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JOHN PHILIP SOUSA
“The Stars and Stripes Forever” March (1896)

America’s most celebrated military march actually came about during a period of mourning and reflection. While on vacation in Europe, John Philip Sousa and his wife, Jenny, learned of the death of their dear friend David Blakely, who years earlier had encouraged the “March King” to form his own band and had managed it since 1892. Shock mingled with homesickness as they rushed home. Thus it was on Christmas Day 1896, as the bandleader strolled on the SS Teutonic and gazed at the American flag flying above, that he began hearing strains of what would become “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”


“Here came one of the most vivid incidents of my career,” the composer wrote in his 1928 autobiography, Marching Along. “As the vessel steamed out of the harbor I was pacing the deck, absorbed in thoughts of my manager’s death and the many duties and decisions which awaited me in New York. Suddenly, I began to sense the rhythmic beat of a band playing within my brain. It kept on ceaselessly, playing, playing, playing. Throughout the whole tense voyage, that imaginary band continued to unfold the same themes, echoing and re-echoing the most distinct melody. I did not transfer a note of that music to paper while I was on the steamer, but when we reached the shore, I set down the measures that my brain-band had been playing for me, and not a note of it has ever been changed.”


The Sousa Band played the work’s premiere on May 14, 1897, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. The performance inspired an excitable reporter for the city’s Public Ledger to write that it was “stirring enough to rouse the American eagle from his crag, and set him to shriek exultantly while he hurls his arrows at the aurora borealis.” It became the most requested work in the Sousa Band’s repertoire, and even today no patriotic celebration is complete without it. In 1987, an Act of Congress officially adopted it as “the national march of the United States of America.” (This was contrary, perhaps, to the wishes of Sousa himself, who in 1915 had quashed a similar effort, stating that “if the march ever becomes a national air, it will be because the people want it and not because of any congressional decree.”)


The march genre as passed down to Sousa was a product of centuries of history. Its use in military settings—primarily drum-calls in its original form—is mentioned already in 16th-century treatises, and by the 17th century the military band of Louis XIV was performing works by Jean-Baptiste Lully and André Philidor. Marches in France, England, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire grew ever more sophisticated in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It is not a stretch to suggest that marches from the Napoleonic Wars inspired composers such as Beethoven and Berlioz.


Sousa deserves most of the credit for the march’s elevated status in 19th- and early-20th-century America. Born in Washington, D.C., of an immigrant Portuguese father and a German mother, he showed early gifts on violin and trombone and studied harmony and composition with John Esputa, Jr., and George Felix Benkert. When Sousa was just 13, a family friend arranged for him to serve as an “enlisted apprentice” to the Marine Band.


Later he would join the band, in which his father played trombone, and from 1880 to 1892 he served as its director. During the terms of five presidents he raised the Marine Band (“The President’s Own”) to unprecedented levels of professionalism; after 1892 the civilian Sousa Band continued to build on this standard. In 1893, in continued efforts to polish the sound of the military band, Sousa encouraged the publisher and instrument-maker J.W. Pepper to develop a tuba-like helicon that came to be called the Sousaphone.


Sousa composed 136 military marches, including “The Liberty Bell,” “The Washington Post,” and “Semper Fidelis”; the latter became the official march of the United States Marine Corps. Having served in theater bands and orchestras, Sousa was also an avid composer of operettas (including El Capitan and The Bride Elect), and he wrote songs and a wide range of instrumental works including waltzes, overtures, suites, fantasies, and tone poems.


Typical for its genre, “The Stars and Stripes Forever” is built from multiple strains. Two initial strains, each repeated, are followed by a trio of three strains. The composer told the press that these three strains represent regions of the United States: The broad main subject is the North, the tootling piccolos represent the South, and the bold, descending brass is the West. Sousa later wrote optional patriotic lyrics to the march.


—Paul J. Horsley

JOHN PHILIP SOUSA
“The Stars and Stripes Forever” March (1896)

America’s most celebrated military march actually came about during a period of mourning and reflection. While on vacation in Europe, John Philip Sousa and his wife, Jenny, learned of the death of their dear friend David Blakely, who years earlier had encouraged the “March King” to form his own band and had managed it since 1892. Shock mingled with homesickness as they rushed home. Thus it was on Christmas Day 1896, as the bandleader strolled on the SS Teutonic and gazed at the American flag flying above, that he began hearing strains of what would become “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”


“Here came one of the most vivid incidents of my career,” the composer wrote in his 1928 autobiography, Marching Along. “As the vessel steamed out of the harbor I was pacing the deck, absorbed in thoughts of my manager’s death and the many duties and decisions which awaited me in New York. Suddenly, I began to sense the rhythmic beat of a band playing within my brain. It kept on ceaselessly, playing, playing, playing. Throughout the whole tense voyage, that imaginary band continued to unfold the same themes, echoing and re-echoing the most distinct melody. I did not transfer a note of that music to paper while I was on the steamer, but when we reached the shore, I set down the measures that my brain-band had been playing for me, and not a note of it has ever been changed.”


The Sousa Band played the work’s premiere on May 14, 1897, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. The performance inspired an excitable reporter for the city’s Public Ledger to write that it was “stirring enough to rouse the American eagle from his crag, and set him to shriek exultantly while he hurls his arrows at the aurora borealis.” It became the most requested work in the Sousa Band’s repertoire, and even today no patriotic celebration is complete without it. In 1987, an Act of Congress officially adopted it as “the national march of the United States of America.” (This was contrary, perhaps, to the wishes of Sousa himself, who in 1915 had quashed a similar effort, stating that “if the march ever becomes a national air, it will be because the people want it and not because of any congressional decree.”)


The march genre as passed down to Sousa was a product of centuries of history. Its use in military settings—primarily drum-calls in its original form—is mentioned already in 16th-century treatises, and by the 17th century the military band of Louis XIV was performing works by Jean-Baptiste Lully and André Philidor. Marches in France, England, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire grew ever more sophisticated in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It is not a stretch to suggest that marches from the Napoleonic Wars inspired composers such as Beethoven and Berlioz.


Sousa deserves most of the credit for the march’s elevated status in 19th- and early-20th-century America. Born in Washington, D.C., of an immigrant Portuguese father and a German mother, he showed early gifts on violin and trombone and studied harmony and composition with John Esputa, Jr., and George Felix Benkert. When Sousa was just 13, a family friend arranged for him to serve as an “enlisted apprentice” to the Marine Band.


Later he would join the band, in which his father played trombone, and from 1880 to 1892 he served as its director. During the terms of five presidents he raised the Marine Band (“The President’s Own”) to unprecedented levels of professionalism; after 1892 the civilian Sousa Band continued to build on this standard. In 1893, in continued efforts to polish the sound of the military band, Sousa encouraged the publisher and instrument-maker J.W. Pepper to develop a tuba-like helicon that came to be called the Sousaphone.


Sousa composed 136 military marches, including “The Liberty Bell,” “The Washington Post,” and “Semper Fidelis”; the latter became the official march of the United States Marine Corps. Having served in theater bands and orchestras, Sousa was also an avid composer of operettas (including El Capitan and The Bride Elect), and he wrote songs and a wide range of instrumental works including waltzes, overtures, suites, fantasies, and tone poems.


Typical for its genre, “The Stars and Stripes Forever” is built from multiple strains. Two initial strains, each repeated, are followed by a trio of three strains. The composer told the press that these three strains represent regions of the United States: The broad main subject is the North, the tootling piccolos represent the South, and the bold, descending brass is the West. Sousa later wrote optional patriotic lyrics to the march.


—Paul J. Horsley