Isaac Laquedem

Three songs of America, part 2: The Star-Spangled Banner

Despite its other fine musical and lyrical qualities, Yankee Doodle, about which I wrote on Monday, didn't have the dignity of a national anthem.  This is not to say that the anthems of other nations are uniformly fine pieces of work; for example, Great Britain's anthem, God Save the King (or Queen), started life in 1745 as a tribute to King George II.  Its first verse began "God save great George, our King / Long live our noble king / God save the King."

The song got more lively in the second verse:

O Lord our God, arise
Scatter his enemies
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On him our hope we fix,
O save us all.

The British were less sanguinary than the French, who in 1795 adopted La Marseillaise as their anthem.  It includes this fierce bit:

Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
Mugir ces feroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes!

Which translates approximately to this:

Do you hear these ferocious soldiers
Roaring in the forests?
They're coming almost up to arms' reach
To cut the throats of your sons and wives!

Americans didn't go in for singing pious hopes for our leaders, nor (most of the time) for singing about how fierce and deadly the enemy was.  In fact, our country didn't adopt a national anthem until 1931, when Congress selected The Star-Spangled Banner over the other contenders.  Francis Scott Key had written it in 1814 while watching the British attack on Baltimore during the War of 1812.  The song's first verse doesn't express pious hopes for the president, nor does it threaten citizens with slaughter, nor does it boast about America.  Rather, and very unusually for national anthems, it simply asks a question: "Last night at sunset, our flag was flying over the ramparts [of Fort McHenry in Baltimore].  The sun is about to rise.  Can you see it flying yet?"   The second verse says "yes, it is still flying."

Key's third verse is a little more in the French model, beginning with these lines:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.

He returns to modest Anglophilia in the fourth and final verse, which says approximately, "Praise God for making us a nation and saving us this time; we will conquer when our cause is just. Let us hope it is always so as long as our flag shall fly."  All four verses end with the anthem's most famous line, "O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave."  Again, it's an unusual anthem, because it mostly doesn't brag, exhort, pray, or threaten, but rather asks if our flag is still flying and rejoices that it is.

Where Key slipped up was in his choice of music.  He wrote the verses to be sung to the tune of a British song called To Anacreon in Heaven, the club song of the Anacreontic Society.  It's replete with classical references and double entendres.  It's also nearly unsingable: it stretches over an octave-and-a-half and has one leap of more than an octave.  It has another fault, or perhaps an omission, which later writers have tried to solve, as I'll discuss in my third and concluding post on this subject.

Three songs of America, part 1: Yankee Doodle

Independence Day brings to mind three songs of American history, first and most prominently Yankee Doodle of the Revolutionary War.  The song itself, or at least snippets of it, date back (Wikipedia tells us) to 20 or more years before the Revolution.  The term "Yankee doodle" came into the song during the war itself, first as a pejorative from the British -- "doodle" is said to come from the German word "dudel," meaning "fool" or "simpleton" -- and so a "Yankee doodle" was a foolish colonist.  Shortly into the war itself, the American soldiers took the British insult and reveled in it, proudly singing about the Yankee doodles who did not have the fine uniforms and muskets of their opponents, but were still going to win their independence. 

Like God Save the King (the British anthem that it displaced), Yankee Doodle is easy to sing, with a melody that spans less than an octave and has no big leaps up in pitch.  Unlike the British anthem, Yankee Doodle has no pretensions to dignity.  It's very much a song of the people, without any fixed order to the verses after the first.

I learned three verses of Yankee Doodle as a child, the ones beginning "Yankee Doodle came to town," "Father and I went down to camp," and "There was Captain Washington."  Then a few years ago, the Laquedemitasse and his classmates sang three more verses I'd never heard.  This one delighted me:

There I saw a thousand men
As rich as Squire David
And what they wasted every day
I wish it could be save-ed.

As with the other verses, the "there" is the camp of the Revolutionary Army.  Who Squire David was, I do not know, but his name lives on in what I think is the first bit of American song to protest waste in government spending.

If you have to travel by yourself, make the most of your companion

Baritone Robert Orth, in town to play Don Alfonso in Portland Opera's production of Cosi Fan Tutte, is often away from home, appearing on stage.  This week in Portland, someone asked him if he ever felt lonely being away from home so much.  "When I started to travel," he replied, "yes, I did feel lonely.  But now that I've spent thirty years on the road," he said with a whimsical tone that the dry words don't reflect, "I find myself endlessly fascinating."

May I take your harp upstairs, just for a minute?

When Kenyon College decided to buy a new Steinway, it sent three of its staff -- the head of the music department, the piano coordinator, and a professor emerita -- to New York and the showroom of Steinway & Sons, where the piano coordinator (John Reitz, who soloed with the Oregon Symphony at age 21) played five of the pianos.  The school chose one, and plunked down $85,000.  The professor emerita, Camilla Cai, got to see how Steinway breaks in the keys on its pianos: a machine hits all 88 keys at once, over and over.  The Kenyon College Alumni Bulletin quotes her description: "I don't think I have ever heard a sound as glorious, except the time I heard a harp fall down a full flight of stairs."

"... And there may be many others, but they haven't been discavard."

Many fields have within their ranks someone of accomplishment whose reputation rests on a slim body of work.  For example, Ralph Ellison's literary reputation rests on Invisible Man, the one novel he published during his lifetime, and Evariste Galois's mathematical fame comes mainly from calculations he wrote down in one night of frantic activity, the day before he was killed in a duel. 

The closest example in musical satire is that of Tom Lehrer, whose entire comedic output consists of three albums (recorded between 1953 and 1965) and a few uncollected songs, totaling about two hours of playing time.  He gave up recording 40 years ago, and except for a few songs written for "The Electric Company" and one trip to the studio in 1996 to record one of his old songs, has stayed out of the public eye ever since.  (He once wrote that when in the 1970s people suggested political topics for him to write songs about, he felt rather like a resident of Pompeii who was asked for some humorous comments about lava.)  He released very few pictures of himself (he told me many years ago that he wanted to be just famous enough that people would recognize his name but not his face), and as far as I know only one video of him performing exists, lasting about 13 minutes.  (It's downloadable here.) 

Yet many of his songs continue to be listened to and sung, ranging from "The Hunting Song," a staple of campfire singalongs ("I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow / Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow"), to "Pollution," a favorite of environmentalists of a certain age ("See the halibuts and the sturgeons / Being wiped out by detergeons. / Fish gotta swim, and birds gotta fly / But they don't last long if they try"), to his tongue-twister "The Elements," being the names of the 102 elements then known set to the tune of the Major-General's song from "The Pirates of Penzance."  The title of this post is the last line of the song.

Today marks Mr. Lehrer's 78th birthday.  Best wishes to you, sir, and if in your musical trunk there should be a few more songs "that haven't been discavard," your fans hope that you'll share them soon.

The gift of music has some bad side effects

I'll likely never be able to speak to Mrs. Laquedem and the Laquedemitasse again.  I gave them both iPods for Christmas, and they now walk around the house, looking like two Secret Service agents with the earphones in their ears, ignoring whatever I say.  Sometimes when I wave my arms I can get their attention, but otherwise I think I've lost them.

Isaac salutes Labor Day with another verse from the Wobblies

Folksinger Utah Phillips said that to make their songs, the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World) "used the old hymn tunes because they were pretty, and rewrote the words to make more sense."  In our annual salute to Labor Day, and in commemoration of Grandmother Laquedem, an ardent socialist who stayed true to principle by dying on Labor Day, we quote part of a song, not by the Wobblies' most famous songwriter, Joe Hill, but by Matt Valentine Huhta (c. 1890-1942), better known as T-Bone Slim.  This one goes, more or less, to one of the common melodies for the 100th Psalm, affectionately known as "Old Hundred" to hymn singers across America, but (as you'll see below) has radically different words.  You can find the complete lyric, and many other IWW songs as sung by Mr. Phillips, here.

Oh, hear my humble cry, O Lord,
And send us down some decent board,
Brown gravy and some German fried
With sliced tomatoes on the side.

Observe me on my bended legs,
I'm asking you for ham and eggs,
And if thou havest custard pies,
I'd like, dear Lord, the largest size.

* * *

Dear Lord, we know Your holy wish,
On Friday we must have a fish.*
Our flesh is weak and spirit stale;
You better make that fish a whale.

* * *

Oh, hear me, Lord, I'm praying still,
But if you won't, our union will
Put porkchops on the bill of fare
And starve no workers anywhere.

*  This was written long before the Church relaxed the prohibition on eating meat on Friday.

Owning a record player makes me cool

The Laquedemitasse loves gadgets, just as most young boys do.  A few days ago he noticed for the first time one of the gadgets in my lair.  This one has a hinged dust cover, a small chrome peg in the center, a handsome circular rubber mat around the peg, an orange stroboscopic light, and an assortment of switches with a certain high-tech appearance.

"What is this?"  he asked me.

"It's a record player," I replied.

"Is it new?" he said?

"Um, not exactly," I said.  (It's 30 years old, actually.)

"What does it do?"

"It plays music," I told him, and I picked a record and played it for him.  It was the 1954 recording of The Threepenny Opera, in English, with Lotte Lenya (widow of the composer, Kurt Weill) singing the female lead.  Bea Arthur and John Astin had smaller parts.  He watched transfixed as the needle touched the disc and music came from the speakers.  He could also hear the still, small sound coming from the needle itself as the groove of the record squeezed it.

Tonight he insisted that I play it again.  I'm not worried about whether the Laquedemitasse thinks that I am cool (or whatever today's slang equivalent may be), but I'm surprised that I've gained some degrees of coolness in his mind from playing a German musical on an obsolete piece of equipment.

My dream job is vacant

Sadly, the reason is that its long-time incumbent, Bobby Short, died yesterday.  Alas, my voice and fingers will never be smooth enough to take his place at the Carlyle.

What Rachmaninoff was really thinking

Today's Oregonian reports how the Oregon Symphony found a last-minute replacement pianist to attack Rachmaninoff's Third [not Second, as I had mistyped this morning] Concerto for piano and orchestra, a notoriously difficult work that many concert pianists simply don't attempt. Most composers play the piano, but few world-class composers play at concert level. Rachmaninoff was both a composer and a concert pianist.

A pianist doesn't play solidly through a concerto, but has pauses and sometimes extended breaks during which the orchestra carries the score. It is said that after one concert in which Rachmaninoff played the piano part for a premiere of one of his concerti, a friend asked him, "I noticed that during the pauses you were staring off into space. What were you thinking of? The emotional power of your music? The lyrical nature of the orchestra?" Rachmaninoff replied, "I was counting the house."

That in turn made me think of the Oregonian's other notable story of the day, in which it reported that at least six people close to Neil or Diana Goldschmidt knew of Texas Pacific's plans to buy Portland General Electric weeks before the Goldschmidts say they learned of the deal. The Oregonian names three of them and describes the other three as staffers at the state treasurer's office.

Uncle Neil may say that he was staring off into space, but the Oregonian has started to count the house for him.