Geoffrey Dean, Sketches, Gustav Mahler, South Dakota Symphony Orchestra
War, Jazz, and The Star Spangled Banner
By Geoffrey Dean
Books with an implied musical “soundtrack” have always interested me, as some of my earlier posts on this blog will attest. So when I came across a new tome by E. Douglas Bomberger titled Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), I knew I had a music-filled read in store. 1917 was the year that jazz made its sensational first appearance in New York City and on records, with the Original Dixieland “Jass” Band’s “Livery Stable Blues.” It was also the year that the US entered World War I, making the presence of music by Wagner, Beethoven, and other German composers on concert programs increasingly controversial and the appearance of jazz on the national scene a timely diversion. The Star Spangled Banner, not yet the official our national anthem, became in 1917 a source of heated debate: should it be played, and if so, where, how, and by whom?
Bomberger threads his way through the year month by month, skillfully interweaving the stories of eight important musicians whose lives were forever changed by the impact of WWI. Take the German-American Wagnerian opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who had five sons in the military: four fought on the US side and survived, while her eldest fought and died for Germany. Or African-American band leader James Reese Europe, whose hand-picked military band took France by storm and received a hero’s welcome on its return to New York; his career was literally cut short a year later when a band member fatally knifed him in Boston. Starring roles are also given to classical instrumentalists such as the Austrian violin phenom Fritz Kreisler and Texas-born concert pianist Olga Samaroff. Especially intriguing is Bomberger’s juxtaposition of the divergent paths of two high-profile orchestral conductors, the outspoken super-patriot Walter Damrosch (German-born, long-time naturalized American) of the New York Symphony Society, and the taciturn German sympathizer Dr. Karl Muck (a Swiss citizen, but for many years previous an esteemed employee of the German Kaiser) of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO).
Which brings us back to The Star Spangled Banner, one of many musical themes of Bomberger’s well-researched narrative. As American soldiers began to lose their lives in the fall of 1917, the calls to add the patriotic song to concert programs became ever louder in many US cities. While in New York, Damrosch had introduced this practice with his orchestra, using his own arrangement, the BSO management was so convinced that this popular tune had no place on the orchestra’s “highbrow” concerts (they had allowed it on the Boston Pops “lowbrow” programs earlier in the year) that they did not even tell Dr. Muck that it had been urgently requested for a BSO concert in Providence, Rhode Island. BSO founder Col. Henry L. Higginson argued strenuously against programming it and defended Muck just as strenuously from the attacks that followed. In a rare public statement, Muck himself only made matters worse by explaining that the song really wasn’t the sort of thing that symphony orchestra subscribers wanted to hear on a serious classical concert.
So, when the BSO, conducted by Muck and including 23 German citizens among its members, started performing the piece, it and Muck were attacked for hypocrisy and lack of real patriotic spirit. Of a Pittsburgh performance by the BSO, one reviewer said the orchestra played The Star Spangled Banner too fast, while another said it had been played too slow. A Philadelphia reviewer described the BSO’s version of the song as being “in jazz style,” making early use of the phrase that pinpoints the polyphonic nature of both jazz and the Victor Herbert setting of The Star Spangled Banner that the BSO had appropriated for its concerts.
That year Herbert himself recorded his American Fantasie, the larger work from which his version was taken, in the original band version from which the objectionable ornate countermelodies are notably absent [The Star Spangled Banner starts at about 6'30"]:
Compare that recording to Herbert’s “jazzed up” orchestral version here, where the Banner starts at about 7'50" (hint: the first violin part is the main “offender”):
Damrosch’s version didn’t fare much better, because it too took liberties with the original, using enriched harmonies, an extremely active bass line, and pervasive percussion that, it was said, needlessly complicated the melody and made it harder to sing along to. John Philip Sousa appears to have had no such issues with the Damrosch setting, and made a popular band arrangement of it (note the brisk tempo):
Meanwhile, in restaurants and clubs in New York City, the future national anthem was also being jazzed up, in a manner that encouraged patrons to dance to it rather than sing along. The complaints alleging demeaning treatment of the patriotic song increased to the point that the city issued a new ordinance defining the acceptable ways of performing it and banning all others. By comparison with the dance versions of 1917, I suspect that this later rendition by Louis Armstrong is relatively slow and sedate; it preserves much of the song-like quality, and the accompanying trombone line rarely moves faster than the melody:
As Bomberger points out, more recent performances of The Star Spangled Banner have ventured much further from the original. Jimi Hendrix’s virtuosic Vietnam-era version on electric guitar had a mixed reception, as either a pained homage or an ironic parody of the music and the great (or “great”) nation it represents. Whitney Houston’s stunning 1991 Super Bowl version, given ten days into the Gulf War, was widely praised without mention of how she actually changes the meter of the music. Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock, 1969:
I personally think Hendrix’s version gives eloquent voice to the ultimately unresolvable cognitive dissonance between patriotism and pacificism.
In closing, I offer a version recorded in 1912 by Madame Schumann-Heink, one of the leading ladies of Bomberger’s book, whose five sons fought in WWI. Is her version not, in its own way, similarly conflicted?
As a postscript, here is Whitney Houston’s incredibly inspiring version, which also serves to illustrate how far vocal technique had come in 80 years, and to remind us that the NFL has been the locus of a more recent Banner controversy:
For further comparison, consider this performance at the 2016 Super Bowl, by Lady Gaga:
By Geoffrey Dean
Books with an implied musical “soundtrack” have always interested me, as some of my earlier posts on this blog will attest. So when I came across a new tome by E. Douglas Bomberger titled Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), I knew I had a music-filled read in store. 1917 was the year that jazz made its sensational first appearance in New York City and on records, with the Original Dixieland “Jass” Band’s “Livery Stable Blues.” It was also the year that the US entered World War I, making the presence of music by Wagner, Beethoven, and other German composers on concert programs increasingly controversial and the appearance of jazz on the national scene a timely diversion. The Star Spangled Banner, not yet the official our national anthem, became in 1917 a source of heated debate: should it be played, and if so, where, how, and by whom?
Bomberger threads his way through the year month by month, skillfully interweaving the stories of eight important musicians whose lives were forever changed by the impact of WWI. Take the German-American Wagnerian opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who had five sons in the military: four fought on the US side and survived, while her eldest fought and died for Germany. Or African-American band leader James Reese Europe, whose hand-picked military band took France by storm and received a hero’s welcome on its return to New York; his career was literally cut short a year later when a band member fatally knifed him in Boston. Starring roles are also given to classical instrumentalists such as the Austrian violin phenom Fritz Kreisler and Texas-born concert pianist Olga Samaroff. Especially intriguing is Bomberger’s juxtaposition of the divergent paths of two high-profile orchestral conductors, the outspoken super-patriot Walter Damrosch (German-born, long-time naturalized American) of the New York Symphony Society, and the taciturn German sympathizer Dr. Karl Muck (a Swiss citizen, but for many years previous an esteemed employee of the German Kaiser) of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO).
Which brings us back to The Star Spangled Banner, one of many musical themes of Bomberger’s well-researched narrative. As American soldiers began to lose their lives in the fall of 1917, the calls to add the patriotic song to concert programs became ever louder in many US cities. While in New York, Damrosch had introduced this practice with his orchestra, using his own arrangement, the BSO management was so convinced that this popular tune had no place on the orchestra’s “highbrow” concerts (they had allowed it on the Boston Pops “lowbrow” programs earlier in the year) that they did not even tell Dr. Muck that it had been urgently requested for a BSO concert in Providence, Rhode Island. BSO founder Col. Henry L. Higginson argued strenuously against programming it and defended Muck just as strenuously from the attacks that followed. In a rare public statement, Muck himself only made matters worse by explaining that the song really wasn’t the sort of thing that symphony orchestra subscribers wanted to hear on a serious classical concert.
So, when the BSO, conducted by Muck and including 23 German citizens among its members, started performing the piece, it and Muck were attacked for hypocrisy and lack of real patriotic spirit. Of a Pittsburgh performance by the BSO, one reviewer said the orchestra played The Star Spangled Banner too fast, while another said it had been played too slow. A Philadelphia reviewer described the BSO’s version of the song as being “in jazz style,” making early use of the phrase that pinpoints the polyphonic nature of both jazz and the Victor Herbert setting of The Star Spangled Banner that the BSO had appropriated for its concerts.
That year Herbert himself recorded his American Fantasie, the larger work from which his version was taken, in the original band version from which the objectionable ornate countermelodies are notably absent [The Star Spangled Banner starts at about 6'30"]:
Compare that recording to Herbert’s “jazzed up” orchestral version here, where the Banner starts at about 7'50" (hint: the first violin part is the main “offender”):
Damrosch’s version didn’t fare much better, because it too took liberties with the original, using enriched harmonies, an extremely active bass line, and pervasive percussion that, it was said, needlessly complicated the melody and made it harder to sing along to. John Philip Sousa appears to have had no such issues with the Damrosch setting, and made a popular band arrangement of it (note the brisk tempo):
Meanwhile, in restaurants and clubs in New York City, the future national anthem was also being jazzed up, in a manner that encouraged patrons to dance to it rather than sing along. The complaints alleging demeaning treatment of the patriotic song increased to the point that the city issued a new ordinance defining the acceptable ways of performing it and banning all others. By comparison with the dance versions of 1917, I suspect that this later rendition by Louis Armstrong is relatively slow and sedate; it preserves much of the song-like quality, and the accompanying trombone line rarely moves faster than the melody:
As Bomberger points out, more recent performances of The Star Spangled Banner have ventured much further from the original. Jimi Hendrix’s virtuosic Vietnam-era version on electric guitar had a mixed reception, as either a pained homage or an ironic parody of the music and the great (or “great”) nation it represents. Whitney Houston’s stunning 1991 Super Bowl version, given ten days into the Gulf War, was widely praised without mention of how she actually changes the meter of the music. Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock, 1969:
I personally think Hendrix’s version gives eloquent voice to the ultimately unresolvable cognitive dissonance between patriotism and pacificism.
In closing, I offer a version recorded in 1912 by Madame Schumann-Heink, one of the leading ladies of Bomberger’s book, whose five sons fought in WWI. Is her version not, in its own way, similarly conflicted?
As a postscript, here is Whitney Houston’s incredibly inspiring version, which also serves to illustrate how far vocal technique had come in 80 years, and to remind us that the NFL has been the locus of a more recent Banner controversy:
For further comparison, consider this performance at the 2016 Super Bowl, by Lady Gaga:
| Copyright © 2019 by Geoffrey Dean |
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