Mahler and Sousa?

Here's a minor musical notion inspired by Kalimac's review of a recent performance of Gustav Mahler's third symphony. He writes, "A marching band episode came out with the same crabbed intensity that Charles Ives would have brought to it." I did not know until reading that sentence that Mahler had any familiarity with marching bands. Why does that interest me?

To start with, one of the very few Mahler passages I could hum without prompting is the beginning of his Symphony No. 2 [1], and the reason is that Carolina Crown drum and bugle corps used approximately the first 45 bars of that piece to open their 2010 show [2]. (Also in the corps' program that year, which was titled "A Second Chance," were excerpts from Aram Khachaturian's Symphony No. 2, Arturo Marquez's Danzon No. 2, and Edward Elgar's "Nimrod" from the Enigma Variations. I don't know why the last piece was included in a show where the number 2 was clearly an inspiration.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. Marine Band, "the President's Own" ("established by an act of Congress on July 11, 1798" and not to be confused with the U.S. Marine Drum and Bugle Corps, "the Commandant's Own," which wasn't created until 1934), had since 2014 conducted an online poll each March called "Sousa's March Mania," modeled in format after the "brackets" of the college basketball "March Madness" that occupies so much of American sports fans' interest for three weekends each spring. Thirty-two marches are matched up, and fans vote for their favorite from each pair, and then for the favorite from each pair of favorites, and so on, over four weeks, until a champion march is selected and performed by the band (which has the final two pieces ready on their music stands and does not know which of the two is the winner until just before they play it) [3].

The marches in the poll are typically by a wide range of composers, but to commemorate the tenth poll in 2023, the selections were restricted to the works of John Phillip Sousa, who led the Marine Band for 11 years starting in 1880 and wrote more than 130 marches. I almost always disagree with the fans' choices in these polls, and that was true last year, but one aspect of the winning march, although new to me, struck me as familiar. It was "The Honored Dead," composed in 1876 but not arranged until 1885 for the funeral of Ulysses Grant [4].

Although many listeners will probably say they're too dissimilar, to my ear (perhaps affected by the Carolina Crown version of Mahler), the first four notes of Sousa's march, played by the trombones, sound like the four notes in the cellos and basses staring with the pickup to the sixth measure of Mahler's symphony. Wikipedia tells me that Mahler composed the piece between 1888 and 1894. I don't know when Sousa first toured in Europe, but apparently it can't have been until at least 1892, when he left the Marines to set up his own band. But Grant was world famous, and I wonder if a march associated with his death might have been played by a European band that Mahler heard.

Notes:

[1] Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 2, with score:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D9DfuF-Hf4

[2] Carolina Crown, "A Second Chance," 2010, opener:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0Yvw1veM10

(The audience quiets down after the first 15 seconds.)

[3] Sousa's March Mania, U.S. Marine Band:

https://www.marineband.marines.mil/Educational/Sousas-March-Mania/

[4] John Phillip Sousa, "The Honored Dead," with score:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twPZqn2T-Ds