John Philip Sousa

At the age of 13, his father, a trombonist in the Marine Band, enlisted Sousa in the United States Marine Corps as an apprentice to keep him from joining a circus band.

I can almost always write music; at any hour of the twenty-four, if I put pencil to paper, music comes.
-John Philip Sousa

Grand opera is the most powerful of stage appeals and that almost entirely through the beauty of music.
-John Philip Sousa

Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.
-John Philip Sousa

American teachers have one indisputable advantage over foreign ones; they understand the American temperament and can judge its unevenness, its lights and its shadows.
-John Philip Sousa

There is one thing that freezes a musician more than the deadliest physical cold, and that is the spiritual chill of an unresponsive audience!
-John Philip Sousa

From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.
-John Philip Sousa

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.
-John Philip Sousa