'O Say Can You Hear?' A cultural and musical history of the National Anthem

O Say Can You Hear?: A Cultural Biography of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by Mark Clague
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An interesting, lighter-side at times and rollicking, but deeper at times and with several "new to me" items look at the history of the writing of the Star Spangled Banner and its development. This is expanded from my original review, especially in the last couple of paragraphs.

Several brief points and a couple of longer ones.

First, Key had three days to write it; it wasn’t an overnight flash of inspiration. (That's now long he, an official U.S. government prisoner exchange negotiator, and the man who was their target for exchange, were detained during the battle for Baltimore.)

Second, he’d written another song to Anacreon’s words in 1805, celebrating Stephen Decatur’s naval attack on Tripoli. (Also the source of words in another famous American patriotic song!) That said, Clague rightly notes this wasn’t a poem, it was a song, or rather, song lyrics from the start. (Key also wrote several hymns, some of which are in Protestant hymnals yet today.)

Third, Anacreon wasn’t a “drinking song.” Rather, both words and tune were, for the Anacreontic Society, part of its program of giving professional musicians a glee-club type performance piece. Plenty of details about the club are in the book.

Fourth, additional verses have been written from time to time. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr’s Civil War verse is surely the best and the one that has most survived to today. Go here.

Fifth, it was already an unofficial national anthem of sorts by the Mexican War. See the last paragraphs for more.

Sixth, the National Anthem was being played at opening day games in baseball long before the enforced patriotism of WWI. Related, Clague notes modern “paid patriotism” as uncovered by John McCain and more. And tackles not only Kaepernick, but the likes of Tommy Smith and John Carlos long before him. He also notes that they weren’t the first, but that a Black woman, Eroseanna Robinson, remained seated during the anthem at the 1959 Pan Am Games.

Related to THAT, he notes that “parodies,” based on the Anacreon tune still, began in the 1840s and included ones tied to the temperance movement, abolition, and the early pitch for women’s rights. Next came antiwar versions.

Seventh, Clague has a good breakdown of modern Super Bowl performances.

Eighth, Clague tackles the problematic “hireling and slave” line in the third verse, and takes it to most likely, in context of its time, to refer respectively to conscript troops and British subjects of a king. In short, a follow-up on Declaration of Independence propaganda. He adds that maybe Key intended it to refer to British Gen. Robert Ross, noting its singular while previous third-verse references are plural. I find this not convincing.

Key personally? Yes, a slaveholder. Also, one of the founders of the American Colonization Society. He freed several slaves in his lifetime and the rest in his will (pending his wife’s death). A representer of Blacks in court, including on freedom petitions, that Clague notes saw nearly 60 former slaves freed. At the same time, he as federal district attorney for DC under Jackson, he prosecuted an abolitionist after an 1835 slave riot. But, he also distanced his stances, or tried to, from other ACS members. He never pushed any of his own slaves that he freed into colonization. Clague goes into much more depth to present a nuanced, in-his-times, picture of Key.

In the next chapter, Clague looks at “modern” takes in general. These include Jose Feliciano, of course, Jimi Hedrix, Aretha Franklin and others. He does so in a way that general refutes urban legends, or rather rural legends, since they’re normally by conservative White folk.

From there, it’s on to Rosanne Barr, which a sympathetic yet critical take on it, and for you classical aficionados like me, Stravinsky’s orchestration. Note: I generally like this, but do not like the removed dotted rhythm partway into the 2nd/4th lines. Done by itself, it makes it stand out too much, at least in instrumental-only performances. I’d rather he kept all syncopation but cut the dotted quarters by a sixteenth and augmented the eighth notes by a sixteenth. It does sound less glaring in choral versions, but nonetheless, that part doesn't float my boat. 

Clague also slips in a few observations about medleys of "The Star Spangled Banner" with other music, as done by modern artists.

Back to the brief note above that it had apparently started becoming our National Anthem already at the time of the Mexican War, Clague ends with plaints against it, and suggested alternatives. 

Up until that time, the Civil War "Hail Columbia" was the primary challenger, he says. (The music, he informs us, was written as the original Presidential "march" for Washington before being replaced by "Hail to the Chief.") Today, he notes, it would take much less a change in the 1931 federal law and instead a cultural shift. That said, per what I said about the third verse? Clague addresses that again, too. "America the Beautiful," he mentions first, and part of me would take that, precisely because of its lack of martiality. On the other hand, it's explicitly religious in every verse. (Until you get to the fourth verse, and it's professed mottoe of "In God is Our Trust," the Star Spangled Banner has no such reference.) It's also still too White-centric, especially in later verses. "God Bless America" is way too religious for me. Second, Clague notes it’s still under copyright.  His solution, in the sports world, namely the NFL? Start the season with the National Anthem, then have teams play a  new alternative every week.

 

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" might be a fun eff you to Southern wingnuts, but it's also too religious. "America" is also religious, plus would need a new tune.

So, outside of something like "We Shall Overcome" slipping in,

==

That said, there is one error of note. A professional musicologist should know better than to call Herb Alpert Hispanic.

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Yes! Donaldine and Melania are together in COVIDity as they Don't Fear the Virus, courtesy Blue Öyster Cult

All our bugs have come

Here but now they're gone

Seasons don't fear the virus

Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain, others can be like us

Come on baby, don't fear the virus

Baby take my hand, don't fear the virus

We'll be able to fly, don't fear the virus

Baby I'm your man

La, la, la, la, la

La, la, la, la, la

Regeneron’s done

Here but now its gone

Donaldine and Melania

Together in eternity, Donaldine and Melania

40, 000 men and women everyday, Like Donaldine and Melania

40, 000 men and women everyday, Redefine happiness

Another 40, 000 coming everyday, others can be like us

Come on baby, don't fear the virus

Baby take my hand, don't fear the virus

We'll be able to fly, don't fear the virus

Baby I'm your man

Neil Young, capitalist sellout — #hypocrisy alert (updated)

Neil Young (Wikipedia photo)

Neil Young has long been known for "reinventing" himself musically every several years, but he's long been seen as a consistent liberal political and social voice.

(Update, May 25, 2016: Well, maybe not a consistent liberal political and social voice. Sure, he endorsed Bernie Sanders earlier this year, but now, he's ready and willing to let Donald Trump use his music at campaign events, as long as he pays up.)

Back to the original ....

Well, maybe we should re-invent our understanding of him. And, his voice aside, part of a trilogy of "interesting" voices along with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, maybe we should re-invent our understanding of him as a musician — at least one who understands much about actual recording and engineering — as well.

And, why do I say this?

From this great piece from LA Weekly, which once and for all refutes the idea that "vintage vinyl" sounds better than CDs.

If anything, it actually is worse.

Due to the shorter "travel time" near the label, sound quality on a record deteriorates even further near the center of the black plastic. And (petard alert!) to get more than 40 or so minutes of sounds on a piece of vintage vinyl, the sound must be COMPRESSED! And, there's extra distortion, despite that compression.

And, no, you worshipers at the Altar of Vinyl, the Altar of Glass Vacuum Tubes won't help on this.

How does this all tie to Neil Young?

Simple.

It's his relationship to PonoMusic and the bullshit that Pono is selling to gullible worshipers at the Altar of Vinyl.

First, a background note. Pete Lyman, co-owner and chief mastering technician at Infrasonic Sound, notes that a lot of stuff being cut to vinyl is actually from stuff not only with digital masters, but with original engineering for digital. And, vinyl masters today aren't being produced the same way as they were in the pre-CD era.

Now, an introduction to more generalized hypercapitalist bullshit that's being sold to the Church of Vinyl:

As labels seek to capitalize on a physical medium that is gaining momentum, some marketing efforts offering superior sound are downright misleading. Most notable among these is "audiophile-quality 180-gram vinyl," which consumers assume is superior because it is heavier. Lyman, however, says the added weight offers no musical benefit at all. 

"It increases shipping costs and sales cost of the record. That's about it," he says. "It's the Super Big Gulp of vinyl, but you're not getting more [sound quality], really, you're just getting more vinyl."

OK, that sets the stage.

Here's the capitalist sellout:

With PonoMusic, Neil Young is leading fans down the digital version of a similar "bigger is better" sonic trail. 

It has long been believed that the human ear cannot hear frequencies above 22 kHz. This is why CDs sample sound at 44.1 kHz and 16 bits of information per sample. According to a theorem called Nyquist-Shannon, in order to reach a desired range, sound must be sampled at twice that range. Half of 44, obviously, is 22. 

Pono — along with some other digital retailers such as HDtracks.com — sells some tracks that sample music as high as 192 kHz, with 24 bits per sample. Pono also offers a PonoPlayer (retail price: $399), which the company says is optimized to play those tracks.

So, the 192 kHz is just bullshit. Per Wiki, 192kHz is at the upper end of bats' sonar-based hearing range!

It's bullshit in the same way as gold-plated audio connections and similar overpriced stupidity.

Since the human ear can't hear that high, a special music player that allegedly reproduces them — as well as engineers who claim they can tell the quality grade difference — is an even higher, pricier grade of bullshit.

Even if ol Neil ain't getting a direct cut of Pomo's money in exchange for his Kickstarter effort, he's still a capitalist sellout. If he is getting some payola (I see what I did there), he's a sellout in spades.

Actually, in play rights, etc., he IS getting a direct cut of Pomo's money, though:

You can buy an armload of used LPs for the $21.79 it costs to buy a 192 kHz version of Young's Harvest at the Pono store.

 Capitalist sellout.

I'm surprised that he hasn't offered an updated "After the Gold Rush," let alone "Heart of Gold." (I see what I did there.)

And, music engineering idiot, spouting New Agey-type nonsense like this:

As he's been pitching Pono, Young has continued to promote the idea that analog formats and recording gear offer the authentic sound, and digital is a compromise. 

"I don't think [Pono] can sound better than vinyl," he said earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show. "Because vinyl is a reflection and any digital is a reconstitution; it's not the same thing."

Or else, a — wait for it, wait for it ...

A capitalist sellout playing on his public persona, which would expect him to say something like this, and doing so at a capitalist palooza like the CES. 

That said, he's got plenty of suckers willing to buy into his capitalist sellout if Americans bought nearly 10 million vintage vinyl albums in 2014.

#SciAm has a culturo-centric fail on music

A recent blog post at Scientific American talked about the "sad" feeling of minor keys vs. the "happy" feeling of major keys, and how the author wanted to do some more specific investigation of this issue.

Several historically or culturally relevant items were missing from the piece, though.

That includes, but is not limited to:

1. The major and minor scales of modern Western music (more on that below) did not become the only two regularly used scales until the Renaissance, and even then, not really so until the later part of the Renaissance.

2. They evolved from two of the several church modes of the medieval modal system, which in turn had involved from older classical Greek modal scales.

3. Even when the Western musical world focused on the major and minor scales, they didn't all sound the same until the adoption of even or mean tuning in the 1700s, pushed by people like Johann Sebastian Bach in his two volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Before then, instruments generally had to be tuned to sound best in one or two major or minor keys. Keys that were harmonically "distant" from them had certain intervals that basically sounded ... bad at least. Perfect fourths and fifths, in the most distant keys, might instead sound halfway like the infamous "devil's tritone," the augmented fourth or diminished fifth.

4. Since Debussy's work with whole-tone scales in the late 19th century, followed by Arnold Schoenberg's serialism, Western classical music has become more loosely connected to the major-minor system.

5. Much non-Western traditional music is based on non-12 tone scales. These include India's classical 22-tone scale, the pentatonic scale of stereotypical East Asian music and more.

6. Some modern Western music has also rejected 12-tone scales, not just the major/minor system within 12-tone scales. Harry Partch is known for his work with microtonal music.

7. The author doesn't ask whether cultural beliefs about happy/sad and major/minor influence our perceptions, nor about how our mental states at the moment might fuse with these cultural beliefs.

Basically, the post (I'm not going to bother hunting up the link) came off sounding like someone halfway through grad school in science program but without a single class in music theory or history spouting forth personal ideas on happy/sad and major/minor, plus tapping into modern pop Western musical preconceptions.

World’s earliest known flute found

Beyond the age a 35,000-year-old treasure, this find in Germany raises other questions of music and human development.

For example, I’ve always figured a flute of some sort was the world’s first wind instrument, and probably the world’s first tuned instrument, followed by the first oboe-like instrument when a papyrus flute, softened enough by saliva at the top, because a double-reed wind instrument.

But, there is another instrument, and other aspects to music besides pitch.

Like rhythm.

This raises the question of what the first musical instrument man invented was. Drums are still likeliest, but rocks, logs, or bones as rhythm instruments are indistinguishable from rocks, logs or bones in and of themselves.

Music IS the universal language

Turns out sub-Saharan Africans can pick out the likely emotional state reflected by particular items of Western music, even people who may never have heard such music on a radio before.

That said:
1. The study is small;
2. I’m not sure of the p-value;
3. I’m pretty sure that they weren’t asked to listen to Schoenberg or even more avant-garde items.