Making the March King: John Philip Sousa's Washington Years, 1854-1893

Chapter Three. A Nineteenth-Century Musical Career

chapter three A Nineteenth-Century Musical Career In many ways the historical John Philip Sousa has been the victim of the March King’s incredible success. He is today fully his stage name: a musician known only for a handful of three-minute works written for ensembles of winds alone. It is true that Sousa’s greatest artistic achievements came in the form of marches and that his public fame was secured from the bandstand. But the Sousa of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was much more than a march king, and to think of his creative career as limited to “The Washington Post” or “The Stars and Stripes Forever” is to misunderstand both Sousa and his musical world. A concert by Sousa’s ensemble usually fell into two halves, and a 1926 performance in Salt Lake City is typical (fig. 9). Sousa began most appearances with an overture, in this case the prelude to Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Next came a virtuoso brass solo; here William Tong performed Herman Bellstedt ’s cornet feature “Centennial Polka.” The light work was usually followed by a Sousa suite or other medium-length piece, in this case El Capitan and His Friends, a collection of materials from several Sousa operettas. The pairing of soloist with longer work was then repeated, here by the soprano Marjorie Moody singing a selection from Meyerbeer’s Dinorah and a band performance of the slow movement from Dvořák’s Symphony no. 9. After the intermission the entire process started again. The first half’s soloists were often replaced with a female violinist or, as in this case, with saxophone and percussion features. Along the way almost every work received an unprinted encore, usually consisting of light favorites, most notably Sousa’s own marches.1 A Sousa concert was thus quite different from most twenty-first-century orchestral performances. Rather than the homogeneity of a Beethoven, Schubert, or Brahms cycle, Sousa aimed for variety: ensemble works and soloists, highbrow selections and those meant to entertain, instrumental numbers and vocal gems. For some devotees of high culture such a range Fig. 9. Sousa Band program, 1926. Author’s collection. Three. A Nineteenth-Century Musical Career 51 of material might appear a form of bribery: audiences could be lured to the theater with promises of musical delights and then, once captured, forced to absorb the classical masterworks. But trickery was not part of Sousa’s plan. Like Milton Nobles and Matthew Morgan before him, Sousa sought to give audiences what they wanted: a whole world of entertainment—both pleasing and sophisticated—in one evening. In the March King’s words: “I believe a programme composed entirely of so-called popular music would now be as dismal a failure as one wholly made up of classical pieces. The people seem to want a combination of the heavy and the light.”2 Throughout the course of Sousa’s career, variety remained always the watchword, and it is as apparent in his output as it is in his programming. Sousa wrote about 130 marches, but he also composed art, parlor, minstrel, and political songs, galops, gavottes, schottisches, and waltzes, descriptive works and suites, and operettas and humoresques. Sousa may today be best known as a composer and bandleader, but to his own audiences he was also an essayist, copyright expert, athlete, and humorist. From our perspective the variety evident in a Sousa program and the breadth of Sousa’s career have taken on contradictory interpretations: he is either a noble genius who denies categorization or a charlatan willing to pander to his audience. But the breadth of his work—from theater violinist to band conductor, from songwriter to march composer, from government musician to capitalist entrepreneur—was really quite typical of his generation . In the midst of an 1889 labor battle Sousa explained that any musician could “cast, daily, into the sea of engagements, at least four lines. Sometimes, it’s true, he’ll only get a nibble or two, but oftener he’ll hook a fish on each line, and I can assure you he only throws away what he can’t carry.” The boy Sousa had many models for this sort of musical gamut, models to be found in the working-class players of the Navy Yard, men who might “teach music in the morning, write music in the afternoon, and play music in the evening...