bandleader. It includes approximately sixty items of varying length, a number of which are introduced with commentary by the editor, Bryan Proksch. The materials are grouped around themes that relate to issues that arose during the general periods of Sousa's professional life (1880-1893, 1894-1905, 1905-1906, 1908-1917, 1917-1918, and 1919-1928). The number of entries per period range from six to sixteen, and the length of these periods vary considerably—single years to over a decade. As expected in a publication of this nature, the length of the entries themselves vary, although most are relatively brief.

The included materials come from a variety of sources, although many are housed at the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music (SACAM) at the University of Illinois (p. xvi). Sousa and the band director at the University of Illinois at the time, A. Austin Harding (1880-1958), became good friends; the band at the University was considered one of the leading college programs in the country at this time. Sousa donated a large amount of his materials to Illinois, which arrived in Champaign shortly after his passing. SACAM holdings feature the world's single largest archive of original compositions and arrangements by John Philip Sousa. The Sousa Press Books, a source for a number of the articles cited in this book, are also found at the University of Illinois.

As can be expected in such publications, editor Proksch has included materials on...