San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Composer raises hard questions about what ‘StarSpangled Banner’ symbolizes
If you’re an American, the omnipresence of “The StarSpangled Banner” — and for that matter, the very concept of a national anthem — can feel so much like second nature that it’s easy to assume things have always been this way. Didn’t the founders write it into the Constitution somewhere, alongside baseball, the Pledge of Allegiance and corn dogs?
But the truth is that, like just about everything in our national culture and iconography, the role of “The StarSpangled Banner” is rooted in specific turns of history. For 200 years, it’s served as a hodgepodge of musical reference and verbal resources, constantly redeployed as the occasion demanded. For that matter, it only acquired its official standing as the national anthem in 1931, through a congressional bill signed by Herbert Hoover.
So why behave as though the whole thing is set in stone? What if, after 90 years, we took a diagnostic check on this venerable musical document to see whether it still works as intended?
One person who has addressed that notion with particular cogency is Jessie Montgomery, the New York composer and violinist who was recently named composer in residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In her potent 2014 orchestral work “Banner,” which Bay Area audiences heard performed by the Oakland Symphony in 2019 and again in June by the San Francisco Symphony, Montgomery poses some tough questions about this central symbol of our nation.
Perhaps the most pressing question the piece asks is, “Who is this ‘our’ you’re speaking of ?” A national anthem presupposes, almost by definition, a single monolithic citizenry for which it can serve as an emblem.
But that concept, in today’s America, feels increasingly problematic. The “melting pot” ideal that many of us were brought up on turns out, in practice, to involve large amounts of cultural erasure.
So in 10 minutes of dense orchestral writing, Montgomery instead creates a roiling hubbub of musical debate. “The StarSpangled Banner” is in there, to be sure, in a sort of refracted, Cubist form, but along with it come anthems from Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba, as well as songs of the African American population and even the Confederacy.
“I felt that creating a piece that included many different types of patriotic or antipatriotic pieces was more reflective of the actual sentiment of a unified people where not everybody comes from the same place,” Montgomery told The Chronicle in a phone interview.
“It’s a microcosm of the collective sentiment of the people who have lived in, settled in, and fought with the United States. The piece is about the contradictions of freedom and what it can sound like to a diverse group of people.”
Is “Banner” an expression of patriotism, as Montgomery sees it?
“It’s a different view of patriotism — a wishful, hopeful view. For me, patriotism is about being honest about who’s here, and caring for everyone who’s here,” she said. “I’m protesting against ‘The StarSpangled Banner’ being the source of celebration.”
“The StarSpangled Banner” offers a variety of challenges. The melody is famously hard to sing because the 18th century British source material, originally titled “To Anacreon in Heaven,” was intended for skilled amateurs to show off their virtuosity. Francis Scott Key’s poetry, inspired by a nocturnal bombardment during the War of 1812, represents only the most prominent of various sets of lyrics that have been matched to the music.
But as Montgomery points out, the principal difficulty in the 21st century may be simply that we’re asking the piece to carry too much symbolic weight alone. There’s a whole spectrum of mu
sical material touching on other national values than ramparts and rockets.
A sampling of that material can be found in the San Francisco Symphony’s free outdoor concert scheduled for Sunday, July 4 in Sigmund Stern Grove.
Edwin Outwater will lead the orchestra in some traditional slices of musical Americana — Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” excerpts from Copland’s “Rodeo” — as well as music less often heard in these contexts. Those include “Reflections on a Memorial,” a recent work dedicated to the memory of George Floyd by the acclaimed young African American composer Quinn Mason, and music by Carlos Simon and Jennifer Higdon.
“This is the musical accompaniment to a cultural phenomenon, and it’s all about repeating but also varying the ritual,” Outwater said. “There are a variety of narrative voices that have not been included much on previous programs, and I wanted to be sure that those voices were also represented.”
That kind of pluralistic patriotism is a little hard to square with the premise of a national anthem, which relies on the aspirational fiction that a shared nationality can paper over other, deeper divisions. And the resulting strain is by no means unique to the United States.
For the most part, the rise of national anthems as a category dates to the middle of the 19th century — not coincidentally, at the same time that nationalist fervor began to sweep through Europe and South America. They served, then and now, as binding agents for populations that have often been heterogeneous collections of people. Their importance as propaganda has never been far from the surface.
Which suggests that it might be time to ask an even more daunting question: Have national anthems in general run their course?
The insufficiencies of “The StarSpangled Banner” itself are growing increasingly clear. Perhaps it’s time to go even bigger, and rethink the category as a whole.