Music
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Item Amateur and Professional, Permanent and Transient: Orchestras in the District of Columbia, 1877–1905(University of Chicago Press, 2012) Warfield, PatrickItem John Philip Sousa and ‘The Menace of Mechanical Music’.(Cambridge University Press, 2009) Warfield, PatrickIn 1906 Appleton’s Magazine published John Philip Sousa’s most celebrated—and vitriolic— article, “The Menace of Mechanical Music.” In it Sousa predicts that piano rolls and recordings will end amateur music making in the United States. Modern writers have often condemned Sousa as a hypocrite (the Sousa Band was itself a major recording ensemble) and chastised him for failing to see the cultural and financial benefits of mechanical music. But, in fact, Sousa’s article was part of a larger scheme to gain public support for the 1909 copyright revision. It was also just one step in Sousa’s lifelong battle for composers’ rights, a battle with five distinct phases: (1) the debate over the right of public performance precipitated by the success of Gilbert and Sullivan in the United States, (2) a test of the limits of contractual obligations between performers and managers, (3) the instigation of an international copyright law, (4) the battle over mechanical rights, and (5) the ability of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) to collect royalties as related to public performance.Item The March as Musical Drama and the Spectacle of John Philip Sousa(University of California Press, 2011) Warfield, PatrickJohn Philip Sousa’s phenomenal appeal for early twentieth-century American audiences lay in large part in the dramatic nature of his marches, their performance practice, and his own persona as the March King. Sousa was responsible for transforming the earlier da capo parade march into a linear work suitable for concert performance. When combined with the now largely forgotten performance practice of the Sousa Band, these marches became miniature dramas. Sousa’s famous marches, however, were seldom featured on printed handbills. Rather, the March King connected to his audiences by inviting them to take part fictitiously in concert programming by calling for Sousa’s marches as encores. Such encores not only allowed Sousa to remain humbly invisible on programs, but also provided audiences with the illusion of an intimate conversation with a celebrity entertainer, a conversation that reinforced nineteenth-century notions of American manhood. Through his advertising and concert work, Sousa strove to appear not as a distant celebrity, but simply as a more successful version of the Americans in his audience.