Ah, I see I missed a day. It was inevitable. Honestly, my daily streak survived far far longer than I thought it would. I expect to miss a few more before April 15. The real question is what happens after that.

In the last post, I mentioned that the pledge of allegiance "neither excites me with its poetry nor inspires me with its message". Let's look at some patriotic texts that do one or the other.

For the latter, my favorite is the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

I continue to marvel at brilliance of this checklist. If you ever need a simple test for what is and isn't a legitimate role of government, I can think of nowhere better to look. Does the proposed action further one of these goals? If it doesn't, vote no.

For the latter, my favorite is Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic. Lord knows I have no love for battle nor for evangelism, but God I love these words:

Awesome.

I'm also quite fond of Katharine Lee Bates' "America the Beautiful", which has the added advantage of not celebrating religious war. Still, you can tell where my true passion lies by the fact that I couldn't resist quoting all five verses of the Battle Hymn. I can never resist any opportunity to quote the Battle Hymn. If you were here right now, I wouldn't be able to resist reciting it either. (Actually, I did recite it, but no one was here to hear it.)

With America the Beautiful, I'll limit myself to just one, the second verse, by far my favorite:

I especially love that last couplet.

I suppose if it were put to a vote, I would join with those who would have America the Beautiful displace the Star-Spangled Banner as our official national anthem.

I have very mixed feelings about the latter. I don't hate it, as many seem to. I think the Star-Spangled Banner is misunderstood and under-appreciated. It's a flawed piece, but so many of the criticisms against it are unwarranted that I feel compelled to rush to its defense.

For starters, there's the complaint that its range is too wide for amateur singers. That's nonsense. There are plenty of ordinary tunes with large ranges that people sing all the time without complaining about it. "Pop Goes the Weasel", for example, has the exact same range as the Star-Spangled Banner. But do people call for its banishment from the canon of nursery rhymes because only professionals can sing it? Ridiculous.

The Star-Spangled Banner's text isn't the greatest. The fact that it tells a military story doesn't do much for me, but my passion for the Battle Hymn proves that's by no means a deal-breaker. I do think Banner is second-rate poetry, but I hate to criticize the text because the far greater problem with the Banner is how grossly the text is neglected.

My rule for singers is always: tell the story! It's hard to think of any song which is so routinely sung with complete disregard for what the words mean. It may as well be in Yiddish for all the thought singers give to the text. It's rare to hear a performance that isn't just memorized syllables.

The true problem with the Star-Spangled Banner is neither the text nor the music, but the mismatch of the two. The scansion is really quite bad, with weak syllables falling on strong beats as often as you'd expect in a television commercial where a lame advertising text is forced onto some popular tune. Some of these are fixable. When I sing the Banner, I always put the short note before the beat instead of after at "whose broad" and "the bombs", and I usually sing "ba-an-ner" instead of "ban-ne-er". For the life of me, I don't understand why others don't do this, since it helps enormously and it's such an obvious fix. It's not as if singers haven't subjected the song to all sorts of other contortions, and yet somehow tradition forbids singing "the bombs bursting" instead of "thuuuh bmzburrr-sting". Go figure.

Under the burden of the misfit text, the music suffers. What the Banner tune really wants to be is a sprightly minuet with a nice long elegant stride on every other downbeat. In this, it has much in common with the tune for "Happy Birthday", which lost its natural cadence when the original "good morning" was replaced by "happy birthday" and died an ugly death from the ponderous slowness that inevitably followed.

Banner is slowed down not just by its text, but by the mere fact of being a national anthem. It is the nature of anthems that they want to be slow. That's why it's good to pick a tune which is not only stately to begin with (such as "America the Beautiful" or "God Bless America"), but which truly enjoys being slowed down even further. The best example of this is "God Save the Queen", which in America takes the text "My Country, 'Tis of Thee". Like the final number in Bach's B minor mass ("Dona nobis pacem", which is a repetition of "Gratias agimus tibi"), the more you stretch it out, the grander it gets. With God Save the Queen -- easily the greatest anthem tune ever written (and by "written" I mean evolved, since it has no single author) -- I don't think there is such a thing as too slow. There is a whole universe of phrasing in every beat.

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