Claude Debussy and the American “March King” John Philip Sousa, it may seem, lived not merely on different continents, but also on different planets. Rejecting a two-hundred-year-old Western tonal tradition and conventional formal concepts, Debussy’s impressionism ostensibly represents the exact opposite of Sousa’s popular style, as characterized by relatively simple and unambiguous cadential harmony and a symmetrical syntax analogous to rhymed and metered poetic language.