Nick DePinna

Orpheus Reignited

Artificial intelligence was not used in the creation of this work.

Release notes by H. Robert Baker

“Orpheus Reignited” is not about Orpheus. It draws its inspiration from the statue of the Greek bard that stands outside Maryland’s Fort McHenry, which commemorates Francis Scott Key’s poem “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Key, detained on a frigate during the Battle of Baltimore in 1814, wrote the poem on the back of a letter. Shortly after his release, he published it as a patriotic broadside. The popular poem was soon set to music and became a mainstay in piano repertoire. A century later, it would officially become America’s national anthem.

But how does Francis Scott Key merit a comparison with Orpheus? Orpheus was the greatest of all bards, whose voice and lyre probed the deepest limits of the heart. And if the ancient Greeks understood anything, it was the profound pain of being human. By comparison, “The Star-Spangled Banner” feels thin. It is militant, boastful. It peddles sentiment and trades on rather stock imagery—the waving flag; night’s darkness; the promised light of the morning sun.

Still, the national anthem invokes strong feelings. While it may be too much to say that every American knows it, every American has at least heard it.  We are asked at some point in our lives to stand and remove our hats during its performance. Some of us rise. Some of us choose to remain seated, or to kneel. So whether you are a watery-eyed defender or white-knuckled critic, it is music that impels a response. 

Every note of the national anthem can be found in the brass parts of “Orpheus Reignited.” Every single one. The anthem as artifact remains utterly intact, with no foreign intrusions. The music, however, runs in reverse and is inverted on the staff, giving us the anthem backwards and upside down. This form has purpose. It provides the musical roadmap for the brass that dut­ifully march through the piece. It allows for the instantly recognizable anthem to be completely and honestly reinvented.

So listen carefully. Familiar chords are flipped and turned into photo negatives of their original forms, transforming major into minor, ascending intervals into descending. The melody emerges and dissolves.  Harmonies overlap and blur into one another. The tune that we all know as the national anthem is no longer recognizable, but this is not a demolition of its musical architecture. It is its brutalist reconstruction.

Against this reconstituted soundscape wails a soprano saxophone. It is a study in contrasts. The brass adhere to a written part; the saxophone improvises. The brass are confined only to the historical artifact of “The Star-Spangled Banner;” the saxophone is free to tell a different story. And one senses in the distinctive timbre of the saxophone a counter-narrative. At times, the soloist is in concert with the brass, at times buffeted, and at times she breaks free. The beauty lies in the conversation, opposition, and struggle.

There is something deeply American in that notion. E Pluribus Unum. We want to be one people, even though we are many. We yearn for a history declaimed in the epic mode, but we forget that it is sung in the tragic key. How else can one fairly represent the extremes we veer to in our history—liberty and slavery; freedom and oppression; equality and caste? This goes beyond Manichean platitudes. For America has always existed in the interstices of this struggle between our aspirations and our fears, and between hope and desperation.

And if you listen again to the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner” with these ears, new meanings arise. Its narrator is not the stoic general or heroic soldier but a prisoner who does not, cannot, know the outcome. The invocations of the flag are in the interrogatory mood—O say can you see? O say does that star spangled banner yet wave? There is no visual confirmation of the flag’s survival in this stanza. The proof comes instead audially—the report of gunfire and the explosion of mortars. It is as if America only exists because we are beset on all sides. The anthem is less a boast than an anxious plea. 

Granted, we only sing the first verse. By the fourth verse of Key’s original poem, America’s inevitable triumph has been roundly asserted. And in the third verse, Key plays out a small fantasy of punishing (or at least defeating) the “hirelings” and the “slaves” who had fled their bondage with the arrival of the British. It is a shameful verse. Nor is this solely the judgment of history. Key’s abolitionist contemporaries mocked him openly in the press, pointing out the rich irony of celebrating freedom by protecting slavery.

And what of Francis Scott Key himself? Probably few Americans are aware that he was himself an enslaver. Fewer still know he was also a lawyer who argued freedom cases on behalf of the enslaved. No matter. Key was no abolitionist, and for that he was on the wrong side of history. But we are all born on the wrong side of history, into conditions we do not choose and circumstances over which we have precious little control.

None of this exonerates either Key or the “Star-Spangled Banner.” It only acknowledges that we all struggle as humans with the world we inherit, including its injustices. We fail more than we succeed, and we must live with the pain of failure every day. It is only in the struggle that we find meaning.

Perhaps this is what merits the comparison of Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner” to the musical genius of Orpheus. The man of Greek myth achieved the impossible—passing into the underworld as a mortal man and retrieving his beloved. But the victory was undone by his own longing and passions. Orpheus’s ability to move men to tears (or the furies to a froth) was both the source of his great power and his ultimate undoing. Is it America’s fate as well?

“Orpheus Reignited” is not about escaping the past, or mocking it. Somewhere in the contrasts we find beauty. Somewhere in the struggle we find meaning. And if we cannot escape our own human frailties, so be it. Struggle on.