The march was created with a practical purpose in mind: to allow large groups of soldiers to march in lockstep, and it was only later that it was used in artistic settings to invoke military imagery. Because the march was created to accompany and guide military movements, it is characterized by strong, repeated rhythms and a lack of ornamentation. Stylized marches arose as a result of this.
The first marches arose from rhythm patterns that were originally only played on drums. For ritualized activities such as parades and reviews, slow marches were used. The quick march, which was roughly twice as fast as the slow march, was used for maneuvers, and the attack tempo was the double-quick march.
Early marches included both original pieces and works with melodies adapted from other musical genres, such as popular tunes and operas, in the 1600s and 1700s. Individual regiments and armies began commissioning their own private marches by the end of the eighteenth century, and British soldiers marched to works by Handel and Haydn, among others, while Austrian troops occasionally marched to Beethoven marches.
Many of today’s most well-known marches were composed in the nineteenth century. Johann Strauss, Sr. composed “The Radetzky March” for the 1848 Austrian Revolution, for example. But it was John Philip Sousa, an American composer and band leader, who was the most famous march composer of the nineteenth century. In the 1880s and 1890s, Sousa composed marches for the United States Marine Band, including “Semper Fidelis,” “The Liberty Bell,” “King Cotton,” “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and “The Washington Post.”
Some well-known marches are linked to a specific work of art. Kenneth J. Alford is best known for his march “Colonel Bogey,” which Alec Guinness whistled in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. For A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Felix Mendelssohn composed a “Wedding March.” In operas like The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart used marches frequently to establish a military presence, as did Richard Wagner in Tannhäuser and Gioachino Rossini in William Tell. Funeral marches appear in symphonic music in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Third Symphony and Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony, where Mahler composes a parodic movement based on the song “Frère Jacques.”