THE MARCH KING

What better month to celebrate The March King than July - what would our Independence be without a rousing march or two? This article was posted in this month's issue of our community magazine

“Da, da dee dah-dah, de dah, de dah, de dah.” Of course you recognize the opening bars of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Don’t you? (There’s no way to put those opening bars, plus the cymbals crash, into print. You’ll have to hum to yourself.)

There’s nothing like a stirring march to get our patriotic juices flowing, and there’s nothing like a Sousa march to top them all. John Philip Sousa* was born in 1854 in Washington, D.C. He began with the violin, at age six, and went on to master the piano, the flute, and several brass instruments. He was a natural. His father, a trombonist in the U.S. Marine Band, enlisted his son, age 13, in the corps as an apprentice so that he wouldn’t run off and join the circus – the circus band, of course.

After his first stint with the corps ended in 1875, he learned to conduct while he was in a theatre orchestra. Thus, when he rejoined the corps, at the age of 26, it was the leader of the band. He led the Marne Corps Band for twelve more years, after which he left to form his own band. In the years that followed, the Sousa Band performed all over the world. Interestingly though, over all the years, they marched only eight times.

You can sense the concert audiences sitting and tapping their toes to the Sousa marches, but there was other music offered as well. Sousa, The March King, also wrote many popular operettas, dozens of songs, and other pieces such as overtures and suites. Among his 136 marches, though we may not remember their names, the tunes of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” “The Washington Post,” “Semper Fidelis,” and “The Thunderer” are familiar to us all.

                                                   

No sousaphones in the Marine Band

In almost every marching band across the country, there is at least one person beholden to Sousa for inventing the sousaphone. A typical concert tuba weighs in at 25 to 35 pounds, and though a sousaphone can weigh just about the same, the tuba’s circumference is several feet. It’s fine for a player to let his chair hold it for him while he plays in the orchestra, but it is a beast to heft if he has to march with it.

Sousa recognized the problem. In 1893, providing ideas about what he needed, he asked Philadelphia instrument maker, J. W. Pepper and Sons, to design a tuba that could be carried. The sousaphone was based on the helicon, a much older but awkward instrument that could also be carried. The sousaphone incorporates different features that make it comfortable for the player to carry, as well as to play.

Though there were once jumbo sousaphones that weighed 60 pounds, the average one weighs 30 to 35 pounds, give or take the weight of the music holder.  And, would you believe it, there are Sousaphones made of fiberglass that weigh only about 15 pounds. No brass there.

Ready to march in the festivities in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, years ago,
this sousaphone-wearing gentleman was the clown of the event.
His eyes were very expressive. 

As Elizabeth Eshelman, a onetime sousaphone player, wrote, “There’s something about a wearable tuba that brings out the—goofy? show-off? animalistic? flamboyant? side of the tubist, and when you consider that one must already have a screw loose to choose to play the tuba, you start to realize that the sousaphone is really its own beast.”  Next time you’re at a football game or a big parade, make note of the antics of the sousaphone players – they’re a fun bunch.

* Don’t believe the wags who’ll try to tell you his surname was So, and that in a patriotic gesture he added the USA to his name. ‘Tain’t so!