John Philip Sousa

Hands Across the Sea is one of the finest 2/4 marches by the "March King" John Philip Sousa (1854-1932). Composed in the same year as Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, it shows how rags coexisted for many years with their formal and harmonic forbears. Sousa's earlier Washington Post, one of his first successes, is famous as a parade piece today, but it was best known in the years immediately following its publication as the music for the widely disseminated new American-spawned dance craze, the Two Step. No doubt Hands Across the Sea and other marches were similarly employed as dance music, and it is easy to see how the evolution of march into ragtime was driven by the gradual introduction of ragtime's lilting, dancelike syncopations into the march style.

Notes by Roy Wiseman