Music for Brass

Program Note

While Francis Scott Key gets most of the credit for The Star-Spangled Banner, he actually only wrote the poem that inspired the lyrics (“The Defense of Fort McHenry”). John Stafford Smith, a British composer born in 1750, wrote the music for what would become our National Anthem.

Smith was a member of the Anacreontic Club of London, a group of wealthy men who met to celebrate music, food, and drink.  The original tune was first published as “To Anacreon in Heaven” circa 1780. The Star Spangled Banner was officially recognized as the American National Anthem in 1931 by an act of Congress.

Katherine Lee Bates, a professor of English at Wellesley College, penned the words to America the Beautiful while hiking through Colorado in 1893.  The poem went largely unrecognized until it appeared in the Congregationalist Newspaper two years later, and was finally published by the Boston Evening Transcript in 1904.  It was never meant to be sung, but was paired up nonetheless with a hymn song (Materna) written by Samuel Augustus Ward in 1882. 

Ward wrote the melody on his way home from a trip to Coney Island, an amusement park in Brooklyn, New York.  Sadly, Samuel Ward never got to hear his melody used for America the Beautiful.  He died in September of 1903; the music and lyrics were first joined together in 1904 and published in 1910.