Article

Journal of Historical Research

in Music Education
John Philip Sousa’s Historic 2022, Vol. 44(1) 5–25
© The Author(s) 2021
Resistance to Technology in Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Music Learning DOI: 10.1177/15366006211033966
https://doi.org/
journals.sagepub.com/home/jhr

Matthew D. Thibeault1

Abstract
In this article, I explore John Philip Sousa’s historic resistance to music technology
and his belief that sound recordings would negatively impact music education and
musical amateurism. I review Sousa’s primary arguments from two 1906 essays and his
testimony to the US Congress from the same year, based on the fundamental premise
that machines themselves sing or perform, severing the connection between live
listener and performer and thus rendering recordings a poor substitute for real music.
Sousa coined the phrase “canned music,” and I track engagement with this phrase
among the hundreds of newspapers and magazines focused on Sousa’s resistance.
To better understand the construction of Sousa’s beliefs, I then review how his rich
musical upbringing around the US Marine Band and the theaters of Washington DC
lead to his conception of music as a dramatic ritual. And I examine the curious coda
of Sousa’s life, during which he recanted his beliefs and conducted his band for radio,
finding that in fact these experiences reinforced Sousa’s worries. The discussion
considers how Sousa’s ideas can help us better to examine the contemporary shift to
digital music by combining Sousa’s ideas with those of Sherry Turkle.

Keywords
music education history, sound studies, media education, John Philip Sousa, sound
recordings, twentieth century

1 Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong.

Corresponding Author:
Matthew D. Thibeault, Education University of Hong Kong, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, New Territories,
Hong Kong.
Email: mdthibeault@eduhk.hk
6 Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 44(1)

A 2012 promotional tweet by the National Association for Music Education reads:
“Live music is best! Don’t miss out on the US Army @fieldband fall tour. http://bit.ly/
wVWOJJ #awesome #free” (see Figure 1)1 While far from a policy statement, the
tweet includes one of the few uncontroversial axioms of music education: live music
is different than, and superior to, recorded music. Real musicians, so common thinking
goes, perform live, while recordings are the realm of Auto-Tune, endless recorded
takes, and other forms of acoustic cheating.2
If belief in the superiority of live music in education has a patron saint or figure-
head, it is certainly the “March King” John Philip Sousa, whose music remains a staple
of music education through concert band repertoire and whose opposition to record-
ings is the object of both scholarly attention and popular legend.3 Katz writes that
Sousa “set the terms of the debate” about sound recordings, and in this article, I pro-
vide a history and analysis of Sousa’s consequential resistance to technology in music
learning.4 I will show how Sousa described his fears for a detrimental impact on musi-
cal culture and the work of music educators in 1906 through two essays and through
testimony to the United States Congress.5 Sousa’s resistance was ideological but also
a matter of bold personal action: Until the final few years of his life he refused to per-
form or conduct his music for recordings, broadcast his band on the radio, or even to
listen to the radio—a stance that had both social and economic costs he willingly bore
given the fervor of his beliefs.6 And I examine how his arguments resonated broadly,
with hundreds of magazines and newspapers covering them at the time and an increase
in interest during the recent rise of the internet and digital media by scholars in fields
such as musicology, sound studies, and internet law.7

Figure 1. The Twitter post from the National Association for Music Education.
Thibeault 7

Sousa’s ideas, stated boldly and shared widely, resonated with and certainly influ-
enced music education. The years just following Sousa’s arguments, for example, saw
the rise of the movement for music appreciation, particularly through work by Frances
Elliot Clark, who “helped her colleagues navigate from nineteenth-century models of
music education rooted in singing schools toward the early twentieth-century use of
recorded music for teaching.”8 Early appreciation confined recordings to a listening
context, and music students were unlikely to perform along with recordings despite
evidence that they might coexist, as they did in the live performances that accompa-
nied silent films which were a primary form of employment for musicians until the
mid-1920s.9 And the stark separation between live and recorded music that persists in
US culture today is not the only option: In Japan students and performers comfortably
combine live and recorded music in public music making and karaoke, as well as in
the heavily mediated Suzuki Method or the use of synthesized Vocaloid performances
by students and educators.10
In the present historical study, I explore Sousa’s views with particular attention to
how they matter to music educators interested to interrogate their own potential resis-
tance. I provide an analysis of his arguments as they relate to teaching, learning, and the
amateur musical culture he believed to be threatened by sound recordings. I explore
Sousa’s particular conception of live music as a dramatic ritual that was not easily
expressed via sound recordings, a conception from which I argue his resistance ema-
nated. Finally, I share the curious coda of Sousa’s career, during which he embraced
sound recordings, only to find many of his fears confirmed due to the constraints of
radio. And I will show how an understanding of his approach can help us to consider
what might have been lost, or at least temporarily misplaced, as we endeavor to retain
those aspects of technology that we also wish to celebrate.

Methodology
Given the stated aim to understand Sousa’s resistance in relation to the field of
music education, the research questions are:
1. What were Sousa’s primary arguments regarding the negative impact of sound
recordings on music learning?
2. How are Sousa’s arguments related to his particular conception of live music?
3. Does Sousa’s participation in radio at the end of his life change the understand-
ing of his beliefs?
These questions lead to a more speculative question, taken up in the
discussion:
4. How might Sousa regard our current transition to digital technologies and the
internet in music learning?
This historical study involved collecting and analyzing diverse material, organizing
the data within the theoretical framework, and composing a chronological narrative.
The Sousa Archives and Center for American Music at the University of Illinois
8 Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 44(1)

provided access to Sousa’s writings and also to vast primary sources through newspa-
per articles assembled by a clipping service, most of which are now available online in
digital format.11 Additional primary sources included his aforementioned Congressional
testimony, two of his essays, and his autobiography.12 The initial response to Sousa’s
arguments is established through examination of approximately 400 contemporaneous
newspaper and magazine items, and Sousa’s eventual change of heart towards record-
ings are evident through newspaper articles from the mid-1920s, including several
penned by Sousa. Secondary sources include books by Bierley, Warfield, as well as
various scholarly literature concerned with Sousa’s essays.13 Finally, I refer exten-
sively in this article’s discussion to the work of Turkle to connect Sousa’s resistance to
concerns regarding digital technologies of the present.14 Together, these produced an
immersive historical approach to understanding Sousa’s arguments, with a goal to
reach a point of saturation at which no new material was emergent. This final paper is
organized thematically and chronologically.

Summarizing Sousa’s Resistance Toward Sound

Recordings
Sousa’s overall belief was that “mechanical music”—sound recordings, music boxes,
and player pianos—would have profound negative effects on musical culture,
impacting musical amateurs and those involved with music education.
Fundamentally, Sousa’s resistance rests upon a radical premise: that sound record-
ing machines themselves sing or play for listeners. This position is clear in the open-
ing line of his most-studied essay, “The Menace of Mechanical Music”:

Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama
hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing us a
song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul.15

Framing machines as only a substitute for live persons left the living being’s superior-
ity axiomatic: “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself
gives it forth.”16 Singing machines, Sousa believed, would disrupt learning because “It
is the living, breathing example alone that is valuable to the student and can set into
motion his creative and performing abilities.”17 He imagined how the ecosystem of
music learning would thus be disrupted, warning of a decline of “pianos, violins, gui-
tars, mandolins, and banjos among the working classes,” and an effect on amateur
players and teachers as “the automatic music devices are usurping their places.”18
The presence of machines that could sing would also disrupt motivation and even
disincentivize study altogether:

For when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application,
and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time
Thibeault 9

when the amateur disappears entirely, and with him a host of vocal and instrumental
teachers, who will be without field or calling.19

Sousa predicted profound long-term damage: “Under such conditions the tide of ama-
teurism cannot but recede, until there will be left only the mechanical device and the
professional executant.”20 He invoked nationalistic terms: “Then what of the national
throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?” Moreover,
he skillfully deployed emotionally charged examples accompanied by illustrations
(see Figure 2), “When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that
she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys
[sic], or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery?”21

Figure 2. Illustration From Sousa’s Essay “The Menace of Mechanical Music” (1906).
10 Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 44(1)

In lyrical passages, Sousa worried about the cumulative effects of repetition:

“Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs,
will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human
phonographs—without soul or expression?” He implored his readers, “Music teaches
all that is beautiful in this world. Let us not hamper it with a machine that tells the story
day by day, without variation, without soul, barren of the joy, the passion, the ardor
that is the inheritance of man alone.”22
Sousa followed the “Menace” essay with an ironic take on the same arguments, “The
Year in Music,” a futuristic fiction in which his predictions had come true.23 Sousa
foresaw a world of “reincarnated art” in which humans had largely abandoned tradi-
tional instruments, instead attending “talking-machine conservatories” where “fixed
routine of mechanical ingenuity triumphs over the idiosyncrasies of mere man, and
automatic action proves the uselessness of eyes and hands and soul.”24
The “New York Phonograph Symphony Orchestra” performed Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony at “The Palace of Automatic Music,” a concert which lasted just under the
four-minute duration of a cylinder recording, after which members of the audience
“hugged the better-looking phonographs.”25 Player pianos inspired “reports of dis-
coveries of musical geniuses that have taxed the credulity of the most trusting,”
including a man who “without any previous knowledge of music … played the
Lohengrin Wedding March on the pianola with one foot.”26
As for learning, Sousa’s satiric take included a machine music virtuoso, Algernon
Augustus de Smith, a person exposed at an early age to recordings via a “talking-
machine recital.” Sousa describes Algernon’s hand, turning the crank to produce a
“performance” that leads to applause and kisses, only to reveal that Algernon had
advantages both in nature, as his grandfather was an organ-grinder; and in nurture,
as his mother “had accidentally swallowed a toy music-box” three months before
Algernon’s birth.27
But what of live musicians? Sousa imagined they would be obsolete, relegating
their mention to the final paragraph:

It may be necessary to mention the Conried Opera Company, consisting of men and
women, which gave some performances at the Metropolitan Opera House during the
season. While these representations were not entirely devoid of melodic and harmonic
traits, they were sadly lacking in that unchanging perfection so noticeable in the work of
the artists of the Palace of Automatic Music.… When it is considered that a whole man is
necessary to manipulate each separate one of these nearly-obsolete instruments, the waste
of space and energy seems appalling. These primitive orchestras may have satisfied
audiences of unmechanical days, but they show only too palpably the limitations of hand-
made music as opposed to the perfection of the automatic machine.28

In both of his essays, Sousa argued passionately that recordings would distort, dis-
place, and displease those for whom the joys of music rested on the person-to-person
communion of live concerts or recitals. His critique is extreme and steeped in nostal-
gia, and yet also coherent and novel in arguing that a privileged place be retained for
Thibeault 11

live musical experiences in the presence of other people. Sousa’s claim that machines
themselves sing pushed back against the commonsense notion that recordings merely
convey a performance. Setting up a contest between live and recorded music, he aimed
to blunt the adoption of recordings during the time of their emergence, and to warn the
public, including teachers, of negative consequences few others anticipated. It is easy
to understand the continued resonance of Sousa’s arguments given the potent combi-
nation of his depth of feeling, the freshness with which he beheld the then-new tech-
nologies of the gramophone and cylinder, and his disarming use of humor. If one wants
to resist recordings, one must reckon with Sousa.

“Canned Music” and the Impact of Sousa’s Arguments

How did those who encountered Sousa’s arguments reckon with them at the time? A
clipping service, hired by Sousa during his career, assembled a set of 81 “Press Books,”
with one set held at the Sousa Archives. These include approximately 400 articles
between 1906 and 1907 in the US and the UK that report on or respond to Sousa’s
opposition to recordings and his testimony to US Congress. Katz’s assertion that Sousa
“set the terms of the debate” regarding recorded music is literally true with regard to
one particularly potent phrase he invented to denigrate recordings: “canned music,”
which he introduced to the world through a nostalgia-soaked example:

There was a time when the pine woods of the north were sacred to summer simplicity, when
around the camp fire at night the stories were told and the songs were sung with a charm all
their own. But even now the invasion of the north has begun, and the ingenious purveyor of
canned music is urging the sportsman, on his way to the silent places with gun and rod, tent
and canoe, to take with him some disks, cranks, and cogs to sing to him as he sits by the
firelight, a thought as unhappy and incongruous as canned salmon by a trout brook.29

Sousa’s phrase instantly resonated with a public for whom canned food was still a
novelty (see Figure 3). The Call of Newark embraced the term in an article of their own
within a few weeks of the publication of Sousa’s essay: “This is canned music and, like
other canned things, can never be as good as the real thing.”30 Another paper predicted:
“When time shall have stripped the vanity and veneer from the present era, it will
undoubtedly take place in staid and reliable history as the Can age.… The can has
invaded the field of art.”31
The term “Canned music” was often used in a humorous or sarcastic way by other
authors: “In spite of Mr. Sousa’s enunciation of ‘canned music’, there has been, so far,
no movement to appoint sanitary inspectors.”32 Others teased Sousa directly:

John Philip Sousa has recently said some spicy things about “canned music,” meaning
the phonograph, music-boxes, and automatic piano-players.… But does he forget that we
have to have living musicians in order to can—no one being more canned than John
Philip and his thrilling marches?33
12 Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 44(1)

Figure 3. Various Headlines From Newspapers in 1906 Responding to Sousa’s Arguments

Against Technologies of Sound Recording.

Another wrote: “‘Canned music’ is the epithet applied by Mr. Sousa to the music
made by phonographs and piano players.… They are not on a high aesthetic level,
but neither are the Sousa pieces.”34
Even those who disagreed with his resistance nevertheless used his term: “We
believe that all music, whether of the ‘canned variety’ as Sousa terms it, or otherwise,
makes for appreciation of something better.”35 The term persisted and remained in
wide use, including perhaps the most concerted resistance in history to recorded music,
the strike by the American Federation of Musicians of 1942–44, which is often referred
to as the “canned music controversy.”36
Thibeault 13

The Basis of Sousa’s Resistance in His Approach to Live

Music
Sousa was right about recordings: they cannot completely convey the experience
of live music or, at least, they cannot convey live music as he practiced it. Sousa was
as one of the most successful live musicians of any era—he performed 15,632 con-
certs between 1892 and 1931—an average of nearly 400 concerts per year for forty
years.37 Sousa conceptualized these concerts as more than merely sonic; and in this
section, I present the audiovisual aspects, interactive practices, localized elements,
unique approach to encores, and secret musical arrangements that comprised the
conception of live music as social connection and dramatic ritual so beloved by
Sousa’s audiences.
Sousa’s childhood experiences with music as a form of human connection were
abundant and rich. His father Antonio housed the family in the Navy Yard area of
Washington, DC, where they lived near the barracks of the US Marine Band, of which
he was a member. This neighborhood was heavy with musicians, especially while
Sousa was a child and the US Civil War was underway.38 He experienced a musical
and cultural richness in Navy Yard, an area filled with European immigrants, as well
as a substantial number of African Americans fleeing the South after the war.39
Sousa sang in school under Joseph Daniel, a teacher who led his choirs in numerous
public concerts. He formally joined the US Marine Band as an apprentice at the age
of 13, receiving “musical training and a formal education, as well as food, clothing,
and lodging.”40 Further, Sousa wrote:

Being a boy in the band was not a novel situation for me, for from my tenth year I had
played triangle, cymbals, and Eb alto horn (God forgive me) at various times with the
band, and was a great friend of all the musicians in it.41

Sousa’s early experiences also included work as a violinist and conductor in Washington
theatres, and Sousa’s first compositions were written for Vis a Vis, a club he had
formed with friends.42 These early compositions including settings of poems written
by friends, as well as songs wrote for Emma May Swallow, a young woman with
whom Sousa was romantically involved.43 Sousa, then, inhabited a working-class
musical world with a military band, music in school and the theatre, and music for
friendship and love—all of it performed live and in the presence of others.
These formative experiences continued to resonate for Sousa and to find a place in
his conception of live music when he led his famed band. Visual aspects were central
to the ritual. As Sousa wrote in his autobiography, “the rapport between performer and
audience is invaluable and can be fully attained through actual vision. I have refrained
from broadcasting for this very reason; I am reluctant to lose the warm personal touch
with my audience.”44 Sousa placed great value on the visual aspects of the band’s uni-
forms and he required musicians to memorize their solos so no music stand would
block the audience’s view.45
14 Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 44(1)

Newspapers at the opening of the 20th century remarked on visual aspects. A

Cleveland newspaper wrote: “It is said that Bandmaster Sousa doesn’t approve of hav-
ing his music repeated by phonographs. Mr. Sousa appreciates the fact that in order to
be properly heard he must be seen.”46 Other papers captured Sousa’s visual persona
through sketches of conducting (see Figure 4), and The Washington Post suggested a
technological intervention: “Mr. Sousa objects to having his music repeated by a pho-
nograph. It might help if the phonograph were equipped with a gesture attachment.”47
The visual importance of Sousa himself was noted in a review of a performance where
he was absent:

Figure 4. An Artist Rendering of the Visual Aspects of Sousa’s Musicians and His Conducting.
Source: Manchester Dispatch (April 3, 1903).
Thibeault 15

And yet, what is Sousa’s Band without Sousa? It is all in the entertainment, that spectacled
face, shrouded in its peculiarly black beard, those eccentric ways of beating time, that swing
of the arms like soldiers marching, those curly designs that the baton traces in the air.48

Localizing each performance was also a hallmark of Sousa’s performance style.

Warfield notes, “in addition to the programmed works, concerts frequently featured
short, unpublished pieces by local composers, and Sousa was known to lead high-
school bands during intermission.”49 The importance of this localization cannot be
overstated: “It is here, in the March King’s connection to his audience, that we find his
real appeal.”
Encores were perhaps the most unique dramatic aspect of Sousa’s performance
style. Rather than saving an encore or two for the end of the concert, Sousa’s band
typically played several encores after each number, usually beginning before the
applause even died down. Bierley writes,

The use of quick encores added excitement and probably played a greater part in the
remarkable success of the band than is realized.… Selections were placed for maximum
effect, and he learned early how to sense audience reaction.… If Sousa detected that an
audience was bored he might stop at a logical spot, call out the name of one of his most
popular marches, and play the remainder of the concert from encore books, which
consisted of favorite selections.50

For those in the audience who might not be moved by the dramatic aspects of a Sousa
performance, Sousa had an ace up his sleeve: other bands played Sousa’s compositions
from commercially available editions that were inferior to the versions Sousa’s band
performed in concert. Warfield documents how, in his performances, Sousa changed
orchestration with each repeat of a section and added subtle variations that made the
march more dynamic:

While these changes may appear trivial, their effect is significant.… Critics were rarely
able to explain these changes, but they often noted their effect.… The flutist Joseph
Lefter explained that the performance changes were a way of protecting the Sousa brand:
“I asked him one time why he changed his music when he played it in the marches. When
it’s marked loud, why he didn’t play it loud. He told me, he says, ‘Mr. Lefter, if everybody
played it the way it’s written, then everybody’s band would sound like Sousa’s Band so
we make some changes now and then just to make it a little bit different’.”51

Sousa regarded musical experience holistically: the sonic aspect was inseparable
from the overall dramatic ritual, a theatrical happening that built on real and imagined
connections between the local audience and Sousa’s band, whose physical presence
and visual appearance were integral to the music, and whose particular performance
style was protected by a scarcity and idiosyncrasy that would have been jeopardized
through recordings. Each performance could be shaped to the local setting and the
attention of the audience in a way that a recording could not, nor did recordings afford
16 Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 44(1)

animated visual components or gestures, and recordings could not respond to the
audience, adding an encore or stopping as interest waned. Sousa’s approach to musi-
cal performance can help us to see that his resistance was not merely an opinion, but
rather a defense of music as it existed in his life, from his childhood to a career of
thousands of successful concerts.

Sousa’s Eventual Capitulation to the Recorded Realm

While many scholars have engaged with Sousa’s resistance, most focus on his “Menace
of Mechanical Music” essay and thus omit consideration of a most curious coda:
Sousa’s eventual repudiation of his views and his embrace of radio performance.52
Sousa’s changed views on recordings were stated bluntly to the New York Times: “I
was wrong. I admit it.”53 Bierley counts 35 live radio broadcasts and three prerecorded
ones by Sousa and his band.54 In this section, I examine how the issues Sousa had
feared in theory played out in practice as his band finally became part of the world of
machine music.
Sousa had appeared on the radio as early as 1926, with The Baltimore News report-
ing that he had dropped by WFBR for an interview on the air.55 Sousa understood that
radio had some attraction, writing in his autobiography that it “is pleasanter, moreover,
at times to give oneself up to the charms of music with a pipe and foot-stool at hand
than in the crowded concert hall.”56 But in the same work he maintained his old stance:

[Radio] fulfills its purpose, just as the movies do, but its scope is limited. The rapport
between performer and audience is invaluable and can be fully attained only through
actual vision. I have refrained from broadcasting for this very reason; I am reluctant to
lose the warm personal touch with my audience.57

Sousa had additional worries at that time, namely, profit: “Usually when I make an
appearance I get paid for it. The radio listeners are getting something for nothing.”58
He also worried about overexposure, mentioning that Victor Herbert had grown “sick
of some of his own songs because he heard them over the radio so often … I never
release any of my music for broadcasting because radio kills it.”59
A year later, after his autobiography was published, the Times announced: “Sousa
Joins Ranks of Radio Artists,” reporting the first series of nine broadcasts. As to his
profit worry, they noted that Sousa was to receive “more than $50,000’ for the series.”60
On May 12, following the first broadcast, the Times ran “Sousa Confesses Why Radio
Won.”61 He described his change of heart: “I feared that over the radio any concert
would be sort of ground out or cut and dried, without this intangible thing called
personality.”
“Sousa Marches in Radio ‘Parade’” reports the extraordinary breadth of Sousa’s
resistance, “I knew as little about radio performances as any man in the world, for I
had never heard a radio concert up to the time I played over it myself.”62 Giving these
radio concerts immediately required changes to Sousa’s group: “The men were seated
Thibeault 17

just as they would be at one of our concerts, and we played one of my marches.
Thereupon changes in the seating of the entire band were suggested so as to get the
proper sound over the microphones.”
Sousa was unfamiliar with many aspects, such as the low volume with which the
announcer spoke, “But I was assured that the voice would carry, as it was hooked up,
apparently, to the entire world.”
While the larger world listened and provided Sousa an immense broadcast audi-
ence, Sousa’s band played for what was likely the group’s smallest ever in-person
audience. Sousa referred to those in the room as the “looking and listening” audience
of ten: his wife and children, manager and secretary, and three or four other guests
whose presence he found invaluable, stating: “I watched their faces at the close of the
concert and knew then that I had caught my audience.”
The world certainly was listening, with a few telegrams of congratulation arriving
even before the broadcast was over. The article quoted in full a radiogram he received
from an exploration camp in Antarctica, “We enjoyed listening to your initial radio
broadcast yesterday, and all hands send our thanks and best wishes from Little America.
Richard E. Byrd.” While appreciating the accolades, Sousa still hungered for the con-
nection of a live concert, writing, “[if] somebody would invent a means to transfer the
applause from the audience to the performers it would be a splendid way to ascertain
the opinion of your hearers.”
While most of Sousa’s broadcasts were ephemeral, two recordings remain: an intro-
duction spoken by Sousa and the subsequent playing of “The Stars and Stripes” from
the prerecorded Thanksgiving concert of 1929.63 However, strict rules for the musi-
cians’ union in New York meant that the band that played was actually largely devoid
of Sousa’s normal players—a few exceptions for soloists were allowed, but this group
was not Sousa’s band as they would have sounded in concert.
Perhaps most challenging to Sousa was the reality that, with radio, he lost control
over programming. In place of the carefully planned numbers and famous encores,
Sousa’s radio broadcasts were heavily constrained and entirely preplanned. A letter to
Bierley from clarinetist Edwards “Ed” Johnson, a member of Sousa’s band, recounts
telling details of the changes in programming at the hand of Arthur Pryor Jr (a radio
executive who also happened to be the son of one of Sousa’s trombone soloists):

We would do the rehearsal in the afternoon and go over a list of numbers offered by Mr.
Sousa. These were written on a large blackboard. When we returned in the evening for
the actual broadcast, we would find the blackboard hacked and slashed, by Arthur Pryor
Jr., to allow for the commercials, introduction, etc., sign-offs. Mr. Sousa knew little or
nothing about radio programs at that time, and so Pryor tailored the list to fit the allotted
time. He did it in as gracious a way as he could, but more and more Mr. Sousa just became
a figure head [sic], merely lending his name to the broadcasts. You can imagine how Mr.
Sousa felt, as he had always completely dominated the presentations. He knew that he
was out of his element and had to allow Pryor Jr. to run the show. I am sure that he did
not enjoy any part of it except the money.64
18 Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 44(1)

As Sousa wrote in a letter responding to a programming request, “I regret exceed-

ingly I have nothing to say regarding the selections used by me over the radio. The
General Motors have a committee who pass on all programs.”65
After reading about Sousa’s experiences, one could conclude that, although he
stated a reversal in his position, he was prescient regarding what machine music
would do to his musical expressions. Radio won, but to say that Sousa “was wrong”
in his criticism is unhelpful. Rather, Sousa’s participation in radio affirms how his
persona and his rituals of performance were so attuned to a live setting that he lost
nearly everything when transmitted by radio. These concerts brought Sousa addi-
tional fame, money, and audiences whose numbers may have equaled the combined
audiences of the rest of his career. But what that audience received was, to use Sousa’s
own words, “as like [his] real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful, liv-
ing, breathing daughters.”66 The radio audience lost the visual aspects of Sousa’s
conducting, the ability to watch his soloists, or to admire the physical presence of the
band; and they heard a band whose membership was compromised. Sousa was unable
to calibrate his broadcast performance to the audience, losing the ability to choose his
program or add encores. The Sousa band that the audience experienced via radio was
thus hardly the band that had been developed over thousands of concerts. The March
King on the radio, reduced to a mere figurehead, brought to life Sousa’s worst fears
about machine music.

Discussion: Sousa, Turkle, and Resisting Today’s

Technologies
In this article, I have shown how Sousa developed a view of sound recordings as a
menace to be resisted based on the model of live performance as a dramatic spectacle
he shared through his band. Sousa worried about the impact of sound recordings also
on teaching and learning, and he taught music educators to worry, including through his
coining of the term “canned music,” which furthered his idea that music is best when
live. Educators today acknowledge Sousa’s continued influence and importance,
including performance of his music by bands and orchestras. Sullivan also documents
Sousa’s educational work during World War I at the Great Lakes Training Station, work
that both raised the profile of bands like Sousa’s and educated thousands of musicians,
some of whom contributed to the rise of the wind band in schools following the war.67
In terms of predictions for the demise of music through displacement, Katz con-
cludes that Sousa’s core predictions were wrong, amateurism has continued to flourish
and educators were not displaced by machines.68 It is also clear that many of the things
that Sousa worried about have come to pass but are now accepted as uncontroversial.
His fear that students would come to imitate recordings, for instance, can be seen as a
foundation of Suzuki’s nurturing pedagogic approach.69 And today’s musicians play
with, in, and alongside recordings, from practices like karaoke to the use of practice
software like Smart Music.70
Thibeault 19

A statue may be unlike Eve’s living daughters, but statues are art, and most people
today depart from Sousa in believing sound recordings also to be art. Yet Sousa’s ideas
regarding live music as distinct and superior to recordings persists, including in the
NAfME tweet previously cited. And yet, live music cannot be ruled best, nor worst;
instead, all that we can do is better interrogate how our beliefs rest on our constructed
ideologies, values, and experiences towards sound recordings.71 I have shown how
Sousa constructed his beliefs about recordings atop his particular upbringing and
musical experiences, which led to his construction of music as a dramatic ritual that he
feared would be lost for performers, teachers, and audiences if the broader public were
to become too enmeshed in machine music.
The tension, then, is to better understand Sousa’s presence in our current practices
despite the fact that we might reject as extreme many of his original positions.
Understanding this, we might wish to promote alternate ways of thinking about the
relationship between live and recorded music, particularly as we adapt new practices
to the realm of digital music, the internet, and the host of new technologies that are in
use in music learning?72 We might also come to understand technology in music more
critically, following others in education.73 This begs a final speculative question: How
might Sousa regard our current transition to digital technologies and the internet in
music learning? To explore this, I supplement Sousa’s case with contemporary work
by Sherry Turkle, a psychoanalytically trained ethnographer whose writings echo
Sousa’s urgency in expressing profound reservation regarding the impact of digital
technologies, and whose writings about our own technological moment parallel the
tone of Sousa’s arguments.74
Sousa’s worry of babies put to sleep by machinery, and Turkle’s research docu-
ments a related phenomenon, which she names the “Eliza effect” after a computer
program that mimicked a therapist.75 Again and again, she finds a startling willingness
to conspire to hide the inanimate aspect of technologies, as people limit their responses
to make things seem more real: Japanese Tamagotchi digital pets and Paro digital
caregiving robot seals, online romantic relationships, and so on. Again and again,
when a machine offers a limited version of an area of human activity, humans shrink
their interactions to fit within what the machine offers. Author Zadie Smith captured
this in reviewing the film The Social Network:

We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know
that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We
know what we are doing ‘in’ the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the
software is doing to us?76

Sousa and Turkle remind us that our musical experiences might be superficial if we are
not careful about how music technologies might work within limited conceptions of
musical art. The concept of music appreciation, recall, was derided as a “racket” by
Virgil Thompson and Adorno attested to the challenges and disappointments in trying,
for instance, to have one appreciate a Beethoven symphony through the NBC Music
20 Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 44(1)

Appreciation Hour.77 We should consider how music as a social practice is impacted,

turning perhaps towards the participatory conceptions that favor social connection
over sonic perfection.78 And we might follow Borgmann’s advice to counteract the
reduction of music to a speaker by encouraging focal practices that keep us in touch
with richer notions, even on an occasional basis, such as learning an instrument or
continuing to attend live concerts.79 We can remember Sousa’s worries about the
seduction of automatic perfection in music and Turkle’s worries about the seduction of
digital devices that can fill every moment of boredom with stimulating but thin simu-
lations. The richness of musical experience can be promoted when teachers are con-
scious of the conceptions they embrace, the reasons for making music together they
share, and the ways that they are cognizant of how technologies might cheapen other-
wise rich experiences. For instance, teachers can consider the tradeoff involved in
having students practice alone rather than collectively, or in spending time working
out a section in rehearsal rather than having students working with automated practice
software environments. We can also attend to the work of scholars today helping to
make uses of technology in music learning more robust and social.80
Teachers can follow Turkle’s lead, but down a musical instead of a conversational
path, reclaiming music as a subject where teachers promote full human flourishing, the
experience of emotions, and the embrace of human weakness and frailty. A recent
study found that students working in a screen-free camp for five days were better able
to notice nonverbal emotional cues, something that those of us in music likely also
know but rarely take as a goal of music education.81
In Reclaiming Conversation Turkle recommends a purposeful reengagement with
conversation as a way to restore or maintain our ability to fully flourish as humans,
writing, “So, my argument is not anti-technology, it is pro-conversation.”82 Regarding
this moment in which we seem poised to give much over to technology, she writes, “It
is time to make the course corrections. We have everything we need to begin. We have
each other.”83 Music educators reading Turkle alongside Sousa may come to see ways
that they, through their efforts with learners, can be attentive to the project of reclaim-
ing versions of music that are attentive to human interaction and open to spontaneity.
Turkle notes that those who spend more time online have a harder time identifying
emotions in others, in part because research suggests that those who spend more time
online spend less time aware of their own emotions.84 As put by Nass, “[t]echnology
does not provide a sentimental education.”85 Sentiments and emotions are often at the
core of musicmaking, and music educators can see how making music together, espe-
cially in its flawed fullness, can allow us to experience, learn, and share emotions
through the shared intimacy of music. And it is particularly in the age of editable per-
fection, which Sousa presaged with his “palace of automatic music,” that we need to
reassert a place of importance for our flawed and imperfect music.
Sousa and Turkle, taken together, provide grounds for caution and resistance in the
embrace of digital technologies. They warn us to pay attention not only to the gain and
Thibeault 21

the good, but also what we might lose. Sousa’s arguments can also invite us to a
renewed sensitivity for the social character of educational experiences. When a begin-
ning trumpet player can perform a scale, we should celebrate, but also consider the
implications of the pathway she traveled to reach this accomplishment, be it in a sec-
tional with fellow students, or alone with a software practice suite such as SmartMusic.
At present little research seems to attend to these dimensions; but as more time is spent
overall with screens and concern for a balanced approach emerges, music education
can be positioned as a way to promote healthy social engagement.
Perhaps the greatest value Sousa provides educators is the concrete example of
thinking deeply and openly about how technology might be involved in shifts in the
ways that we experience music, and in his call to defend what the profession might
wish to retain. Sousa’s example has most value in reminding us that we do not need to
simply accept those changes that feel likely or inevitable. Rather than a deterministic
view, we can see how aspects that are viewed as technological problems are often bet-
ter understood as having a social basis: whether an artist will earn a living from stream-
ing revenue, for instance, is less a matter of any inevitable income from streaming and
more likely an artifact of how pricing structures are set by businesses.86 Resistance can
also resonate, providing a reminder of relations and ways to structure activities that
allow us to reclaim them, revaluing anew aspects of life that might have previously
been displaced by versions that are more efficient but less rich. This reclaiming can be
renewed, and perhaps must be remembered any time someone puts forward an argu-
ment for efficiency, technological innovation that might displace human connection,
or by promoting music learning and performing that places the immediate audience
and vicinity at the center of musical experience. To me, the efforts of such resistance,
following Sousa’s model, provide needed hope.

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Brian M. Sullivan, whose research assistance was invaluable;
and Channing A. Paluck for insightful observations and suggestions on an earlier draft of this
article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: Archival research at the Sousa Archives and Center for
American Music at the University of Illinois was supported by the Illinois Program for Research
in the Humanities.
22 Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 44(1)

Notes
1. NAfME, Twitter Post, August 21, 2012, https://twitter.com/NAfME/status/23791604
0888213506
2. Sasha Frere-Jones, “The Gerbil’s Revenge: Auto-Tune Corrects a Singer’s Pitch. It Also
Distorts—a Grand Tradition in Pop,” June 7, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/
critics/musical/2008/06/09/080609crmu_music_frerejones; Philip Auslander, Liveness:
Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999).
3. Paul E Bierley, The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2006); Patrick Warfield, Making the March King: John Philip Sousa’s Washington
Years 1854–1893 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016).
4. Mark Katz, “The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Sound Studies, ed. Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor J. Pinch (New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 462.
5. John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” Appleton’s Magazine 8, September
1906, 278–84; John Philip Sousa, “The Year in Music,” Town Topic, December 6, 1906. U.S.
Congress. Arguments Before the Committee on Patents of the House of Representatives,
Conjointly with the Senate Committee on Patents, on H.R. 19853, to Amend and Consolidate
the Acts Respecting Copyright: June 6, 7, 8, and 9, 1906.
6. John Philip Sousa, “Sousa Marches in Radio ‘Parade’,” New York Times, September 22,
1929, Bierley Box 47, Folder 7.
7. Patrick Warfield, “John Philip Sousa and ‘The Menace of Mechanical Music’,” Journal
of the Society for American Music 3, no. 4 (2009), 431–63, https://doi.org/10.1017/
S1752196309990678; Katz, “The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music,” 459–79;
Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New
York, NY: The Penguin Press, 2008).
8. Julia J. Chybowski, “Selling Musical Taste in Early Twentieth-Century America: Frances
E. Clark and the Business of Music Appreciation,” Journal of Historical Research in Music
Education 38, no. 2 (2017), 105, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1536600616684969.
9. James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950 (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
10. Charles Keil, “Music Mediated and Live in Japan,” Ethnomusicology 28, no. 1 (January 1,
1984), 91–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/851433; Matthew D. Thibeault, “Learning with Sound
Recordings: A History of Suzuki’s Mediated Pedagogy,” Journal of Research in Music
Education 66, no. 1 (February 7, 2018), 6–30, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022429418756879;
Matthew D. Thibeault and Koji Matsunobu, “Learning from Japanese Vocaloid Hatsune
Miku,” in Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning, eds Janice Waldron, Kari
K. Veblen, and Stephanie Horsley (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 511–28.
11. Jane Cross and Patrick Warfield, “The Digital Sousa and New Online Resources from the
United States Marine Band,” Music Library Association 75, no. 3 (2019), 387–408.
12. John Philip Sousa, Marching Along: Recollections of Men, Women, and Music, ed. P. E.
Bierley, Rev. ed. (Westerville, OH: Integrity Press, 1994).
13. Bierley, The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa; Warfield, Making the March King.
14. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each
Other (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2011); Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The
Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2016).
15. Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” 278.
Thibeault 23

16. Ibid., 279.

17. Ibid., 279.
18. Ibid., 280.
19. Ibid., 280.
20. Ibid., 281.
21. Ibid., 281.
22. Ibid., 282.
23. Sousa, “The Year in Music.”
24. Sousa also used language with racial overtones, stating, “The boundless domain of human
endeavor gives way to the Harlem flat of a wax cylinder,” 45.
25. Sousa, “The Year in Music,” 45.
26. Ibid., 46.
27. Ibid., 46.
28. Ibid., 46.
29. Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” 281. Bierley claimed that Mark Twain originated
the phrase “canned music” but most give credit to Sousa. Bierley does not cite a source
for Twain, nor could he recall where he originated that idea (personal communication).
Additional efforts to support Twain as the originator of the phrase were unsuccessful.
30. Call of Newark, September 2, 1906, Press Books Vol. 21.2 p. 143.
31. September 2, 1906, Press Books Vol. 21.2 p. 144.
32. New Orleans Times, September 8, 1906, Press Books Vol. 21.2, p. 147.
33. Boston Endeavor, September 2, 1906, Press Books Vol. 21.2 p. 144.
34. “The Can Age,” October 3, 1906, Press Books Vol. 21.2, p. 147.
35. “Canned Music,” Philadelphia Enquirer, August 25, 1906, Press Books Vol. 21.2 p. 139.
36. James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio, 158.
37. Patrick Warfield, “The March as Musical Drama and the Spectacle of John Philip Sousa,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (August 1, 2011), 290.
38. Warfield, Making the March King, 8, 15.
39. Ibid., 13.
40. Ibid., 19.
41. John Philip Sousa, Marching along: Recollections of Men, Women and Music (Boston, MA:
Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1928), 27.
42. Warfield, Making the March King, 29.
43. Ibid., 37.
44. Sousa, Marching Along, 1928, 357.
45. Bierley, The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa, 8.
46. “Sousa Talks of Music and Radio,” The Plain Dealer, June 9 [year indistinct in archive
copy], Bierley Box 47, Folder 7.
47. Washington Post, June 18, 1906, Press Books Vol. 21.2 p. 121.
48. “The Sousa Band without Sousa,” Brighton Herald, July 4, 1903, Press Books Vol. 20.3, p.
212.
49. Warfield, “The March as Musical Drama and the Spectacle of John Philip Sousa,” 309.
50. Bierley, The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa, 311.
51. Warfield, “The March as Musical Drama and the Spectacle of John Philip Sousa,” 304–05.
52. For a few of the most well-known invocations of Sousa in recent years, see Lessig, Remix;
J. Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke
24 Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 44(1)

University Press, 2003); Katz, “The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music;” Emily
Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture
of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Warfield, “John
Philip Sousa and ‘The Menace of Mechanical Music’.”.
53. Sousa, “Sousa Marches in Radio ‘Parade’,” Sec. R.
54. Bierley, The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa, 84.
55. “‘March King’ at Mike,” Baltimore News, November 20, 1926, Press Books Vol. 71, p. 104.
56. Sousa, Marching Along, 1928, 356.
57. Ibid., 357.
58. “Sousa Is Still New at Mike [Sic],” November 6, 1927, Bierley Box 47, Folder 7.
59. “Sousa Talks of Music and Radio.”
60. “Sousa Joins Ranks of Radio Artists,” New York Times, April 23, 1929.
61. “Sousa Confesses Why Radio Won,” New York Times, May 12, 1929, Bierley Box 47,
Folder 7.
62. Sousa, “Sousa Marches in Radio ‘Parade’.”
63. Paul E. Bierley, “That Curious Sousa Voice Tape,” Journal of Band Research 22, no. 1
(1986), 45–47.
64. Letter from Edwards Johnson to Paul Bierley, October 16, 1980, Bierley Box 149, Folder 9.
65. Letter from John Philip Sousa to W. G. Butler, June 5, 1929, Bierley Box 149, Folder 9.
66. Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” 279.
67. Jill M. Sullivan, “John Philip Sousa as Music Educator and Fundraiser during World War
I,” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 40, no. 2 (April 1, 2019), 143–69,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1536600617743013.
68. Katz, “The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music.”
69. Thibeault, “Learning with Sound Recordings.”
70. Matthew D. Thibeault, ‘Algorithms and the Future of Music Education: A Response to
Shuler’, Arts Education Policy Review 115, no. 1 (2014), 19–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/1
0632913.2014.847355.
71. Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.
72. See, for instance, the breadth of ideas in Alex Ruthmann and Roger Mantie, eds, The Oxford
Handbook of Technology and Music Education (New York, NY: Oxford University Press,
2017).
73. Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (New York, NY: Taylor and Francis, 2012);
Michael P. Peters, “Notes toward a Political Economy of Ubiquitous Learning,” in
Ubiquitous Learning, eds Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2010), 62–71.
74. Turkle, Alone Together; Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation.
75. Turkle, Alone Together, 24.
76. Zadie Smith, “Generation Why?,” The New York Review of Books, November 25, 2010,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/25/generation-why/.
77. Rebecca Kathryn Meador Bennett, “The Anxiety of Appreciation: Virgil Thomson Wrestles
with a ‘Racket’” (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2009); Theodor W. Adorno,
“Analytical Study of the NBC ‘Music Appreciation Hour’,” The Musical Quarterly 78, no.
2 (July 1, 1994), 325–77.
78. Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2008).
Thibeault 25

79. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical
Inquiry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
80. Christopher Cayari, “Connecting Music Education and Virtual Performance Practices from
YouTube,” Music Education Research 20, no. 3 (May 27, 2018), 360–76, https://doi.org/10.
1080/14613808.2017.1383374; Janice Waldron, Kari K Veblen, and Stephanie Horsley, eds,
Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning (New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 2020).
81. Yalda T. Uhls, Minas Michikyan, dan Morris, Debra Garcia, Gary W. Small, Eleni Zgourou,
and Patricia M. Greenfield. “Five Days at Outdoor Education Camp without Screens
Improves Preteen Skills with Nonverbal Emotion Cues,” Computers in Human Behavior 39
(October 1, 2014), 387–92, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.05.036
82. Turkle, Alone Together, 25.
83. Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 17.
84. Ibid., 41.
85. Clifford Nass, “The Keyboard and the Damage Done,” Pacific Magazine, January 2012.
86. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York, NY: Random House, 2011).

ORCID iD
Matthew D. Thibeault https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6778-3826

Author Biography
Matthew D. Thibeault is an associate professor of Cultural and Creative Arts at The Education
University of Hong Kong. His research interests include participatory music and media in music
education.