Stars & Stripes Forever

They gave you a tuba part. It would be written at pitch, so to play it on bass you'd have to take it up an octave.

A classic for the 4th of July. We played the Dave Wolpe arrangement of it for big band. There are a lot of different arrangements of this Sousa March. The fact that it was played with electric bass (or even DB) means that it was 'screwed around with' at least a little bit.

 

Don't you mean Sousaphone?

 

The thing's in cut time, tempo is half note = 120.

In fact, Stars and Stripes Forever is a piece that has historically been played at a freakishly consistent tempo, if you ever need to find 120 bpm just hum it and you'll be pretty damn close.

 

Believe it or not but Sousa wrote string bass parts to most, if not all, of his marches. I have them.

 

Sousa tended to make the sound very full. The sound is excellent for professional and college bands, but in the hand of less experienced musicians it can sound dull and 'fuzzy' (remember that Sousa was director of the US Marine band 1890-1900, then had is own professional group. During WWI he was director of the Navy Band, and after the war had a professional group until his death in 1932).

What I mean by a very full sound is, for instance, the french horn parts are more rhythmic (long, short, long, short etc etc) rather than melodic, and tend to be voiced in full chords using 4 parts. In the re-arrangements, that part is often reduced to a two part harmony, or sometimes just left out completely leaving the percussion section to keep the rhythm. The low brass parts are sometimes simplified by reducing the number of parts. The same is true for the woodwinds. Instead of a complete and full voicing of the woodwinds as a section it is a clearer scoring to double the saxophones with the low brass rather than have them work as the low sound within the wooodwind section.

Of course all that is very subjective and part of the choices that arrangers will use depending on how and where the music is to be played and who the players are. There are very fine arrangements of the famous Sousa marchs that are very accessable to Middle School bands (it would be difficult to get a very good sound from kids that age using the original parts). David Shaffer is a fine arranger for that. And Fredrick Fennell did some good work arranging them for wind ensemble.. there were a good number of 'mistakes' in the original parts, mostly along the lines of editing expression marks.

BTW, Sousa himself was a violin player professionally before getting into the band biz.

 

As a french horn player for years I absolutely abhorred Sousa marches because of the 5 minutes of off beats I had to play.

boom-Chuck boom-Chuck boom-Chu-Chu-Chuck-Chuck.

If you've never had a cramp in your lower jaw, play that and see how you feel.

I think the faster Sousa marches are played the better. You get the over with sooner and the horn section won't fall over dead.