The Complete Marches of John Philip Sousa for free

[mikehalloran]

I guess this is as Off Topic as it gets but still music and July 4th is in a few weeks.

The "Presidents Own" United States Marine Band has released volume one and it's all free. You can download the audio files in 248k VBR, of course, but the complete scores and parts are available in .pdf by clicking on the links to the individual marches.

http://www.marineband.marines.mil/Audio ... Sousa.aspx

Since government works are not subject to copyright, how long till we see these sampled in EDM tracks?

Speaking of Copyright, it will be interesting to see how his last 35 marches published after 1/1/1923 are handled but those are not likely to be released for another few years at this rate of 17 per annum. The first 101 are in the public domain.

Anyway, I found this after posting this link to four hours of classic American marches on YouTube and a friend gave me the heads up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trZlvpLihHk

This is classic, timeless music and I am glad to see that it is being preserved and made available in this way.

[Shooshie]

That's a love/hate relationship with me, for sure. I wanted not to like it, but found myself looking for all my old favorites. These are probably a lot more fun to play than to listen to, and I've played a lot of them. I was in New York a few years ago, with my WX5 and Wallander (on a flash drive), and was asked if I could play the piccolo part to Stars & Stripes in a recording of unusual arrangements for an album. I nailed it by memory in a take or two. Listening to it here, I realize that in a couple places my memory was not consistent with the score, but only a real piccoloist would probably have noticed.

It was always fun to be in Washington, D.C. attending rehearsals of the Navy Band or Air Force Band. They played marches with the seriousness and concentration that most orchestras might afford Bruckner or Mahler. Absolute focus on the conductor was required, and the slightest mistake was grounds for serious upbraiding. Didn't happen often. I had extended family in each band, and almost joined the Navy, but a change in commanders suddenly made that undesirable, so I quickly withdrew my queries. I'd been playing with the sax section in quartets, and they were happy with me, so it was a tough decision, but when people began quitting because of the new commander, I knew I'd made the right one.

These are great recordings. Very precise. I love the cornet solo in "Kingdom Coming." John Keats, I think it was, had a phrase: "Negative Capability," which meant more-or-less the ability to hold contradictory opinions in equal esteem. I think that describes my relationship with military marches. Once I'm listening to them I can't stop, and yet at the same time they bring back memories that are... well... not pleasant. I'll probably never play another march, but you never know. I hadn't expected to play Stars & Stripes, but there it was. On a visit to the Bohemian Grove on the Russian River north of San Francisco, I found myself playing trumpet parts on soprano sax in marches before dinner every day. So... I love 'em. I hate 'em. Usually at the same time!

Shooshie

[mikehalloran]

On March 9, 1932, three days after the death of John Philip Sousa, Deems Taylor spoke about Sousa on a national broadcast honoring "The March King". The following is the complete chapter from one of my favorite books, "Of Men and Music".

BANDMASTER

I READ an editorial on band music recently, in which one sentence began, “While it can hardly be said that John Philip Sousa was a great musician—” I am not so sure of that. So much depends upon your definition of greatness. For me, a great musician, like any other great artist, is one whose name identifies his work.

There is another type of artist who survives: the one whose work identifies his name. Scattered through the pages of aesthetic history you will find a host of men who had the luck to turn out one work of genius. Thomas Gray was—who? The man who wrote Gray’s Elegy. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam does not survive because its translation is one of the works of Edward FitzGerald. On the contrary, FitzGerald survives because he wrote the translation. Mention the name of Henry Bishop to the average person, and that which you have mentioned will probably kindle no light of recognition in his eye. To identify Bishop, you must explain that he wrote “Home, Sweet Home.”

In these cases, and a good many others, the work is more famous than the man. The light in which he stands is a reflected one. The truly great ones survive without explanatory footnotes. We say, “a play by Shakespeare,” “a symphony by Beethoven,” or “a statue by Michelangelo.” We do not ask, “What play?” or, “What symphony?” or, “What statue?” We take it for granted, hearing the name of the artist, that any work of his is worth our attention. Even his failures, whose actual merits warrant them no such distinction, usually survive because they bear his name. That name is, if you like, a trademark; and, like any good trade-mark, is a guarantee of worth.

Sousa was no Beethoven. Nevertheless he was Sousa. When you said “a Sousa march,” the phrase meant something pretty definite to almost anyone who heard you. He did not ask, “What Sousa march?” It did not matter. Any one of them bore the impress of a vigorous, clear-cut, and decidedly original musical personality. They were not —they are not, for that matter—”festival” marches, or any other concert variant of the original form. They were intensely practical. Sousa started as a navy bandmaster (that is, after he had left off being a boy violinist), and did most of his work in the open air, and in motion. The marches he wrote, first for the Marine Band and later for his own, were intended to set the pace for marching men. They were for the feet, not for the head.

They have a deceptive simplicity, those Sousa marches. Their tunes are so uncomplicated, so easy to catch, so essentially spontaneous and diatonic, that one can easily underrate them. Simple as they may be, they are Sousa’s tunes, and no one’s else. It took only a minor grade of inspiration to write them, perhaps. It is none the less genuine inspiration.

His career is not unlike that of Johann Strauss, Jr. Like the Viennese, he wrote operettas (you may still remember El Capitan) whose scores always contained at least one number couched in the composer’s characteristic rhythmic idiom. In Strauss’s case, it was a waltz; in Sousa’s, a march. Gradually each man became famous for that particular sort of instrumental number, and grew to specialize in it. Strauss became the Waltz King; Sousa became the March King.

A composer whose music is in the permanent repertoire of virtually every brass band in the world may not be a great musician, but he is none the less someone to take into account. I have heard The Washington Post March played in Munich, and the High School Cadets played in Paris. The Stars and Stripes Forever, it is safe to say, is better liked in many lands than the actual Stars and Stripes themselves. Wherever men march, they march, sooner or later, to the music of John Philip Sousa.

We do rightly, of course, to judge a man by his reach as well as his grasp. It is only fitting to admire Beethoven and Wagner for their pretensions as well as for their achievement. They dared more than other men. If they won greater glory, they also risked a more disastrous failure. Yet I think it is not always necessary to be technically ‘great” in order to be immortal. The giants of art stir our hearts and souls and imaginations. Sousa stirs only our feet. Nevertheless, he does stir them.

Wherever he has gone, I am sure he has found a welcome. There is a dining hall in the Elysian Fields, marked GRADE A COMPOSERS ONLY. If you could look in at the door tonight, you would probably see him there; perhaps not at the speakers’ table, with Wagner and Beethoven and Mozart and Bach and Debussy and the rest, but somewhere in the room—at a small table, possibly, with Herbert and Strauss and Delibes.

“However did he get in here?” asks some disapproving shade—a small-town Kapeilmeister, probably. “He was a good craftsman, and did an honest job, no doubt. But so am I, and so did I. Yet when I applied, they blackballed me. Who got him in?”

The guide smiles. “The marching men. The men who have had to go long miles, on an empty belly, under a hot sun, or through a driving rain. They made us take him in. They said he made things easier for them.”

Deems Taylor, Of Men and Music © 1950

[monkey man]

Oh man, this is gonna put me out of business!

An excerpt from the yet-to-be-released MLI Product Update Q3 2015:

3rd World March By Series™
3rd World March By - Movement Three - Holus Bolus
3rd World March By - Movement Four - The Bowel Movement
3rd World March By - Movement Five - Himalayan Hemorrhoids Collection

[mikehalloran]

Oh man, this is gonna put me out of business!

An excerpt from the yet-to-be-released MLI Product Update Q3 2015:

3rd World March By Series™
3rd World March By - Movement Three - Holus Bolus
3rd World March By - Movement Four - The Bowel Movement
3rd World March By - Movement Five - Himalayan Hemorrhoids Collection

No, I think your timing is perfect. You may be hangin' ten on the the wave of a new trend. Yea, Baby!

[Shooshie]

Wherever he has gone, I am sure he has found a welcome. There is a dining hall in the Elysian Fields, marked GRADE A COMPOSERS ONLY. If you could look in at the door tonight, you would probably see him there; perhaps not at the speakers’ table, with Wagner and Beethoven and Mozart and Bach and Debussy and the rest, but somewhere in the room—at a small table, possibly, with Herbert and Strauss and Delibes.

“However did he get in here?” asks some disapproving shade—a small-town Kapeilmeister, probably. “He was a good craftsman, and did an honest job, no doubt. But so am I, and so did I. Yet when I applied, they blackballed me. Who got him in?”

The guide smiles. “The marching men. The men who have had to go long miles, on an empty belly, under a hot sun, or through a driving rain. They made us take him in. They said he made things easier for them.”[/i]

Deems Taylor, Of Men and Music © 1950

I like that. It sounds like something Deems Taylor would say, too. And it would appear that Deems Taylor, like many, has a relationship to the music of JP Sousa similar to mine.

Shooshie

[James Steele]

Thought you guys might appreciate this. In the backstage of the old historic Lyceum theater in downtown San Diego, I spotted this scrawled on a wall in one of the back rooms. It has plexiglass placed over it to protect the signature that was done in pencil. It's legit. I took a photo:

[Shooshie]

Thought you guys might appreciate this. In the backstage of the old historic Lyceum theater in downtown San Diego, I spotted this scrawled on a wall in one of the back rooms. It has plexiglass placed over it to protect the signature that was done in pencil. It's legit. I took a photo:

Cool! It's always cool to find things like that in theaters. There's a theater in Omaha (IIRC) that has a piano signed by Horowitz. Sometimes they have pictures in the green room. Somewhere (I don't remember where) there were signatures all over the backstage bathroom. They hadn't painted their bathroom in a long, long time!

Shoosh

[Phil O]

Thanks for the posts, guys!!

[BobK]

Thanks for the posts, guys!!

+1

[Rick Cornish]

Great stuff....thanks for posting. I was "volunteered" to direct my little town band for the summer and we are programming lots of Sousa. His writing was so solid, it sounds good outdoors and even holds up pretty well if you have only one clarinet player show up (which has happened).

[FMiguelez]

Thank you for posting this.

Like you said, it's great timeless music by the master of bands.

[monkey man]

Master of bands, 'Nandito? ... and his music was timeless? Cripes, it may all be 4/4, but every hittoon my marching band's had has contained time.

Geez, turn it up and drive the nails in deeper, won't you?

Oh man, this is gonna put me out of business!

An excerpt from the yet-to-be-released MLI Product Update Q3 2015:

3rd World March By Series™
3rd World March By - Movement Three - Holus Bolus
3rd World March By - Movement Four - The Bowel Movement
3rd World March By - Movement Five - Himalayan Hemorrhoids Collection

No, I think your timing is perfect. You may be hangin' ten on the the wave of a new trend. Yea, Baby!

A sales bump would be very much appreciated, Mike. Thank you for the heads-up!

[mikehalloran]

Hmmm.... Dare I mention that march time is 6/8, not 4/4?

[Rick Cornish]

Hmmm.... Dare I mention that march time is 6/8, not 4/4?

Depends on the march. I see cut time as often as 6/8.