NOTE: The Marine Band website points out that “only six marches from Volume 6 are in the public domain and presently have Marine Band editions. Recordings of non-PD marches are only available for streaming on YouTube." I selected one march from each volume (two from Volume 3), and the titles are as follows: Volume 1: Yorktown Centennial -- selected because I live in Virginia. Listen HERE. Volume 2: Mother Goose -- selected because I once wrote some music and lyrics for a children’s show based on Mother Goose. Listen HERE. Volume 3: The Quilting Party and The Belle of Chicago -- selected because I have one sister who loves to quilt, and one sister who lived in Chicago. Listen HERE and HERE. Volume 4: Powhatan’s Daughter -- selected because I live in Virginia, home to Wahunsenacawh, the leader of the Powhatan tribe, an alliance of Algonquian-speaking American Indians living in Tsenacommacah in the Tidewater region of Virginia at the time when English settlers landed at Jamestown in 1607. Listen HERE. Volume 5: Wedding March -- selected to see how Sousa’s wedding march compares to those by Mendelssohn and Wagner. Listen HERE. Volume 6: New Mexico -- selected because I’m planning a trip there in the fall. Listen HERE. I will listen to the marches today and tomorrow, and then I will post my comments and ratings later in the week. JULY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU! I have now listened to these seven marches a few times, and as you can tell from my ratings below, these are not necessarily the top-of-the line marches by Sousa. This group of marches is certainly a fine lot of marches, but there's a reason why I've never heard them before -- it's because they are examples of Sousa's second (or third?) tier marches. These marches are not in the same league as "Stars and Stripes Forever," "The Washington Post," "The Thunderer", and "Semper Fidelis" (just to name a few). I suppose someone can't hit a homerun every time. These marches range in duration from 1:25 for the "Quilting Party" to 6:50 for the protracted "Wedding March," and the average length of the seven comes in at 3:06, a very typical length for a Sousa-type march.
Evidently, Sousa capitalized on the popularity of an 1880's tune called "Aunt Dinah's Quilting Party" in this march, hence the name. Also, the first section includes a musical quote of “When a Wooer Goes a-Wooing” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard. Alas, when it comes to Powhatan's daughter, there is a much wrong with this march as the Disney film "Pocahontas." This march begins with some pretty typical fanfare followed by appropriate pomp for a wedding party, but then a slower, quieter section takes over and just drags on and on and on. There's a little more fanfare at 4:45 that hints at some additional pomp and jubilation, but the slow part takes over yet again. Close to 6:00 minutes into the song, church bells are added to the mix, but it's too little too late. While the "New Mexico" and these other six marches don't rank up there with some of Sousa's best, it is interesting to explore all of the marches of "The March King," the man who "revolutionized and standardized American march music during the 19th and early 20th centuries" (HERE).
In all, John Philip Sousa composed 136 military marches, a remarkable feat to be sure -- especially since so many of them rank as some of the greatest military marches of all time.
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A New Hope:As the header above says, each week I will listen to a piece of classical music that I've never heard before, and then I will report out what I thought about it. Archives
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