1854–1932 · United States · Classical
John Philip Sousa (1854–1932) was an American wind-band composer and conductor, known as the March King. He wrote the national march of the United States, The Stars and Stripes Forever, and led the Marine Band and later his own band. The site offers his marches for piano, from intermediate to advanced level.
John Philip Sousa was born in Washington on 6 November 1854. His parents were immigrants and he was the third of their ten children. His father, João António de Sousa, played trombone in the United States Marine Band; he had been born in Spain to Portuguese parents. His mother, Maria Elisabeth Trinkaus, came from Bavaria.
The boy was not in good health and at first was educated at home. Later, once at school, he began violin lessons with John Esputa and studied music theory and composition with George Felix Benkert. He also learned the piano, the flute and brass instruments. It turned out that he had perfect pitch. His first composition was lost.
At eleven Sousa formed his first wind band. At thirteen he planned to leave with a travelling circus, but his father insisted otherwise, and the boy joined the Marine Band as an apprentice musician. There he played the violin and tried his hand at composing.
His apprenticeship ended in the mid-seventies of the nineteenth century and Sousa left the band. He kept performing as a violinist, worked briefly with several Washington theatres, and it was in a theatre pit orchestra that he learned to conduct.
In 1876 Sousa went to Philadelphia for the celebrations of the centenary of the United States. A special orchestra was assembled for the occasion, Jacques Offenbach was invited to lead it, and Sousa played first violin.
He carried on giving concerts in Philadelphia and writing music for stage productions. Among his work were arrangements of several Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. For H.M.S. Pinafore, one of the most popular of them, he made a new orchestration, which the authors themselves rated highly.
Sousa's wedding to Jane Bellis took place on 30 December 1879. Their three children were John Jr., Jane Priscilla and Helen.
In 1880 the commandant of the Marine Corps, Colonel Charles McCawley, was in the audience at one of the performances. He liked the music, and when he learned that it had been arranged and performed by a former member of his band, he invited Sousa to dinner and offered him the post of conductor of the Marine Band, which was then in poor shape.
Sousa directed the band for twelve years, and in that time it rose to be among the country's leading military bands. He shifted its programmes towards symphonic music and demanded harder rehearsing. He arranged classical works for it and composed new pieces, chiefly marches. The ensemble, called The President's Own, served five presidents, the first of them Rutherford B. Hayes and the last Benjamin Harrison, and it played at the inaugural balls of 1881 and 1889.
The 1880s were when Sousa began to win a name as a composer. His first major success in operetta was Désirée (1883), and among his marches Gladiator (1886) became especially popular. In 1890–1892 Sousa and the band made large concert tours across the United States.
On 15 July 1881 Sousa became a Freemason in a Washington lodge and stayed an active member for the rest of his life. For the Shriners he composed several pieces, including the march Nobles of the Mystic Shrine.
By the early 1890s Sousa increasingly felt that his position as a serviceman without officer rank did not match his fame and held back his growth as a conductor and composer. The patron David Blakely proposed that he found his own orchestra, and in July 1892 Sousa asked to be discharged from the service.
Between 1892 and 1931 the ensemble, soon called simply Sousa's Band, gave 15,623 concerts. Audiences warmed to it from the first season. In 1900 it played at the Paris World Exposition, in 1900–1905 it toured Europe, in London it appeared at the Royal Albert Hall, and in 1910–1911 it went round the world. In Paris the musicians marched along the streets as far as the Arc de Triomphe; in its forty years the band marched in only eight parades.
The 1890s were also the high point of his operettas, among them El Capitan. In December 1901 King Edward VII gave Sousa the Royal Victorian Medal for a private birthday concert for Queen Alexandra. Among the band's soloists in the early 1920s was Jascha Gurewich, one of the first to bring the saxophone to the concert hall.
Soon after America entered the First World War, on 31 May 1917, Sousa received a commission as a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve. He directed the Navy band at the Great Lakes station near Chicago, and he passed nearly all of his pay to a relief fund for sailors and marines, keeping one dollar monthly. When the war ended, in November 1918, he was released from active duty and returned to his own band. By the early 1920s he had been promoted to lieutenant commander in the reserve, though he never went back to service, and he often performed in his Navy uniform.
The orchestra's busy concert life was interrupted in 1914 by the outbreak of the First World War and resumed after it. In the 1920s Sousa worked on questions of music education and sat on competition juries. After the Great Depression began, in 1929, concerts became fewer, and the band's last performances took place in September 1931. For many years Sousa refused to appear on radio, but in 1929 he agreed to a nationwide broadcast.
Sousa spent his later years at Sands Point, New York. He died on 6 March 1932 in a room of the Abraham Lincoln Hotel in Reading, Pennsylvania; the cause was a heart condition. Not long before, he had been rehearsing The Stars and Stripes Forever with the local Ringgold Band, which had asked him to be a guest conductor. His grave is in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, and every 6 November the Marine Band plays one of his marches there.
In 1987 a special act of Congress made The Stars and Stripes Forever the national march of the United States. Sousa was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Great Americans in 1976, long after his death, and a Mercury crater received his name in 2012. A Liberty ship of the Second World War also bore his name; the Marine Band owns its bell and rings it when playing the march The Liberty Bell.
The film Stars and Stripes Forever, made by 20th Century Fox in 1952, starred Clifton Webb as Sousa and drew loosely on the composer's memoirs, Marching Along. George Balanchine's ballet Stars and Stripes, built on Sousa's marches, was first danced in New York in 1958. The John Philip Sousa Foundation, established in 1981, honours one outstanding student of marching band.
The best-known part of Sousa's legacy is his marches for wind band. They differ in character, yet all of them show optimism and vitality. His first march to appear in print was Review (1873). Among the most famous are The Thunderer, The Washington Post, The Liberty Bell and The Stars and Stripes Forever.
He composed for the theatre too: fifteen operettas in a style close to Gilbert and Sullivan, such as Désirée (1883), El Capitan, The Charlatan (1898) and Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1899). Besides these there are about seventy songs, five overtures, eleven suites, twenty-four dances and twenty-eight fantasies, along with a great many arrangements of nineteenth-century symphonic works from western Europe. A novella, The Fifth String, appeared in 1902 and the book Pipetown Sandy in 1905. Marches and waltzes grew out of many of these stage works. He also wrote the music for six further operettas that were left unfinished or never staged. In 1920 he wrote a story of 40,000 words, The Transit of Venus, as well as a booklet, A manual for trumpet and drum, with advice on playing the drums and the trumpet.
Other well-known marches include Hail to the Spirit of Liberty (1900), The Invincible Eagle (1901), dedicated to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, Who's Who in Navy Blue (1920), written at the request of the Naval Academy class of 1920, and the Salvation Army March (1930) for that organisation's fiftieth anniversary in the United States.
Sousa dedicated many marches to people and institutions: Imperial Edward (1902) to King Edward VII, Anchor & Star (1918) to the United States Navy, and The Black Horse Troop (1924) to a cavalry unit of the Ohio National Guard. He also wrote marches for several American universities, among them those of Minnesota, Illinois, Nebraska and Michigan. He also composed a march drawing on tunes from The Mikado, the comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as the overture Our Flirtations. At his concerts he often added Sullivan overtures to the programme.
Sousa's marches were written for wind band, and on the site you can find them in versions for solo piano. You can begin with Transit of Venus March (level Intermediate+) and then move on to The Washington Post (also Intermediate+). The hardest in the selection is The Stars and Stripes Forever (level Advanced), the national march of the United States.