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John Philip Sousa's ‘Red Indians’: A Case Study of Race in Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

Michael V. Pisani
Michael V. Pisani
Affiliation:
Vassar College
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Extract

To discover that one of popular music's most famous and enduring composers wrote a march-characteristic called ‘The Red Man’ immediately arouses curiosity about the nature and substance of such a work, the reasons for writing it, and how audiences received it. John Philip Sousa composed ‘The Red Man’ in 1910 for his world tour and, like much of his music, it is still played and recorded today. I will attempt to answer these questions by examining this lesser-known but highly distinctive Sousa composition in detail. That necessarily involves seeing the piece through a variety of lenses. Since the way in which audiences listen to music has fundamentally changed in a hundred years, the closest we can come to hearing the piece through ears of 1910 is to explore a variety of critical responses from the time published in newspapers in different countries. Since these accounts are written in a stylistic language considerably different from the way modern critics write about music, the responses need to be seen in context. Many were rooted in notions of race and ethnicity prevalent among the middle- and upper-class audiences for which Sousa composed. Moreover, Sousa's audiences listened with a host of associations that accrued during the nineteenth century and are lost to us today. This was enhanced by the type of programmes on which ‘The Red Man’ was performed, which encouraged the perception of music through a national or exotic lens, or through the filter of a narrative. The musical language of this ‘Indian’ piece is hardly unique, since it owes many of its metaphors to Sousa's contemporaries. For all his originality, Sousa was also an expert assimilator. There isn’t space here to examine every derivation in this work, but by exploring a few of them we can learn much about his music and his audiences.

Type
Articles
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , June 2006 , pp. 73 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

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References

1 Sousa, John Philip, Marching Along: Recollections of Men, Women, and Music (revised edition, 1928Google Scholar ; repr. Westerville, OH, 1994), 265.

2 Information on Sousa's tour itinerary from Bierley, Paul E., John Philip Sousa: American Phenomenon (New York, 1973), 73Google Scholar .

3 Sousa recorded ‘The Red Man’ and ‘The Black Man’ from Dwellers with his band on diamond disc (Edison 50084-L and 50086-L). He later fashioned a full symphonic orchestration for the suite in 1916. The only known recorded versions of Dwellers in modern times are of the orchestral version. See Keith Brion cond., the Razumovsky Symphony Orchestra, John Philip Sousa, vol. 2: At the Symphony (Naxos 8.559013) and Richard Kapp, cond., The Philharmonia Virtuosi, Sousa for Orchestra or Wave the Flag (ESS.A.Y Recordings, 1989). References in this article are to the original instrumentation. The instrumentation for the 1911 tour is listed in a clipping found in the Sousa scrapbooks (known as the ‘John Philip Sousa Pressbooks’) in the archive of the United States Marine Band, Washington, D. C. I am grateful to Sergeant Michael Ressler for his assistance in making these pressbooks available to me. For this clipping, see Sousa pressbook 36, p. 65.

4 Northampton Mercury (28 Jan. 1911), 32Google Scholar . Also in Sousa Pressbook 35.

5 Items in pressbook 35: Evening Post and Globe (30 Sep. 1911), 85Google Scholar . Portland Telegram (28 Sep. 1911), 82Google Scholar . Items in pressbook 36: Portsmouth Times (14 Jan. 1911), 17Google Scholar . Leamington Chronicle (27 Jan. 1911), 31Google Scholar . Dundee Courier (22 Feb. 1911), 71Google Scholar . Leeds Mercury (3 Jan. 1911), 4Google Scholar . Northampton Mercury (28 Jan. 1911), 32Google Scholar . Lancaster Post (3 Feb. 1911), 46Google Scholar . Lancaster Observer (3 Feb. 1911), 116Google Scholar . Des Moines Leader (14 Nov. 1911), 116Google Scholar . Page numbers refer to location in the pressbooks, not to the original newspaper article.

6 Sousa's account of the genesis of Dwellers in the Western World is found in ‘Sousa at Shoot; Tune Spoils Aim’, Cleveland Leader (1 Jun. 1910) in pressbook 33, p. 42Google Scholar .

7 Elgar's Crown of India Suite of 1912 similarly conveys representation as a mirror of British colonialism.

8 The Band parts are in the John Philip Sousa collection at the University of Illinois, box 131, folders 5–8. I am grateful to Scott Schwartz, Archivist for Music and Fine Arts at the University of Illinois, for his assistance.

9 ‘The Red Man’ and ‘The Black Man’, probably because of their two-step tempo, were included in John Church's 1914 publication of John Philip Sousa: March and Dance Album, vol. 3.

10 The anonymous comment on racial differences in the music is in ‘March King's Band Wins Great Favor’, Des Moines Leader (14 Nov. 1911) in pressbook 36, p. 116Google Scholar .

11 No author, ‘Hottentot Two Step Sousa's Next?’ Minneapolis Journal (22 Nov. 1911) in pressbook 36, p. 119Google Scholar .

12 See my chapter ‘Music in the Theatre’ in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar .

13 Newspapers reviews of Sousa's, National, Patriotic, and Typical Airs were found in Sousa pressbook 1, p. 26fGoogle Scholar .

14 ‘Apache Scalp Song’ in National, Patriotic, and Typical Airs, 20.

15 For a rich study of this composer-conductor's fascination with American Indian lore, see Lowe, Donald, ‘Sir Carl Busch: His Life and Work as a Teacher, Conductor, and Composer’, DMA thesis, University of Missouri–Kansas City, 1972Google Scholar .

16 Benkert was the conductor of the Philadelphia orchestral union and taught Sousa harmony, violin and piano. Sousa had enormous respect for this musician, who died rather young. See Marching Along, 28 and 36–8.

17 Horatio Parker is not known to have composed any ‘Indian’-based works. Perhaps the reviewer is thinking of Parker's opera Mona, a Druidic subject that enjoyed a premiere at the Metropolitan in 1910.

18 Buffalo Evening News (5 Nov. 1910) in pressbook 36, p. 102Google Scholar .

19 ‘At the Prince’, Houston Post (30 Oct. 1911). Sousa pressbook 36, p. 113Google Scholar . ‘Auditorium: Sousa and His Band in Concert’, Minneapolis Tribune (18 Oct. 1912) in pressbook 36, p. 215Google Scholar .

20 By putting such words as Indian or primitive in quotes, I am not abdicating responsibility for attempting to explain what I mean by those terms. It is precisely the accrued meaning of this term in a musical context that interests me here. I use quotes to draw attention to the word's duplicity and to highlight its ambivalence. Yet I am aware of the dangers of attaching quotes to terms such as primitive. As Marianna Torgovnick aptly put it: ‘When we put primitive into quotation marks, we in a sense wish away the heritage of the West's exploitation of non-Western peoples or at least wish to demonstrate that we are politically correct. But the heritage of Western domination cannot be abolished by wishing or by typography. In fact, funny things begin to happen when primitive goes into quotation marks. The first thing is that all other constructed terms – especially terms like the West and Western – seem to require quotation marks as well, a technique that despite its seeming sophistication ultimately relieves writers of responsibility for the words they use. In the absence of such ubiquitous marks, treating primitive differently from abstractions such as Western implies that the societies traditionally so designated do not, and perhaps never did, exist – are simply a figment of the Euro-American imagination.’ See Torgovnick, Marianna, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1990), 20Google Scholar .

21 Toye, Francis ‘The Quintessence of America’, Vanity Fair (11 Jan. 1911) in pressbook 36, p. 13Google Scholar .

22 Browner, Tara, ‘Transposing Cultures: The Appropriation of Native North American Musics, 1890–1990’, PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1995, 15–19Google Scholar , and Turino, Thomas, ‘Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music’, Ethnomusicology 43/2 (spring/summer 1999): 221–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

23 The style tropes of Indianism are explored at great length in Pisani, Michael V., Imagining Native America in Music (New Haven, CT, 2005)Google Scholar .

24 For more on composed war dances see ibid., 116–25.

25 See Bellman, Jonathan, The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe (Boston, MA, 1993)Google Scholar .

26 In Imagining Native America, I propose a model for the analysis of various pentatonic modes. See 216–19.

27 I have borrowed the semiotic term ‘anchor’ from Roland Barthes, particularly as he defines it in Image, Music, Text [1964], trans. Heath, Stephen (New York, 1977), 38–41Google Scholar .

28 Strickland, Rennard, Tonto's Revenge: Reflections on American Indian Culture and Policy (Albuquerque, NM, 1997), 17–45Google Scholar .

29 Again, a topic explored in greater detail in Pisani, Imagining Native America in Music.

30 For a comprehensive list of such songs, see Schafer, William J., ‘Indian Intermezzi (“Play It One More Time, Chief!”)’, Journal of American Folklore 86/342 (Oct. 1973): 382–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

31 For good overviews of other cultural icons of American Indianism, see Berkhofer, Robert, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1978)Google Scholar and Stedman, Raymond William, Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in American Culture (Norman, OK, 1982)Google Scholar .

32 On a side note, Sousa later received honorary awards from three Indian tribes, the Star Blanket of the Fire Hills Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan (1925), the Ponca in Oklahoma (1928) and the Pawnee, also in Oklahoma (1931). The Star Blanket called Sousa ‘Great Music Chief’. See Bierley, , John Philip Sousa, 86Google Scholar .

33 Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has called this ‘imperialist nostalgia’. See his Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, MA, 1989), 71–2Google Scholar .