Transit of Venus by John Philip Sousa Concert Band - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1650408

Legendary Washington composer John Philip Sousa likely watched on Dec. 6, 1882, as the planet Venus eclipsed a small part of the sun. This rare alignment -- when the planet's orbit takes it between the Earth and the sun -- is called the "Transit of Venus." Shortly after the astronomical phenomenon, Sousa began work on a musical march of the same name. Sousa wrote at least four marches about the way the heavenly bodies march across the night sky. The march king was a member of the astrology-loving Masons, and he paid close attention to the movement of the heavens. But the "Transit of Venus March" never caught on, and went unplayed for more than 100 years. Sousa's copies of the music were destroyed in a flood. But now Venus is approaching another transit, and fans of Sousa are resurrecting the forgotten march. It will be performed at 8 tonight at the Schlesinger Concert Hall in Alexandria. "The interesting thing about band leaders at the time is that their concept of the universe was that there was this hidden balance and all these cosmic things going on," says Sten Odenwald, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. Odenwald is preparing for June 8, when Venus will block out part of the sun for the first time in nearly 122 years. He has also worked with the Virginia Grand Military Band to organize the performance of "Transit of Venus." Unlike "Stars and Stripes Forever" or "The Washington Post March," Sousa's "Transit of Venus" did not bring Sousa fame, nor did the novel Sousa wrote with the same title. Loras Schissel, who works in the music division of the Library of Congress, found the old sheet music for "Venus" languishing in the library's files. "It's a little three-minute gem," says Schissel, who also conducts the Virginia Grand Military Band. "It was written in a time when people were less cynical and more optimistic. It was America on the threshold of thinking that anything was possible, and Sousa captured that feeling perfectly." Because bands today use different instruments than they did in the 1880s, Schissel had to rework the score for a modern ensemble. Last year, the Virginia band trotted the new version out for a test run. But most people, including John Philip Sousa IV, the composer's great-grandson, have never heard it performed. He will attend tonight's performance and hear it live for the first time.

------------ Library of Congress Archives

The original music for the Transit of Venus was inconsistant, unclear, and scored for uncommon instruments such as the Eb horn and the Db Piccolo. This, combined with the scarcity of Sousa at the time, made the march unpopular, and therefore, almost never played. The march was lost in time until the early 2000s, when Loras J. Schissel, Sousa finatic found the orginal music and created an interperetation based on it. The issue is, alot of what Schissel changed about the march was more composed rather than edited from Sousa. That is why I have edited the march to be as close to the original as possible, but with inconsistancies fixed and unclear articulations cleared up. I hope you enjoy the Transit of Venus by John Philip Sousa, edited by Wesley Besancon.