This summer’s Arrangement and Description class is processing the digital recordings of Champaign, Illinois’s Pogo Studio which were acquired by the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music in December 2013.  Throughout his life, Mr. Sousa had a general aversion to most forms of mechanically reproduced music because of their poor sound quality.  In 1906 he published an article in Appleton’s Magazine that stated,  “I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste … by virtue – or rather by vice – of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.”  Given Flat Sousa’s harsh rebuke of sound recording technologies, it’s easy to understand why the student archivists found humor in his remarks about the digital audio recordings they about to work on.