STANLEY tells it all – Studying Sousa: from letters to notes
After reading a lot of letters, words and sentences about John Philip Sousa, it was time to read the notes, chords and melodies he composed. Going through my inhouse library, I started dusting off the books on composing and arranging. Over the years, I have acquired them all. As a composer and arranger myself, I am of the curious kind. Any new book is subject to indepth scrutiny. You never know what you can learn next, right? This approach always helps me to build focus while studying new material. Even though I knew Sousa’s music, I still made studying it a new project.
Getting back to ‘my’ books was great. Although many deal with jazz music and film scoring, most subjects are related to all. The omni talented Sammy Nestico wrote about both the Jazz Big Band and the Symphonic Wind Band in his ‘The Complete Arranger’. However, my favorite book is ‘Scoring for the Band’ by Philip J. Lang. This great composer/arranger and orchestrator ‘par excellence’ enclosed his famous orchestration on Morton Goulds version of ‘Yankee Doodle’. When I studied Wind Band Conducting in the early ‘80s, Lang’s book was the one we used.
Personally, I like to hold a book in my hands while reading. Studying Sousa, I noticed the majority of books are not available anymore since they are out of print. However, the internet as library of the world, brings many more opportunities to still read and study these. Copyright is challenged, an important subject for authors, but not all the time. It’s a weird kind of battle within, since it hurts me to notice entire books have been digitalised and published online. At the same time, it’s the only way to go forward in order to study Sousa. From across the Atlantic, that is!
The same applies to published music. Scores, parts, etc., can be found online as well. Here we owe a lot to the BandMusic PDF Library which is the online music library to visit. Many thanks to the initiators, contributors and volunteers for keeping up the good work! They brought us in contact with more music than we could have imagined.
Stanley E. van Wel MM – Music Director
Posted on LinkedIn.com dated 29 November 2023