John Philip Sousa

Sousa ca. 1910

Sousa band 1893

Sousa disc on Gramophone 1897

Sousa ca. 1900

Sousa team 1904

Stars & Stripes by Sousa from Berliner

John Philip Sousa was director of the United States Marine Band 1880-92, wrote military-style march sheet music including Semper Fidelis (1888) that was adopted by the Corps as its official march, made cylinder recordings for Columbia Phonograph Co. in 1890-92 and disc recordings for the Berliner gramophone after 1893, formed his own Sousa Concert Band (not a marching band) and played at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, made many national tours, 4 European tours 1900-05, and a world tour 1910-11. His band was the first American band to make a tour around the world, and even had its own baseball team. He composed Stars and Stripes Forever in 1896 and was first heard at the George Washington Centennial, May 14, 1897, with President William McKinley attending. Sousa was a symbol of patriotism, discipline, and Victorian respectability and order in an age of rapid social change. His popularity rose concurrently with the rise of American imperialism and commercialism. Sousa's concerts provided a vibrant outlet for nationalism while enhancing American prestige, for he stressed American composers and uplifted the reputation of American music. His image was much the result of the mass publicity efforts and promotional techniques of professional managers who advertised his client with illustrated posters, magazine and newspaper articles, photographs, and local interviews. In an age preceding radio and the high-fidelity phonograph, Sousa provided countless Americans with their first experience of professional music. Although his bands' recorded works were pioneer efforts in the development of the phonograph, Sousa was openly hostile toward mechanically reproduced music. He standardized the march form, though his output was hardly limited to that genre. Indeed, his oeuvre shows not only variety but also immense productivity: 136 marches, fifteen operettas, seventy songs, eleven waltzes, thirteen dances, eleven suites, twenty-seven fantasies, fourteen humoresques, twelve trumpet and drum pieces, twenty-five miscellaneous pieces, and 322 arrangements and transcriptions. A man of letters, Sousa also wrote seven books, including an autobiography and three novels, and 132 journalistic articles. With Victor Herbert, he also led the fight in 1909 to convince Congress to pass a new copyright law that forced recording companies to pay royalties to composers upon the sale of their recorded pieces.

Sousa from David Lovrien with sound clips
Sousa from US Marine Band
Sousa from LOC
Portraits and Collections from UIUC
Gramophone picture from LC, with Emil Berliner's January 1895 List of Plates shown next to the gramophone. The disc on the gramophone seen here is the first recording of John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, recorded for Berliner only thirteen days after the premiere of the march on May 14, 1897.
The Early Gramophone from Sound Recording History

Biography

John Philip Sousa was born November 6, 1854, in Washington, District of Columbia. He was the oldest boy among ten children born to Maria Elisabeth Trinkhaus, a Bavarian immigrant, and John Antonio Sousa, born in Spain of Portuguese descent. The senior Sousa, who played the trombone in the United States Marine Band and in marching bands of the Civil War, influenced his son's love of band music profoundly. The boy began music lessons at age six and was later enrolled in the Esputa Conservatory of Music in Washington, where he studied violin, piano, winds, and brass. He also took trombone lessons with his father. At age eleven, as first violinist, Sousa formed a quadrille dance orchestra with seven men. When Sousa was thirteen, his father enlisted him in the United States Marine Band as an apprentice musician to dissuade the boy from joining a circus band. Concurrently, Sousa took private theory and violin lessons with George Felix Benkert. By age twenty, he was playing violin in Benkert's small symphony and in the Ford's Theater orchestra, as well as conducting and playing first violin with the Washington Theatre Comique.

Start in Commerical Entertainment.

Sousa continued to play with the marines for seven years. Moving to Philadelphia, he won a position to play first violin in the 1876 Centennial Exhibition orchestra, which for a time was conducted by Jacques Offenbach. Sousa was also influenced by the conducting styles of Theodore Thomas and Patrick S. Gilmore. Sousa's natural understanding of composition was further developed through his work as an arranger for two music publishers in Philadelphia, J. M. Stoddart and Co., and W. F. Shaw Publishing Co. In addition to private teaching, he directed an amateur opera company, which specialized in the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. These experiences in Philadelphia developed for him a growing reputation and culminated in his decision to devote his talents to commercial entertainment. In 1879, he married Jane van Middlesworth Bellis, a soprano in the opera company and the daughter of a carpenter. The next year, the couple moved to Washington, District of Columbia; Sousa had accepted the directorship of the United States Marine Band from Corps officials, who had been impressed with his work in Philadelphia. The Sousas would have three children: John Philip, Jr., Jane Priscilla, and Helen.

Bandmaster and Composer.

Sousa's unprecedented success as a bandmaster began upon his second enlistment in the Marine Corps in 1880. For the next twelve years, he rigidly directed the Marine Band, turning it into a professional organization of national renown. During this time, Sousa composed some of his most famous marches: The Gladiator (1886); Semper Fidelis (1888), named for the Marine motto Always Faithful and adopted by the Corps as its official march; and The Washington Post (1889), which received international popularity and won for its composer the title "The March King." Sousa's directorship was further distinguished with the Marine Band's first national tours in 1891 and 1892 and when the band made cylinder recordings for Columbia Phonograph Co. in 1890-1892, recordings which were among the first ever produced.

Forms Own Band.

In 1892, David Blakely, a talented promoter who handled the Marine Band's 1891 tour and had formerly managed Gilmore's renowned band, advised Sousa to resign from the Corps and form his own band. As the new organization's manager and financier, Blakely promised the bandmaster six thousand dollars a year--four times his annual military salary--plus twenty percent of all profits. He accepted, and in the summer of 1892 formed Sousa's New Marine Band. Soon renamed Sousa's Grand Concert Band, the organization premiered 26 September 1892, in Plainfield, New Jersey. In early 1893, the New Jersey Phonograph Co. (Newark) began recording the new band, and in time, the group recorded in both cylinder and disk technologies for all the major companies, including Columbia, the National Phonograph Co. (of Thomas Edison), and the Victor Talking Machine Co. The new band found early success by playing in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the 1896 Cotton State's Exposition in Atlanta, the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and annually during summers at the Manhattan Beach Hotel resort in Brooklyn. By 1897, Sousa's annual income was approximately fifty thousand dollars.

Distinguished Band Members.

The Sousa Concert Band, which averaged seventy members after 1897, was distinguished by the virtuosity of its players, many of whom were the eminent soloists of their day: coronetists Herbert L. Clarke and Frank Simon, "Paganini of the Trombone" Arthur W. Pryor, tuba player William J. Bell, "Saxophone King" E. A. Lefebre, soprano Estelle Liebling, violinist Maud Powell, euphonium player Simone Mantia, and bass drum legend Gus Helmecke. Their conductor directed with a rigid professionalism and demanded perfection. He claimed to know precisely what each member of the band was doing each second during a performance, because it was he who commanded them to action. His every arm movement or finger twitch was a directive to an individual player or to the group.

Personal Characteristics.

A short man with a high-pitched voice, piercing black eyes, and a subtle wit, Sousa was beloved and respected by his band. He was repelled by profanity and religious prejudice and enjoyed a reputation as a wholesome, healthy man's man who delighted in work. Frail as a child, he excelled in sports, especially trapshooting, horseback riding, and baseball (the Sousa Band had its own team). Distinctive in appearance, the bandmaster wore gold-rimmed glasses and dressed, like the players in his band, in immaculate uniforms. For most of his adult life, Sousa wore a beard, and while he insisted on new white kidskin gloves for almost every performance, he used inexpensive wooden batons. Strong-willed, he appeared before his adoring public only ten weeks after breaking his neck in a fall from a horse, leading people to believe that he had only broken his arm.

Immensely Popular Touring Company.

The Sousa Band and its conductor, much like one of the era's presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, quickly achieved the phenomenon of celebrity and were closely associated with American nationalism. They played to capacity audiences throughout the band's thirty-nine-year existence and traveled more than a million miles in annual North American tours, four European tours (1900, 1901, 1903, 1905), and a world tour in 1910-1911. The Sousa Band was a concert band--it marched only seven times in its existence. The band traveled six to ten months each year, frequently appearing in two towns per day. In addition to the tours were the regular summer season concerts at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, the New York Hippodrome, and Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Weekly attendance in New York alone from 1911 to 1914 exceeded sixty thousand. The concerts were fast-paced; the bandmaster would allow only twenty to thirty seconds to lapse between each piece until intermissions. Yet the concerts often lasted three hours, and true to Sousa's preference for entertainment over education, the program was generous with light tunes and many encores, usually Sousa pieces. Nevertheless, he exposed many Americans for the first time to the music of Richard Wagner, Gioacchino Antonio Rossini, Richard Strauss, Edward Elgar, and other classical composers.

Popularity Corresponds with Patriotism.

The phenomenal popularity of Sousa and his band corresponds closely with the rise of American imperialism and cultural nationalism. Above all, Sousa was a patriot, evidenced even in the titles of his marches: America First (1916), The Invincible Eagle (1901), The Liberty Bell (1893), and of course, The Stars and Stripes Forever (1896), which was first heard at the George Washington Centennial, 14 May 1897, with President William McKinley attending. The public's intoxication with this piece was immediate and soon it became a national symbol, especially during the Spanish American War in 1898. Congress twice entertained resolutions to make it the national anthem. The piece was played at least once in every future Sousa Band concert; audiences often demanded it several times.

Part of the War Effort.

When the United States was drawn into World War I in 1917, Sousa, at age sixty-two, enlisted as a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve to lead the navy band on national tours to support the Red Cross, recruitment, and Liberty Loan bonds. During the summers, he was allowed leave to tour with his own band. The sparkle and verve of Sousa's compositions and performances raised more than twenty-one million dollars for the war effort. After the war, Sousa was promoted to lieutenant commander and released from duty, but his audiences saw him in his uniform for most of his remaining concerts. The Sousa Band continued to tour into the 1920's, though their tours were tapering off by 1926 and were much less frequent in 1929. The band broke up in 1931 after the Great Depression no longer made concerts profitable. On 6 March 1932, the March King died of a heart attack in Reading, Pennsylvania, while preparing for a guest appearance. After lying in state in the Marine Barracks, Washington, District of Columbia, his body was buried in the Congressional Cemetery.

A Vibrant Outlet for Nationalism.

Sousa's popularity rested upon his musical genius and disciplined conducting and upon the virtuosity of his musicians. His belief in musical variety pleased most everyone, and his sensitivity to audience response and use of encores after each programmed piece easily cultivated enthusiasm. Yet the phenomenon of his celebrity was also a consequence of the time in which he lived: Sousa was a symbol of patriotism, discipline, and Victorian respectability and order in an age of rapid social change. His popularity rose concurrently with the rise of American imperialism and commercialism. Sousa's concerts provided a vibrant outlet for nationalism while enhancing American prestige, for he stressed American composers and uplifted the reputation of American music. His image was much the result of the mass publicity efforts and promotional techniques of professional managers such as David Blakely, who advertised his client with illustrated posters, magazine and newspaper articles, photographs, and local interviews.

Provided First Experience of Professional Music.

In an age preceding radio and the high-fidelity phonograph, Sousa provided countless Americans with their first experience of professional music. Although his bands' recorded works were pioneer efforts in the development of the phonograph, Sousa was openly hostile toward mechanically reproduced music. He standardized the march form, though his output was hardly limited to that genre. Indeed, his oeuvre shows not only variety but also immense productivity: 136 marches, fifteen operettas, seventy songs, eleven waltzes, thirteen dances, eleven suites, twenty-seven fantasies, fourteen humoresques, twelve trumpet and drum pieces, twenty-five miscellaneous pieces, and 322 arrangements and transcriptions. A man of letters, Sousa also wrote seven books, including an autobiography and three novels, and 132 journalistic articles.

Philosophy of Music.

Sousa's philosophy of music centered on a belief that entertainment was of more real value than a technical education in music appreciation. His mission, as he saw it, was "to move all America, while busied in its various pursuits, by the power of direct and simple music. I wanted to make a music for the people, a music to be grasped at once." He chose as his medium the concert band at a time when bands and band music were Americans' favorite sources of musical expression; the march was not only a popular parade and military piece but also a fashionable song, hymn, and dance number. Sousa consciously designed his career to cater to the millions rather than to the few. Ironically, he was critical of both the phonograph and the radio (which enabled popular entertainers such as Sousa to reach the widest possible audience) because, for him, music had to be live. The spirit of music--the interaction between audience and performers--could not be recorded and was in danger of being lost through mechanical reproduction. With Victor Herbert, he also led the fight in 1909 to convince Congress to pass a new copyright law that forced recording companies to pay royalties to composers upon the sale of their recorded pieces.

Many-Faceted Legacy.

Sousa's legacy is many-faceted. He aided the development of bands in high schools not only through inspirational example but also through financial contributions, by donating royalties from The Northern Pines (1931) to a scholarship fund for the National High School Orchestra and Band Camp at Interlochen, Michigan. He provided the fledgling recording industry with celebrity sales but also helped secure composers' rights regarding royalty payments. He contributed significantly to American musical theater with his operettas. The straight-belled tuba, dubbed the "sousaphone," was his design. He helped to bring ragtime to Europe and make jazz respectable in America. He contributed to the rise of mass publicity and commercialism, aided the development of American musical culture, and discouraged musical snobbery. The Sousa Band alumni effectively influenced the development of bands and band music in the United States long after his death. His music, aural artifacts that provide a living link to a younger America growing to world power, remains infectious to modern audiences, who find their own toes and fingers unalterably moved to tapping during concerts. The American composer William Schuman called Sousa the American spirit in music, able to invoke shared inheritances in his audiences and allow them a sense of self-recognition. This, perhaps, is Sousa's most significant, yet most ambiguous, legacy.