How a British military march became the distinctive sound of American graduations

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Joshua Fagan, University of Washington

(THE CONVERSATION) Graduations throughout the United States erupt with some familiar sounds every year: the passionate cheering of friends and families, the lofty grandeur of speeches and, of course, one very recognizable tune.

Most Americans – if they’re even aware of its name – know it simply as “Pomp and Circumstance.”

More specifically, it is the “trio” section of the most famous of Edward Elgar’s five Pomp and Circumstance marches, “March No. 1 in D Major.”

When Elgar composed the piece in 1901, he wasn’t thinking about graduation or scholarship. He wrote it as a patriotic military march.

The phrase “pomp and circumstance” originates in Shakespeare’s “Othello,” where Othello uses it as he speaks of the allure of the “spirit-stirring drum” of “glorious war.”

In Britain, the melody still evokes the confident grandeur of an empire at its peak – just years before World War I shattered that confidence. The tune soon acquired a different set of associations in America, where by the 1920s it had become a graduation staple.

The unbridled optimism of empire

For a British military march to be reinvented as a graduation tune – by a former colonial subject of the U.K., no less – shows how people can bestow entirely new meanings...