A Duck May Be Somebody’s Mother

The Stars and Stripes Forever, by John Philip Sousa, played on a magnificent Hooghuys fairground organ.

Sousa was an interesting fellow. He started out playing the violin, which isn’t a great fit for marching bands. Could have been worse. It could have been the cello. At any rate, his father played the trombone, which is more like plumbing than music, I’ll admit. Dad was in the US Marine Band, and was afraid his boy John was going to literally run away and join the circus, not figuratively like most folks. So his father enlisted him in the US Marines. He was thirteen years old. Kinda harsh, dad. Sousa’s enlistment lasted eight years. When he got out, he got a job playing the violin in pit orchestras, and learned how to conduct. Sousa had perfect (absolute) pitch, like somebody I know. If you’ve ever played an instrument without frets on it, or that uses an infinitely variable slide instead of valves to find the note, you know how badly you don’t want a conductor with perfect pitch. Five years later, he was appointed the conductor of the Marine Band. So dad won out in the end, I guess.

Sousa wanted a tuba that would sound better and be easier to play while marching. He asked someone, exactly who is disputed, to modify a helicon, and the result is the familiar sousaphone you see skirling around football fields at halftime, or used to, anyway, before aging strumpets were hired to lip-sync pop tunes instead. Not many people have a musical instrument named after them. You might, I don’t know you that well, but I know I don’t. But I’d totally play a Sippicantela if someone made me one.

Marching bands are thin on the ground these days. A generation ago they were just as important as the football team, in high school and college, anyway. You had to be a pretty good player to qualify for a big college band. You still have to be a really good player, world-class really, to be in the Marine Band.

Most bands wear out just a few Sousa marches, but he wrote a lot of them, at least 130. It’s funny, but almost all of them, even the obscure ones, sound instantly familiar, like Happy Birthday or The Wedding March from Lohengrin, or Stairway to Heaven. He wrote 15 operettas and a bunch of other stuff, too. Operettas are like operas for regular people who fall asleep an hour before the fat lady sings in a regular opera. Sousa is the antidote to Wagner, I guess.

He spent most of his life in the military, and not all the brass was in the marching band. Sousa is enshrined in the Trapshooting Hall of Fame. He represented the Navy in trapshooting competitions against the Army. “Let me say that just about the sweetest music to me is when I call, ‘pull,’ the old gun barks, and the referee in perfect key announces, ‘dead’.”

Sousa marches sound gloriously anachronistic now. They were exactly fitted to their time and place, but somehow became universal and timeless. But Sousa was also a seer. He heard the first sound recordings, and knew what was coming:

“These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy… in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.”

Take pity on poor Sousa. Nobody tell him about the iPhone.