Composers Who Wrote Music That Might Surprise Us

When searching for composers we know, who wrote music that might surprise us, John Philip Sousa was one of the first names I thought might have something interesting for our spring concert. Thankfully, he did not disappoint, and thank God for the Internet! What used to take me weeks, with the help of libraries, librarians, and telephones, came together in a matter of hours: a fairly definitive list of Sousa’s works, going back to his early years.

It turns out that long before “Stars and Stripes Forever,” long before The Sousa Band and its 15,000 concert performances, the “American March King” tried his hand at sacred music.

The “Te Deum in B-flat” was written in 1874, when Sousa was only 20 years old, the same year he was discharged from the Marine Band. It is scored for SATB chorus, organ, and soloists. There isn’t a great deal written about it, but given the text, I imagine it was intended for a church service or some sacred event.

At times, the piece reminds me of a series of exercises in traditional harmony. The tunes are strong and the progressions are inevitable, for the most part. In my mind, there is not a lot of foreshadowing in the music of his great career that followed, but there are some unmistakable sounds of the Victorian era.

Sousa probably wrote it at a time when he was playing violin in theatre orchestras. He did a great deal of work in musical theatre and, he wrote about 250 songs and fifteen operettas during his career, hence his experience with writing for voices.

The last performance of the “Te Deum” I found was at Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania in 2006, under the direction of music director, Fred Hooper. Our performance will be the Midwest premier.