The Experiences of a Bandmaster

John Philip Sousa was the most famous musician in America. He wrote marches so electrifying that audiences allegedly started dancing in the aisles, and he led the United States Marine Band through the Gilded Age, when a presidential inauguration could bring 50,000 people to the Capitol grounds just to hear the music. This memoir is his account of that vanished world: the command performances for presidents who requested "something lively" at 2am, the political chess games of Washington society, and the peculiar dignity of being both a soldier and a showman. Sousa recounts encounters with Presidents Arthur and Cleveland with the practiced wit of a man who had seen everything from failed state dinners to panic-inducing applause. He describes music's strange power to heal a divided nation, to make grown men weep at patriotic airs, to transform a formal ball into something approaching joy. This is a first-person time machine into an America where bands were the radio, where a good march could launch a thousand romances, and where one man with a baton could make the whole country feel like it was standing at attention.