The Star-Spangled Banner

choi

(1) Francis Scott Key  was a 35-year-old American lawyer who witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry overnight (Sept 13-14), in Battle of Baltimore (Sept 12-15, 1814) of War of 1812.

(2) Star Spangled Banner. Library of Congress, undated
https://loc.gov/item/ihas.200000017

Quote:

"In the mid-1760s, a London society of amateur musicians, the Anacreontic Society, commissioned a young church musician, John Stafford Smith, to compose music for material written by its president, Ralph Tomlinson. Smith's tune, entitled 'Anacreon in Heav'n,' was a vehicle not only for the Society's accomplished amateurs, but for its best baritone singer to display virtuosity through an astounding vocal range. Its musical complexity has been compared to that of the famous 'Toreador Song' in Bizet's opera Carmen.  First published in England, the tune appeared in North America before the end of the eighteenth century * * *

"The song's appeal may have been due at least in part to its unique metrical structure. Not found in any other song of the period, its striking meter may have been what attracted Francis Scott Key. By all accounts tone deaf, Key had already composed one other poem using the meter of the 'Anacreontic Song' when he wrote 'The Star Spangled Banner.' [Key's own title: Defence of Fort M'Henry] * * * he [Key] wrote a poem that poses the question [The Library of Congress rephrase the question] 'Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave?' * * *

Note:
(a) To Anacreon in Heaven
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Anacreon_in_Heaven
(dedicated to ancient Greek poet Anacreon)
(b) Georges Bizet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Bizet
(1838 – 1875; French composer; died at 37 of a heart attack three months after Carmen's premier in March 1875, thinking the opera was a failure)
(c) Carmen is an opera in four acts: "the 'Habanera' from act 1 and the 'Toreador Song' from act 2 are among the best known of all operatic arias."  en.wikipedia.org for Carmen.
(i) Borrowed from Spanish noun masculine toreador, toréador is French noun masculine for bullfighter. See bullfighter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfighter
('toreador' is obsolete in Spain)
(ii) Spanish-English dictionary:
* matador (noun masculine; from [verb] matar kill +‎ -dor)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/matador
(d) English pronunciation:
* Anacreon
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Anacreon
* toreador
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/toreador
(e) There is no need to read the rest of this article.

choi

(5) Star Spangled Banner and God Save the Queen are the only two national anthems that have three syllables in a foot or ¾ when viewed as music). Others are 4/4.
(a) Cinque Henderson, Anthem of Freedom: How Whitney Houston Remade 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' New Yorker, Jan 27, 2016
https://www.newyorker.com/cultur ... tar-spangled-banner
("made the radical choice to move the song from a 3/4 time signature to 4/4")
(b) Craig Wright, Listening to Music. 6th ed. Schirmer, Cengage Learning, 2014, at page 15
https://books.google.com/books?i ... tressed&f=false
("Here is the patriotic song 'America' )first known in England and Canada as 'God Save the King' or 'Queen') arranged the same way. EXAMPLE 2-8.  Meter[:] Note in the preceding examples how vertical lines divide the music into groups of two beats in the case of 'Yankee Doodle' and into groups of three beats in 'America.' These strokes are called measure lines, or bar lines. A measure, or bar, is a group of beats. Usually there are two, three, or four beats per measure, although in some cases there can be more. The gathering of beats into regular groups produces meter. A musical composition does not usually present a steady stream of equally loud beats. Instead, certain beats are given emphasis over others in a regular and repeating fashion. The stressed beats are called strong beats; the unstressed beats, weak beats")
(c) George Moody, The English journal of education. vol 10. Groombridge & Sons, 1856, at page 485
https://books.google.com/books?i ... the+gracious+queen+"three+syllables"&source=bl&ots=FPuot5vWCk&sig=KqSUBQSt9u8plOKCrEBafXkl5W4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwip-fyc6uHeAhVpmuAKHUbVDfQQ6AEwB3oECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=God%20save%20the%20gracious%20queen%20"three%20syllables"&f=false
("We have already shown, incidentally, that the measure of triple time in its simplest form exactly corresponds to a Dactylic foot (see ante, page 445), the first beat bing accented, and the remaining two unaccented. For another example of this rhythm we may refer the reader to the National Anthem, 'God save the Queen.' A few measure suffice here (Fig 5)" )

Pay attention to vertical bars inthe music sheet.

choi

(4) Analysis of Star-Spangled Banner. Here is the first stanza:

"O say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

(a) One stanza has eight lines. The rhyme is ababccdd.
(b) The first four lines is a question: Do you see now (at dawn) the flag that we hailed last night?
(c) Fundamentally Star-Spangled Banner is a anapestic tetrameter: each line has four feet; each foot has three syllable: unstressed, unstressed and stressed (this is anapest).
(i) metre (poetry)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_(poetry)
(section 1.2 Feet; section 1.2.1 Classification: anapest)

"O say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming"
(ii) The "ing" in both "gleaning" and "streaming" are EXTRA syllables that Francis Scott Key added.  
(A) In (2)(b) The Anacreontic Song has "number of syllables" in each line (altogether 9 lines excluding chorus) as
12
12
11
13
5
5
11
12
11
(B) In comparison, Star Spangled Banner has 8 lines in one stanza, whose number of syllables are as follows.
11
13
12
13
12
11
11
12

choi

(3) The following basically said the same: Key wrote the lyrics conforming to the song.

David K Hildebrand, BICENTENARY ESSAY: Two National Anthems? Some Reflections on the Two Hundredth Anniversary of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and its Forgotten Partner, 'The Battle of Baltimore.' American Music (a journal published by University of Illinois Press), 32: 253-271 (2014)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/americanmusic.32.3.0253

Quote:

"John Gruber and Daniel May, printers in Hagerstown, Maryland, assembled the first book-length publication * * * Entitled The National Songster, this publication appeared about two months after the British failed to take Baltimore and retreated from the Chesapeake Bay for good.  In this songster, Francis Scott Key’s famous lines, beginning 'Oh [This is an error; fig 1 showed 'O'], say, can you see,' appear under their original title, 'Defence of Fort M'Henry.' Issued in Baltimore on a broadsheet the morning after Key’s return to shore * * * But there also appears in Gruber and May's songster another pertinent song, immediately preceding Key's, and with lyrics describing the same events at Fort McHenry [this is the correct spelling; in honor of James McHenry] and its environs. Like the 'Defence of Fort M'Henry,' it was set to a very popular and widely parodied melody. And yet this song remains essentially unknown today. Its title: 'The Battle of Baltimore.'  In this brief article I will argue that 'The Battle of Baltimore,' set to the tune of 'Yankee Doodle,' served the same purpose as Key's 'Defence of Fort M'Henry' (see fig 1). Both songs refer to and celebrate the decisive turning point in the war: the preservation of Baltimore from capture and certain devastation. Furthermore, one is a lower-class ballad that was circulated and enjoyed some mild popularity—as will be shown in this article—and the other is an upper-class expression that resonated with such success that it spread like wildfire."  at page 254 (footnotes omitted).

"In this 200th anniversary year of Key’s lyrics, much work has already been done to get out the story behind it" at page 256.

"In Revolutionary times 'Yankee' usually referred to New Englanders, for whom the term was an insult. Yet by 1812 the title seems to be applied to all citizens of the United States, both by the British with continued sarcasm and by American songwriters, at least, who used it with pride. * * * 'Doodle,' however, is quite another thing, and its varied meanings today, such as the verb for scribbling informally if not aimlessly, should not be confused with what in 1811 is defined as 'A silly fellow, or noodle [the noodle we eat] . . . also, a child's penis.' Then there is 'doodle doo, or Cock a doodle doo; a childish appellation for a cock [rooster], in imitation of its note when crowing [公鸡叫].' Calling someone a doodle in the early nineteenth century could turn out to be a pretty serious insult."  at page 257 (footnote omitted).

Note:
(a) This article is worth reading.Also, this article uses "verse" to mean "stanza,"
(b) At page 271 is table 1 displaying lyrics of The Anacreontic Song” (without indicating its meter). Caption of table 1 read in part: "In terms of the metrical analysis, the meter is clearly anapestic tetrameter, that is, four groupings of weak-weak-strong. The fifth and sixth lines, as indented in the original sheet music publication, are clearly much shorter."  To be explained in (3).
(c) At page 263 is fig 4, where "Fort McHenry" is at the tip (called Locust Point, not shown on this map) of "Whetstone Point."  The latter is the confluence of five battleships that bombarded (at the tip of big grey arrow),
(d) At page 264: "To analyze Key's text in detail is not within the purview of this article. Others have done so, and the lyrics of the national anthem of the United States prove ever rich in meaning and are artistically fulfilling for analysis.32"  

Footnote 32 in its entirety was: "32. Eli Siegel, ' "The Star-Spangled Banner" as a Poem,' in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known (issue 666, 1986), reprint published online at www.aestheticrealism.net/poetry/
StarSpangledBanner-ES.pdf."

Firstly the link does not work. In fact, the website charges people for reading it.

Secondly I found a free copy in the Web:
Francis Scott Key, Author of The Star-Spangled Banner. By Eli Siegel with an Introduction by Edward Green. (reprinted from Choral Journal, 55: 33.)
http://docplayer.net/63450467-Fr ... pangled-banner.html
("Music. The Star-Spangled Banner as a Poem By Eli Siegel Reprinted with permission of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation from The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, January 8, [I think the reprint starts here:] In 1814, The Star-Spangled Banner was written")
, which did not say anything significant about meter.
(e) Yankee Doodle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Doodle
(section 1 Origin)