Key was born during the American Revolution.
Music was very much an amateur affair.
There were very few professionals.
Music was done on such an informal basis.
And the context of it, of course, is life is very quiet and very slow and very dull.
So there's a strong need for people to teach themselves how to play the fiddle, to be able
to accompany an informal dance.
I love the idea of music as a living, breathing, changing thing.
One really good example of that is a tune called the Rose Tree.
Common song, common tune, it was in the Poor Soldier, a very favorite opera of George Washington's.
That became more of a dance tune.
And when a fiddler plays a dance tune, the dance might go on for 12 times through the
tune and you play it the 12th time and you're just getting kind of bored and you do it another
night 12 times and you start to change it around.
And all those extra notes then are added because of the boredom of the fiddle player.
Music is always going to fill a function.
In the days of Francis Scott Key, that function was very, very broad.
The soldiers marching to engagements.
It's the drum that sets the cadence for the march, but it's the fife that gives it color.
We've proud our plenty, group shot too, so have we men to hand them off the skit balls.
We have a few.
You don't always need a musical instrument though to have a song, and I think in many
cases in the colonial period and up through the 1812 era, very much music making occurred
just by singing.
When Colburn passed the fort below and Ross was past the point, sir, he gave three cheers
to let them know that he was not behind, sir.
Leading into the early 19th century, there's still a very strong sense of separation between
the elite and the rest.
The one place you'd find these people together would be the theaters, and in the theaters
would be a mixture of straight drama, of ballad opera, presentational dancing, solo songs.
In America, much more so than in Europe at this time, the audience takes more and more
control over what's performed by calling for Yankee Doodle, by calling for Hail Columbia,
by on-coring songs, not just once or twice or three times, but five, six, seven times.
The audience has the apple in hand it will throw if it's not happy.
What we see right after the revolution is the beginning of the professionalization of
America's musical industry.
We start to see building of theaters.
We see an influx of professional printers and composers.
Publishing was very expensive in Keys Day, it was far more expensive to publish a piece,
even just a single sheet of music than it is today by a long shot.
It was much easier to print pages of words that could be sung to a familiar tune as
opposed to printing an entire hymnal so that you could have a collection of word books
that were also very popular.
As a matter of fact, we know a lot about early performances from word books as well as from
the actual music.
So it made a whole lot more economic sense to be able to print collections of texts and
then indicate which hymn tune they might fit with.
The ballads that tell the stories of great heroes and so forth, many of these were never
written down.
We'll never know them.
It's only the more popular ones or the ones of greater interest that at some point a printer
puts the words into type and runs off copies.
And by, say, 1810, we start to get into the mass production of sheet music.
We've been importing it from England and other European countries for a while, but we really
get into printing by then.
And it's that mechanism that's in place when the Star Spangled Banner is first put into
sheet music form.
