Igor Stravinsky’s “Illegal” Arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” (1944)

In 1939, Igor Stravin­sky emi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States, first arriv­ing in New York City, before set­tling in Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts, where he deliv­ered the Charles Eliot Nor­ton lec­tures at Har­vard dur­ing the 1939–40 aca­d­e­m­ic year. While liv­ing in Boston, the com­pos­er con­duct­ed the Boston Sym­pho­ny and, on one famous occa­sion, he decid­ed to con­duct his own arrange­ment of “The Star-Span­gled Ban­ner,” which he made out of a “desire to do my bit in these griev­ous times toward fos­ter­ing and pre­serv­ing the spir­it of patri­o­tism in this coun­try.” The date was Jan­u­ary 1944. And he was, of course, refer­ring to Amer­i­ca’s role in World War II.

As you might expect, Stravin­sky’s ver­sion of “The Star-Span­gled Ban­ner” was­n’t entire­ly con­ven­tion­al, see­ing that it added a dom­i­nant sev­enth chord to the arrange­ment. And the Boston police, not exact­ly an orga­ni­za­tion with avant-garde sen­si­bil­i­ties, issued Stravin­sky a warn­ing, claim­ing there was a law against tam­per­ing with the nation­al anthem. (They were mis­read­ing the statute.) Grudg­ing­ly, Stravin­sky pulled it from the bill.

You can hear Stravin­sky’s “Star-Span­gled Ban­ner” above, appar­ent­ly per­formed by the Lon­don Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra, and con­duct­ed by Michael Tilson Thomas. The YouTube video fea­tures an apoc­ryphal mugshot of Stravin­sky. Despite the mythol­o­gy cre­at­ed around this event, Stravin­sky was nev­er arrest­ed.

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