ExclusiveSousa: The Gladiator

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】John Philip Sousa: The Gladiator. This beautiful piece was played by US Air Force Band. It has Creative Commons license (Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal) and is provided through www.musopen.org.

John Philip Sousa was born in Washington on 6 November 1854, the son of a Portuguese father and a German mother. He is now regarded as the ‘king of march music’ and wrote well over 100 compositions that are now part of the standard repertoire of brass bands. We also have him to thank for the sousaphone.

‘The Gladiator’ was composed in 1886, when Sousa was leading the United States Marine Band. He dedicated the march to journalist Charles B. Towle. It is speculated that the title alludes to Towle being a gladiator who fought with a pen instead of a sword.

None of Sousa's reminiscences reveal the identity of the "Gladiator", but the first edition of the score was dedicated to Charles F. Towle of Boston. Towle was a journalist who was editor of the Boston Traveller at the time the march was written, but the nature of his association with Sousa is not known.

Sousa's daughter Helen suggested that her father may have been inspired by a literary description of a certain gladiator. It is unlikely that he would have dedicated a march to gladiators in general, given their cruelty and inhumanity, but perhaps a noble gladiator who had fallen victim to circumstances could have been his inspiration.

Gladiator evoked both good and bad memories in Sousa. In 1885 he had written the dirge "The Honored Dead" for Stopper and Fisk, a music publisher in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. They were so pleased that they asked him to write a quickstep march. He responded with "The Gladiator", but they rejected it. Their shortsightedness cost them dearly; Sousa then sold it to Harry Coleman of Philadelphia, and it eventually sold over a million copies.

“The Gladiator” was Sousa's first march to achieve widespread popularity.

The video was captured by Simone Schlegel and edited by Wenjing Ma.






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