Making the March King: John Philip Sousa's Washington Years, 1854-1893

by Patrick Warfield

John Philip Sousa's mature career as the indomitable leader of his own touring band is well known, but the years leading up to his emergence as a celebrity have escaped serious attention. In this revealing biography, Patrick Warfield explains how the March King came to be by documenting Sousa's early life and career. Covering the period 1854 to 1893, this study focuses on the community and training that created Sousa, exploring the musical life of late nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia as a context for Sousa's development. Warfield examines Sousa's wide-ranging experience composing, conducting, and performing in the theater, opera house, concert hall, and salons, as well as his leadership of the United States Marine Band and the later Sousa Band, early twentieth-century America's most famous and successful ensemble. Sousa composed not only marches during this period but also parlor, minstrel, and art songs; parade, concert, and medley marches; schottisches, waltzes, and polkas; and incidental music, operettas, and descriptive pieces. Warfield's examination of Sousa's output reveals a versatile composer much broader in stylistic range than the bandmaster extraordinaire remembered as the March King. In particular, Making the March King demonstrates how Sousa used his theatrical training to create the character of the March King. The exuberant bandmaster who pleased audiences was both a skilled and charismatic conductor and a theatrical character whose past and very identity suggested drama, spectacle, and excitement. Sousa's success was also the result of perseverance and lessons learned from older colleagues on how to court, win, and keep an audience. Warfield presents the story of Sousa as a self-made business success, a gifted performer and composer who deftly capitalized on his talents to create one of the most entertaining, enduring figures in American music.

360 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2013

Reviews

[Jean]

Not for the faint of heart since written by a musicologist for other musicologists, yet interesting in noting how artists during the period of Romanticism professed to be spontaneous when they were working at their craft.

[Barbara Phillips-Farley]

This book complemented my image of post-Civil War U. S. musical life. Sousa grew up near the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., and was a well-rounded musician. Trained as a violinist, he played in theater orchestras, arranged, composed, and conducted. As director of "the President's Own" Marine Corps Band, he came to prominence and demonstrated his ability to please audiences. The repertoire of that organization was much wider than just marches: they played quadrilles and other social dances, operatic preludes, light classical pieces. When Patrick Gilmore died, the agent William Blakeley persuaded Sousa to tour with his own professional band (many had been with Gilmore). This group had phenomenal success, touring through the year and taking residence in East Coast resorts. Sousa continued to compose, often tailoring his pieces to a specific event -- as, the Chicago Exhibition and other World Fairs, the U.S. Centennial, the unveiling of a patriotic statue -- and his compositions were then available in sheet music arrangements for piano, banjo, zither, various chamber groupings, etc.
The author includes observations on Sousa's compositional innovations, stressing that he was always the dramatist.