Bridging Musical Worlds. Arrangements of Works by Debussy in the Repertoire of the Sousa Band
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As is generally known, Claude Debussy’s cakewalks and cakewalk-inflected compositions are a response to the ragtime craze that was stimulated in Paris by the performances of the American “March King” John Philip Sousa and his band in 1900 and 1903. Far less familiar is the fact that the Sousa Band in turn played a handful of transcriptions of works by Debussy in later years. Considering the instrumentation and the popular character of Sousa’s ensemble, his embracing of Debussy may seem surprising at first sight. However, a well-balanced mixture of ‘vernacular’ and ‘cultivated’ music and the employment of the latter for the sake of entertainment was the hallmark of his style of programming. Still it can be said that the Debussy arrangements, along with transcriptions of certain works by Richard Strauss, represent the highest degree of sophistication and modernity that could ever be found in Sousa Band programmes. Focusing on the analysis of transcriptions of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune by Sousa and of La cathédrale engloutie by Herbert L. Clarke (both written in 1921), this article aims to demonstrate that the departure from musical conventions in Debussy’s works required a fresh approach to band scoring which could only partially build on contemporary standards. Thus, arranging Debussy for wind band did not only mean crossing borders in a social and aesthetic sense but also in a technical one. Since traces of impressionist compositional thinking can even be found at some points in Sousa’s own works, the American bandmaster may be regarded as a pioneer of the popular adaptation of impressionist elements that soon would be common in the music of Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".