‘The Event of the Age’: Appraising the Sousa Band’s 1911 Australasian Tour

Abstract

This article argues for the significance and impact of the Sousa Band’s 1911 Australasian tour on local musical practice, through the lenses of cultural dynamics, reception, and legacy. Set against growing nationalism in the years preceding the Great War, the Sousa Band’s thirteen-week tour was enthusiastically welcomed by Australian audiences and underscored by the band’s alignment with the growing popularity of ragtime music, itself a point of negotiation between Anglo-Celtic and US American cultural influence in Australia. The majority-woodwind instrumentation of the Sousa Band is contextualized within the shifting favours of the time, given Australian audiences’ greater familiarity with British-inspired all-brass band models, within which the Sousa Band’s use of saxophones presaged certain changes in local musical practice that would unfold over subsequent decades. The influence of John Philip Sousa’s concert programming and statements as a public intellectual are also examined to contend that, while never quite ‘highbrow,’ an underlying theme of cultural uplift contributed towards the tour’s enduring impression on a new generation of Australian musicians.