Stravinsky’s Star-Spangled Banner (July 4th, 2016)
Today I learned that Igor Stravinsky’s 1943 arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner got him harassed by the Boston Police Department.
The arrangement, heard in the linked video, contains a diminished seventh chord on the “land” of “oer the land of the free,” right at the 1:30 mark of the video. The effect is palpable. Stravinsky created this arrangement for the Boston Symphony, due to his ”desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.”
From Timothy Judd at The Listeners’ Club:
After the first performance, the audience was apparently shocked by what they considered to be an unconventional harmonization. The Boston Police, misinterpreting a Federal law prohibiting “tampering” with the National Anthem, told Stravinsky that he had to remove his arrangement from the remaining programs. Reluctantly, he conceded.
With the benefit of hindsight, and years of garishly over-embellished ballpark vocal renditions, Stravinsky’s Star Spangled Banner doesn’t sound so bad. This is the National Anthem through the ears of an immigrant. Its bass line and inner voices suggest a hint of “Great Gate of Kiev” Russian weight. There’s some interesting, unorthodox modernist voice leading that might vaguely remind you of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella.
I love it. It might be my new favorite arrangement of our (sorta-crappy) national anthem. To me, that chord suggests that our union is incomplete; that the past 240 years have been the struggle to make it more perfect, with the emphasis on “more.” There will always be more work to be done, more improvements to be made, more successes to celebrate, and more battles to fight. Our truths and values may be self-evident, but they are not self-actuating. Our path is long and winding, and at times we have lost our way, but we can (and must) walk it together.
My favorite version of the national anthem is the various renditions done by the Kentucky All State Choir when they go for their conferences.
It’s very natural and a touch haunting as they fill the entire atrium with sound and “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave?” hits a lot harder than you would expect.
The first time I watched one of these, it was their delivery of that line that caused me to think of what it would mean to me if America were destroyed. They say you don’t really know what you have until it’s gone, so thinking about that really put some things in perspective for me.