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It's hard to imagine how many different performances
I've heard of Sousa's masterpiece, "The Stars and Stripes
Forever." Harder still
to conceive how many times I've played and conducted it.
I thought I knew it inside-out, and I've made personal decisions on
the use of the many performance variations that have gone in and out of
fashion over the years. Anyone
who is familiar with the march has been exposed to most of those, and most
band musicians have been told, at one time or another, "play the
second strain down an octave the first time through," or
"cornets, lay out the first time through the trio."
Trombonists by now almost instinctively know not to play their
countermelody until the last time through the trio, so the flutes and
piccolos will predominate the previous time through.
Often at least one first cornetist--usually the whole section--will
decide to play the concert B-flat in the trio's 15th bar an octave higher
than written, because so many bands play it that way on recordings.
And then there's that drum roll-off effect in the final four bars
of the march that has been in vogue for more than thirty years.
So many unique touches, spread far and wide on records, tapes, and
now CD's…it's enough to make one wonder if there's a band left that
plays "Stars and Stripes" as the published music indicates it
should be. Well, the best source is the one and only recording
of John Philip Sousa conducting "Stars and Stripes" with a band
of New York musicians, some from his current (1929) band, the rest
veterans of earlier Sousa Band tours.
It was made in an NBC studio as his contribution to a program of
music by concert bands from around the world.
It isn't the cleanest, best-balanced performance you'll ever hear,
but it provides evidence of how Sousa himself wanted his march played. It provides something else, too: sonic proof that Sousa actually changed a note value to give
the famous trio melody an added "lift."
For along with the softened dynamics and woodwinds playing the
second strain an octave lower than written, and the flutes all switching
to piccolo (with the trombones not playing at all) during the first trio
repeat (but no drum roll-off at the end), there is, in all three times
through the trio, what comes awfully close to a "Scottish snap"
in the thirteenth bar! With that recording now easily available on CD, you
can check it out for yourself. It's
subtle, but no melody instrument plays that 13th bar as
written. I must have heard
the performance a dozen times before I thought of the rushed concert
E-flat as anything but the exuberance (or imprecision) of the musicians.
Maybe even a little touch of egotism in the cornet section, I
thought. But it wasn't
imprecision, and it wasn't some solo cornetist playing fast and loose with
Sousa's melody. To begin with, Sousa was there, conducting.
This adds authority to the performance.
Arthur Pryor had led the band in its Victor recording a few years
earlier, and there wasn't even a hint of melodic change, at that spot or
elsewhere. If Sousa hadn't
wanted that effect there, it wouldn't have been there.
I have every reason to believe that "the Governor" asked
his musicians to play it that way, and that leads us to an even more
important question: Did
Sousa always play "The Stars and Stripes Forever" that way? We'll probably never know, at this point. The last Sousa Band veteran has died. There's no one to ask, no one to tell, the way Gus Helmecke finally told us about the unwritten drum accents in the published versions of many of Sousa's best-known marches. A few years ago I asked Paul Bierley about that mysterious Bar 13, and he admitted that he'd never noticed the rhythmic alteration. But he didn't dismiss it as an impossibility. He, better than most, knew about Sousa's performance secrets. He said he'd look into it, but he was going through a bout of ill health at the time, and I don't know if he ever uncovered anything about it or not. And all I know is what my musician's ear tells me. That band, following John Philip Sousa's personal direction, played the thirteenth bar as an eighth note followed by an eighth note tied to a dotted half note, not as a quarter note followed by a dotted half, the way the printed music dictates.
Sousa, when he led that performance, was seventy-five
years old. I doubt if he was
doing much musical experimentation by that point, especially with his most
famous march. That leads me
to believe he'd been playing "Stars and Stripes" that way for a
long time, conceivably since shortly after he premiered it in 1897.
Or, perhaps, he made the change, to be used with his own band only,
in the years when he began playing ragtime to satisfy the public taste.
He was a showman, after all. We
all know he had his private bag of tricks, including those drum accents
never included in his published marches, the octave shifts in almost all
of them, his waving out of entire sections during performances (but never
on records), and, I believe, many cymbal or bass drum solos in everything
from "Washington Post" to "The Liberty Bell."
Isn't it likely he would go one step farther with the march that
made him a national icon? I think if Sousa had realized his 1929 contribution
to that NBC broadcast was going to survive through the years he would have
told his musicians to play Bar 13 "straight."
But that's just personal speculation, of course.
Nobody is ever going to know for sure.
It's a fine mystery. All
I can do is decide, when I next get to conduct "Stars and
Stripes," whether I want to play it the way Sousa did on that one
occasion back in 1929. I think I probably will. |
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