Here's To Ya, "Maestro of the March"

John Philip Sousa was the American Beethoven. And all that that entails.

Can you imagine if Sousa had been alive back in those days?? He would have been a sensation! Imagine those parochial rubes who were so scandalized by the first performance of Beethoven's 5th. Now picture Sousa stepping out and hitting a crowd like that between the eyes with The Washington Post March!

Admittedly, that piece would probably not then have been called "The Washington Post March." But Opus #G or whatever it would then have been called, Sousa would have taken that piece and knocked those people out of their god-damned skulls with it! Their minds, their very hearts would have been in a riot, but their bodies would be held transfixed (apart from involuntarily-tapping toes). They would have been all "Here, zen, is ze new master of a form so pure, so bdrdrute, yet so majestic, that a special sort of tuba may need to be invented in order to do due justice to it properly! At some point!"

I'm not so adept at typing the fake German accent, I guess. I tried to roll the 'r' there a little, on "brute." Not sure it reads.

It goes without saying that he would have to have been in Germany, or Vienna, or Austria or the vicinity. That's where the whole hot scene was at that point! Over here, it was all a fife and a fiddle and a yankedy-doo-dah-yay. Music of that rustic sort could afford no real outlet for a man of Sousa's colossal talent. No, he was born to stir the nether ethers of heaven, with a more orchestral strain.

The problem is, he came along too late. By his time, music had been kind of shunted to the side. It was ceding center stage, becoming more used as an accompaniment, not as the main event. So he did what he could to ennoble its diminishing purpose. Rah.

Rah.