Don't Tread on the Banner!

WHAT!

Dammit, I can’t do everything, though I’d be happy to delegate, but really! Whoever imagined that I’d have to check in on the damned national anthem now and again—or maybe even daily—just to make sure that nobody had altered the time signature?

OK—for those of you who had better things to do in your childhood than study classical music, here’s the skinny. Most music is divided into measures, and most measures have a basic pulse or beat. That’s why you tap your feet when somebody is singing. And these measures are either duple or triple—or some variant thereof. Consider a tune you know: Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star. There’s a natural stress every four notes (with the third note being slightly stressed as well). Since four is two times two, the time signature is duple.

A triple form? Think Greensleeves, which has a natural stress every six beats, with a slight stress on the fourth beat. Since six is a multiple of three, it’s a triple time signature.

And the national anthem? It is triple, not duple.

I tell you this because a friend, a professional flutist, on Facebook posted an article by Anne Midgette of The Washington Post about Renée Fleming’s performance of the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Well, I listened and was impressed, but then I usually am with Renée—she’s impossible not to like. And I think she struck a nice balance: there’s nothing worse than an opera singer pretending to be pop. First, it’s ridiculous; second, it reveals profound insecurity. You’ve spent years learning your art, and you chicken out for a sports event? Come on!

Reading the comments was revealing as they so often are. And one comment from Phillip Bush in particular caught my eye:

The real question re the arrangement, etc., is something I find surprising nobody talks about much: have you noticed that the national anthem (at least in Super Bowl versions) has been altered to 4/4 time? Fleming's version, sadly, was no exception though she did revert to 3 in the final lines (beginning with "oh say does that." Just to see if I was imagining things, I listened to all versions since 2008 and only Carrie Underwood in 2010 sang the anthem in 3 all the way through. (It should be added that Christina Aguilera's version in 2009 defies all attempts at metric--or pitch---analysis.)

Clearly a man I could call my brother! Any man who cares enough to hear seven years of our national anthem—OK, but you know what I mean—is obviously my match for neuroticism. Because I have spent most of the match scratching my head and listening to bourrées, gavottes, loures, minuets trying to figure out what dance form the damn Star-Spangled Banner is, or rather was.

Although it may not be—the Star-Spangled Banner may be based simply on a song composed in 1778 for the Anacreontic Society, a group of amateur musicians in London. And yes, the boys liked a spot of ale or beer when getting together; it might be a little unfair to categorize the national anthem as a “drinking song,” if only because most people, especially drunk, can’t sing the song.

The song is called To Anacreon in Heaven, and it turned out my hunch was right: the original song is sung considerably faster than anyone sings the national anthem today. And as a cellist who has played the Bach solo suites for forty years—wow, and shouldn’t I play them better, after all those years? Oh well….

Anyway, here’s the thing: the suites contain stylized but still recognizable dances that were common at the time. And I swear, To Anacreon in Heaven sounds like one of those dances—I can see people in their elaborate gowns and their stiff, formal gestures dancing to it. And the dotted upbeat—the “Oooh” before you land happily on “say”—that’s the tip off!

So I spent the morning with bourrées, gavottes, loures and minuets, and what did I learn?

Nothing definitive, though I can tell that the base for the Star-Spangled Banner is definitely triple, not duple. Here’s a photo of an edition of 1790:

Right—so who got the bright idea of changing the time signature of our national anthem from ¾ (essentially) to 4/4?

I’m sorry to say that it was Whitney Houston—and I would rather hear chalk scratching on the chalkboard than hear Whitney Houston. But it seemed that Houston thought the national anthem was too “waltz-like.” So Rickey Minor, Houston’s musical director, and Houston tinkered around. Here’s what Minor said:

“The original version is in 3/4 time, which is more like a waltz,” Minor explained. “What we tried to do was to put it in 4/4 meter… We wanted to give her a chance to phrase it in such a way that she would be able to take her time and really express the meaning.”

Well, I went out, bought an anti-emetic, waited an hour, and then braved my way through Houston’s lip-synched 1991 performance; yes, I gagged but didn’t retch. 

My other reaction to Ms. Midgette’s article?

A surprising number of readers thought she was being backhanded, snide, or hypercritical. Though I agreed with the most recent comment, from RAMJ:

I just want to hear the anthem sung straight, the way we sang it in grade school. We were made to feel that it was a serious song with great meaning. There was no embellishment allowed. 

The simple notes provide ample challenge to most any voice, trained or untrained. There is beauty in their starkness. I love that only the gods can help the person that starts singing our anthem in the wrong key. 

I cringe at the current rate of embellishment and self-aggrandizement the anthem has been burdened with. I actually avoid listening, because I know it will be painful.

YES!

Finally, Kurt Vonnegut wandered into my brain, and what was it he had written about the Star-Spangled Banner? Well, here it is:

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks. 

Of course, that wasn’t the way I remembered it. My version had it that the Star-Spangled Banner is the only national anthem that ends with a question—or rather, a constant, never-ending challenge as well as quest: does that star spangl’d banner yet wave over the free and the brave?

Your choice—just sing the damn thing in ¾!

Dammit!

I knew at the time that it would come to this. All right—I couldn’t imagine quite how bad the “this” was going to be, but I knew it would be bad.

In 1989, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether the railroads had the right to ask their workers to go into a room and piss in a cup. There had been accidents before, drugs were found to be the culprit, and so the railroads decided to check for drugs via urine testing.

Did it ever make sense?

Of course not. If you smoked a joint on Saturday night, you were spilling metabolites in your urine on Monday—but you weren’t under the effects of the drug. Conversely, if you snorted cocaine on the way to work, you were soaring like a kite, but not spilling metabolites.

Then there was the problem of all the over the counter drugs like Sudafed which gave false positives—sure, more sophisticated tests were available, but unsurprisingly, they were also more expensive.

It was a period of drug hysteria—remember dear Nancy Reagan peering out of the darkness that was presumably drug addiction and whispering hamishly (in the manner of a ham, computer—lump it!), “just say no!?” Remember Bill, who smoked but didn’t inhale?

Of all people, Antonin Scalia got it. Here’s what he said:

The impairment of individual liberties cannot be the means of making a point…symbolism, even symbolism for so worthy a cause as the abolition of unlawful drugs, cannot validate an otherwise unreasonable search.

Right—knew we had to agree on something….

So I was prepared, when Wal-Mart wanted me to come work as an English teacher, for the ordeal of taking the bus out to a clinic, pissing in the bottle with the bathroom door six inches ajar, not washing my hands until after I had given the bottle to the apologetic technician. She took it, stuck a thermometer in it, and then let me use the sink.

Full disclosure: I last used marijuana in—was it the eighties? Nineties? You get the point….

So I knew about that. What didn’t I know?

47% of employers routinely do a credit check on job applicants.

Well, you can imagine the snort I made—even Franny, my beloved mother resting quietly in the afterlife, couldn’t have done better.

Consider the case of Alfred J. Carpenter, a shoe salesman in New York City who got laid off. Not a problem, he thought—his resume was good, he had worked for some high-end names like Ferragamo and J. M. Weston. And since he was healthy, he didn’t need to get health insurance, he reasoned.

Wrong—he tore two ligaments in his knee playing roller hockey. And so the bills piled up, and he was struggling to pay them. A friend thought he could work at Bergdorf Goodman; he applied and all was well. But then that went sour, too; soon he was in bankruptcy. But he kept applying for positions, and even took to disclosing his poor credit with prospective employers. No luck, and no dice. Down to his last 200 dollars, he’s now on welfare and food stamps.

The irony of it is that the company has to ask your permission to check your credit. But if you say no? Is there anyone out there who seriously thinks that if you way no, that won’t be held against you? If so, please contact me at once, since I have several really nice pieces of real estate—including bridges—to sell at the moment.

I can hear you—what possible reason would an employer have to check your credit? Well, The New York Times says this:

“Employers are looking for a sense of responsibility,” said Richard Mellor, a vice president at the National Retail Federation. “They want to see that an individual pays their bills on time and takes responsibility for what they buy.”

There are several problems. First is the obvious one—anyone in this economy looking for a job is probably not going to have the best credit. Here’s The New York Times again:

“Someone loses their job,” Ms. Wu said, “so they can’t pay their bills — and now they can’t get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s this Catch-22 that makes no sense.” It can also be a kind of backdoor job discrimination, Ms. Wu contends, given the numerous studies that demonstrate that those black, Latino or simply poor are more likely to have lower credit scores than those who are white and have means.

Obviously, Ms. Wu gets it. And she goes on to say:

To Ms. Wu and others, a credit report says more about a person’s economic circumstances than his or her moral character. “Some people can go to daddy and say, ‘I can’t pay my bills, will you bail me out?’ ” Ms. Wu said. “And others can’t.”

The other problem? Often, the credit agencies’ reports are incorrect, and everybody who has ever had to deal with these agencies knows—it’s a nightmare. Somehow, the mistake that you corrected in January appears regularly in February.

The solution? Well, nine states have laws regulating or prohibiting the use of credit checks by employers recruiting personnel. But it should be at the federal level—not the state level.

So it was the snowball effect, just as Scalia—probably—feared. First it was just pissing into a cup, then it was giving up your credit privacy, and now? It’s having the government get your telephone / Internet history, if not listening in on your calls or reading your email.

It was Vonnegut, I think, who observed that the Star Spangled Banner is the only national anthem that ends with a question. Remember? We sing it at every baseball game….

And does that flag still wave, over the free and the brave?