Americans, who still hear marches from local ensembles on the occasional small-town summertime evening, tend to think of marches as quintessentially American. Europeans may be likelier to identify with their own national march traditions. Both views, though, are distorted: the march is best classified as European-American. The great American march composers, Sousa included, were nearly all immigrants from Europe, and many marches that became American standards, like the Entry of the Gladiators of Julius Fucik heard on this ...
Read More
Americans, who still hear marches from local ensembles on the occasional small-town summertime evening, tend to think of marches as quintessentially American. Europeans may be likelier to identify with their own national march traditions. Both views, though, are distorted: the march is best classified as European-American. The great American march composers, Sousa included, were nearly all immigrants from Europe, and many marches that became American standards, like the Entry of the Gladiators of Julius Fucik heard on this disc, known to Americans as the Circus March and penned originally as the "Grande Marche Chromatique," were imports from the start. It was America, on the other hand, toward which the trajectory of the march aimed; Americans made the march into a grand spectacle of mass entertainment, with enormous ensembles holding forth in extravaganzas presented to tens of thousands of people -- a tradition that lives on today at halftime of any football game. The buyer of a CD of marches has...
Read Less
