John Philip Sousa (November 6, 1854 – March 6, 1932) was the director of the United States Marine Band, "The President's Own," from 1880 to 1892. He was perhaps the most influential director of that band. Today he is best known as the author of several patriotic marches for wind bands, the most famous of which is "The Stars and Stripes Forever."
Sousa's first hit was "The Gladiator." A few years later, "Semper Fidelis" followed. Sousa revised the whole Marine Band repertoire and instituted strict rehearsal discipline. Under his leadership, the Marine Band made several best-selling phonograph recordings.
A march he wrote for a Washington Post essay contest became such a sensation all over America and Europe that several composers imitated its two-step style, with marches collectively dubbed "Washington Posts."
Sousa's famous marches, and even some of his less well-known ones, have provided Public Domain Soundtrack for a number of movies and TV shows, ranging from the fairly obvious (A Few Good Men) to the much less so (The Shape of Water). Some of the other films and TV shows with Sousa on the soundtrack include:
- The Blacklist "Robert Diaz (No. 15)"
- Boardwalk Empire (four episodes)
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine "USPIS"
- Monty Python's Flying Circus (the opening theme is Sousa's "The Liberty Bell")
- Captain America: The First Avenger
- CSI: New York "Unspoken"
- Family Guy "Herpe, the Love Sore"
- Major Crimes "Turn Down"
- Octopussy
- Sherlock "The Hounds of Baskerville"
- The Simpsons (at least fourteen episodes so far)
- Spider-Man 2
Bear in mind that's a very small sampling. The IMDb lists roughly six hundred movies and TV shows.
Like most famous composers, a few of Sousa's compositions are extremely popular and the rest are quite obscure. Some Sousa marches that might be worth hearing more often include "New Mexico" (which uses aboriginal instruments), "Transit of Venus" and a wedding march.
Like Richard Wagner with Adolphe Sax, Sousa consulted with an instrument maker, J. W. Pepper, to make a new brass instrument, the sousaphone, a kind of tuba that is more amenable to performance in a marching band than a conventional concert tuba. Made of brass but also available in fiberglass, the sousaphone is typically notated at concert pitch in the bass clef but it can also be notated as B-flat instrument in the treble clef a major ninth above concert pitch.
The Marine Band has comprehensibly collected his marches in The Complete Marches of John Philip Sousa
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Sousa is the subject of the 1952 biopic Stars and Stripes Forever, in which he is portrayed by Clifton Webb.
His works include examples of:
- EagleLand: "Stars and Stripes Forever" is practically the theme song of this Trope. The rest of Sousa's marches are all also meant to invoke feelings of type I Eagleland.
- March: Many of his works are written in this manner, with his music being a fixture of parades to this day.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: A lot of media has since used his work within them, ranging from the very well-known to relatively obscure. His march "The Liberty Bell", for instance, has become best known as the theme to Monty Python's Flying Circus.
- Semper Fi: Sousa wrote "Semper Fidelis" after President Chester A. Arthur mentioned he disliked "Hail to the Chief", and named it in honor of "The President's Own" (and, not coincidentally, Sousa's own) U.S. Marine Band. It may just be the second-greatest march ever written, after "The Stars and Stripes Forever".
