Star Spangled Banner

Idea and intentions

The Star-Spangled Banner, in my version, is a piece for a guitarist and two performers turning the tuning pegs. In its current version it was premiered by Anders Førisdal (guitar), Ellen Ugelvik and Jennifer Torrence. It was written in 2016 during the election campaigns which lead to Donald Trump becoming the president. The purpose was to address a current political situation, I also wanted it to be an interesting aesthetic sonic object. I wanted it to be open to multiple interpretations, and to spark thought rather than provide a statement.

I use a well-known symbol of power, the national anthem of the USA, the largest military force on earth and a dominant culture. Then I add a sense of instability with the use of glissandi from manipulating the tuning pegs in the performance. 

Notation

The guitar part is an ordinary arrangement for guitar, apart from the voicing. The notation for the tuning pegs is divided in two, with the treble strings above the guitar part and the bass strings below. The performance instructions consist of curved lines with an arrow pointing up or down, indicating which way to turn the peg. The different pegs each have a vertical place in relation to a single line in the score, below, above, or on. The degree of turning and details in timing are up to the performer. 

The voicing on the guitar is chosen to achieve the maximum detuned musical lines. I chose to write a fingering that often distributes repeated notes on different strings and that often distributes stepwise motion across different strings. Bar five is an example of different strings on the same tone. The D is first played on the third string, which is detuned with a glissando, and then as the D is repeated it is played on the second string. This is done to avoid drawing a musical intact line by starting the second D from the same pitch as the former glissando ended. In a similar manner the stepwise bassline in bar 26, which commonly would be performed on the same string for practical reasons, is distributed across string five, six and four to avoid the evenness that would come from playing along one string. The effect is that the stepwise motion is disturbed as the distances between the notes are more uneven.

Performance

The precarity in the situation lies primarily in the performance, it is uncertain to the performers how it will sound. The guitarist will not have the pitches as expected from string and fret, and the tuning peg operators will not have a precise idea of the pitches they produce, they control direction, speed and to an extent the shape of the glissandi. 

To produce the music, the musicians must play together on a single instrument. One guitarist performing an ordinary guitar arrangement, and two performers manipulating the tuning pegs. In part it's a music-making through disturbance, the performers pulling in different directions to facilitate the coincidental. It´s also the counterpart, music-making by working together to make the music sound precisely the way it does. The act of balancing disturbance and cooperation is at the centre of the performance. Maintaining this balance of opposites requires continuous counterbalance, this movement between the intended and the coincidental is at the core of the music. 

Surreal

I find that the piece easily lends itself as a commentary to an unstable political situation. However, when performed, the music has brought about spontaneous laughter from the audience. This indicates surprising moments and humour, not gravity and political uncertainty. I speculate that if it is considered a piece of music, with less attention given to the national connection, another effect is that detuning a known tonal music opens for a surreal comedy. An average listener in the western hemisphere knows the music and could finish it on her own, given just half a bar, but the pitches are all off and this subverts the audience expectations. 

The music combines the funny, the serious, the symbol of power and the unpredicted. It is my hope that this leads to contradictions, which in turn trigger interest, uncertainty, and questions.

Christian Blom