Your favorite Sousa?

[KVG_DC]

My first exposure to The Gallant Seventh was in tri- state honor band for high schools in the Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan corners. 
 

We had a number of pieces we were given in advance to prep, but then there was always a “sight reading piece” that we’d get Friday evening for the Saturday evening concert. 
 

The envelopes go out and we’re instructed to wait to open them together as we’d get five minutes and he’d count us off to play. 
 

We pull out The Gallant Seventh and those of us from programs that did sight reading exercises for competitions immediately start rifling through to find the toughest passages and parse the key and changes and start fingering them.

Behind me I hear our first chair trumpet whisper “oh s___…” followed by a few confused murmurs from trumpets down the line from smaller programs.  Then a lot of panicked breathing.

He counts us off at full tempo and it was rough.  We sounded pretty good the next night when though!

 

[KVG_DC]

In retrospect, being instructed to learn to play scales and arpeggios around the entire circle of fifths at pace without stopping was perhaps one of the most valuable bits of musicianship building I ever had 

[MadisonBandMan1]

I know this thread is about Sousa but I just want to hijack this thread and talk about my two favorite marches right now.

 Rolling Thunder by Henry Filmore

And The World is Waiting for Sunrise by Harry Alford

I will share my favorite Sousa marches here shortly. 

[CrownBariDad]

I wish I could post pics but I inherited an antique cylinder player from my grand dad and an assortment of cylinders. There's a Caruso in there somewhere, but my favorite is the one of Sousa's band playing Stars and Stripes Forever conducted by the man himself.

I used to conduct this, too, when I was 5 or 6. My band was my stuffed animals. The recording was too small to contain the march on one side, so I had to stop and flip it over to hear the "dog fight" and the ending. The bears made for a great trombone section.