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Post by mikef6 on Aug 5, 2019 18:42:01 GMT
I have never been really interested in marches but yesterday on my publicly supported classical radio station, I heard Sousa’s “The Thunderer March” and was astonished by its power – and its familiarity even though I can’t recall ever hearing it before. The radio host said, at the end of the recording, that we sometimes find music that we have heard all our lives but never knew where it came from. I was thinking the same thing. Overnight I became very interested, not in marches as a genre, but marches by Sousa in particular.
Sousa (1854-1932) wrote 137 marches. Like some other composers (e.g. Sir Arthur Sullivan) and writers (Arthur Conan Doyle), Sousa wanted to be known for works other than what he was most famous for. He wrote nine operettas, only one of which (El Capitan) gets an occasional revival. Ironically (Sousa probably would have hated this), there is a march in “El Capitan” which – lifted out of the play’s plot – is frequently heard as a stand-alone work. Sousa is still honored today because he could do this One Thing better than anybody else.
John Philip Sousa was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1976.
His most famous march, “The Stars and Stripes Forever” was made the official march of the United States in 1987.
The Trio section of his “Liberty Bell March” was used as the theme song for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
The Trio of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” (this is what you very likely sang as “Be kind to your web footed friends…”) is repeated 3 times each with a different instrumentation. The second repeat is taken by a piccolo. The band in my recording (below) uses 4 piccolos. This is great stuff.
The Thunderer
Stars and Stripes Forever
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