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achieved still greater success when they were
retrofitted with words by Mitchell Parish —
among them, “Belle of the Ball,” “The Waltzing
Cat,” “Serenata,” and “Sleigh Ride.”
A gifted melodist, Anderson was naturally
given to composing elegantly detailed orchestral
miniatures. He did essay a few pieces in the larger
genres, including a piano concerto and the Broadway musical Goldilocks, but as his biographer
Steve Metcalf pointed out, “of the works that have
made Anderson’s reputation, no individual piece
is as long as four minutes in duration, and at least
half are under three.” Anderson’s pieces are very
much of their time, a period when record labels
issued catalogues of “semi-classical” releases
and audiences embraced lightweight compositions that displayed high standards of classical
craftsmanship, even if the aspirations were unpretentious. His music was immediately accessible and hard to forget, a magical melding of
the popular and symphonic traditions.
At the turn of the 20th century John Philip
Sousa was doubtless the world’s most
famous American musician and quite likely the
most famous musician of any nationality. He
transcended borders practically as a matter of
genetics: his father was born in Spain to
Portuguese parents, while his mother was born
in Bavaria. His father was a professional
musician, a trombonist in the United States Marine Band, and saw to it that his son received
training in a variety of instruments. When he
was only 13, John Philip was himself named an
apprentice member of the Marine Band, and he
was offered the group’s directorship in 1880, at
the age of 25. He spent the next 12 years at the
group’s helm, quickly transforming it into the
most accomplished military band in the nation,
and in the last two years as director he took the
Marine Band on national tours that consolidated its fame. He formed his own ensemble —
Sousa’s Band— in 1893, and that ensemble continued to be a strong draw until the Great Depression made touring impractical.
The term “occasional music” is used for musical compositions written to accompany a specific event, usually a ceremonial one. Most
occasional music is forgotten about as quickly
as the event for which it is written. Many of
Sousa’s marches were written as occasional
pieces, and although they include some of his
more obscure items — say, The Lambs’ March
(written for the 1914 “gambol” of New York City’s
Lambs’ Club) or the Sesquicentennial Exposition March (for Philadelphia’s 1926 celebration
of 150 years of American independence) — they
also include The Washington Post, which
The Washington Post
John Philip Sousa
Born: November 6, 1854, in Washington, D.C.
Died: March 6, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania
Work composed and premiered: composed, 1889;
premiered June 15 of that year, at the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, D.C., with Sousa leading the United States
Marine Band
New York Philharmonic premiere and most recent
performance: premiered February 5, 1920, Josef Stransky,
conductor; most recently played, July 4, 2009, Bramwell
Tovey, conductor
Sousa in 1890
36 | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC
Estimated duration: ca. 4 minutes
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probably ranks as the second most popular of
his 136 marches, trailing only The Stars and
Stripes Forever.
The Washington Post newspaper had been
founded in 1877 as a four-page “Democratic
daily journal.” In 1889 the paper sponsored an
essay contest for public school students, an incentive it unveiled under the name Amateur
Authors Association. Sousa and the U.S. Marine
Band were enlisted to play at the awards ceremony, which was to be held at the Smithsonian
Institution on June 15, 1889. In the run-up to the
event, the Post’s co-publisher, Frank Hatton,
asked Sousa to consider writing a new march
for the occasion, and the band leader consented, dedicating his new work to — and in
fact naming it for — the newspaper itself.
Although marches are typically thought of
as being in simple-duple time (2/4 or 4/4
meter), they can just as easily be written in a
more skipping compound-duple meter (usually 6/8). The Washington Post is of the latter
variety, and the piece owes a good measure of
its popularity to the fact that marches in 6/8
time were at that moment being pressed into
use for the newly devised social dance called
the two-step. In fact, The Washington Post became the prototypical two-step, which made it
an instant international hit for both parade
grounds and ballrooms.
Notwithstanding its tremendous success,
this march did practically nothing to enrich its
composer. As with all his early marches, Sousa
had sold this one outright to his publisher — in
this case for $35. Not until he produced his
march The Liberty Bell, in 1893, would Sousa
strike a publishing deal that would ensure him
ongoing royalties.
In the Composer’s Words
In his autobiography, Marching Along (1928), John Philip Sousa wrote (perhaps with a touch of geographical
imprecision) of how inescapable The Washington Post had become:
I have smiled almost incredulously many a time at proofs of the world popularity of that march. It seems
there is no getting away from it — even in the fastnesses of a Borneo jungle! Major Coffin of the Army, told
me that one day as he was walking through a forest in Borneo he heard the familiar sound of a violin and
suddenly came upon a little Filipino boy, with his sheet music pinned to a tree, diligently working away on
The Washington Post. As for more conventional places, the wildfire spread with even greater vigor. When I went to Europe I
found that the two-step was called a “Washington Post” in England and Germany, and no concert I gave in Europe was complete without the performance of that march. It was the rage,
too, in staid New England, for an orchestra leader in a New England town declared that, at one ball, the only obstacle to his playing the thing twenty-three times was the fact that there were
only twenty-two dances on the programme. Even during the recent World War its cadences clung. One of our soldiers told me
that he had stopped for a drink of water at a little house in a
French village and the old peasant who came to the door invited
him in and, learning that he was an American, immediately commanded his little girl to play some American music for the guest.
The child obliged — with The Washington Post.
The “Washington Post” two-step
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