One little note can cost you the game, the respect of your fans, and the love of your teammates.
One little note can kill your career and break your band up into smithereens.
What a huge difference one little note can make! The difference between heaven and hell lies in a mere semitone. A half-step between public praise and hater’s hate. One hundred cents between consonant triumph and dissonant failure.
One little note can bring on the scorn of a nation. Even in a song that nobody likes—a schmaltzy waltz that is about as embarrassing to sit through as Happy Birthday.
All of the public criticism for “The Star-Spangled Banner” by pop group The Fray at the NCAA championship a couple days ago1 hangs on one little wrong note, though you won’t hear about it in the news.
The Washington Post wrote2:
It was acoustic, emo and mercifully quick.
Now that’s just mean. I guess the emo thing is somewhat accurate, referring to the two distinct acoustic guitar parts and uh, emotional singing, but why no mention of the obvious wrong note on every third chord? It seems people don’t trust their ears when they hear dissonance. It happens to the best of us.
There’s no way people hate this version for stylistic reasons. It can’t be because they played it as a schmaltzy waltz. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a schmaltzy waltz!
It can’t be because they made it a “One Five Four Five” Chord progression; everyone loves those!
It might be because the instrumentation was a tad too “Occupy” for people’s tastes, but it’s actually a pretty conservative folk arrangement, and not at all the main reason for the jingoistic indignation stirred up in the public. Guitars, dudes, a tambourine, and a drum—it’s pretty damn all-American. This easily could’ve been the version George W. Washington sang at the end of the Civil War.
No, it’s got nothing to do with politics. It’s because of one terrible horrible no good very bad little note as demonstrated in the two widgets below.
The rhythm guitarist plays the I V IV V chord progression in G.
However, the other guitarist hits a high G# over the C Major Chord, instead of a G. At just a semitone away, the sharpened tonic is one of the most dissonant possible wrong notes they could’ve played.
Try dragging over both guitar parts simultaneously in alternating up and down-strokes. Just drag over the start of each measure, then slowly move on to the next pair to get a taste of the delicious dissonance lurking in the cliché chord progression.
The sad part is that the guitarist plays it right in the intro (with the G), and then botches it for the rest of the song (with the G#). Or maybe they were going for something truly progressive?
The whole mess creates a very silly harmony, an unintentional augmented chord—C Major with an added Minor Six (Ab). It’s a musical joke of sorts, and that’s one thing Los Doggies can get behind.
The guitarist responsible for this hilarious Easter egg in our anthem, tweeted in response to the criticism:
“Upon thinking about it, doing the National Anthem is a bit like choosing between Jif and Skippy. You just can’t please everyone.”
So true! Who could possibly understand the subtleties of such a dark dissonant musical joke such as the sharpened G in a G major love song to your country? What followers will catch the tonal depravity involved in unapologetically disgracing the old forms like that? What compatriots will embrace the musical irony—intentional or not—spread it around evenly, and then put it back on the shelf like nothing ever happened?
I can relate though. When you’re on stage, your mind can play tricks on you; mess you up. Take a look on the youtube below. A clear case of musical madness caught on camera.
Notes:
[1] It starts off tonally enough. G Major certainly is a fine key. The first instrumental 8 bars are fine, but it sure takes a sharp turn for the worse in the 11th measure when the guitarist starts hitting the G#, and continues to hit it for the duration of the song. However, if this didn’t have that fuck-up, and had beautiful tertian harmony throughout, with the right chord progression, or fuck it, even just two chords, this would be a lot of people’s favorite anthem rendition, probably even win them a Grammy, instead of being the Barr-mangled banner it is, all because of one little note.
[2] Cindy Boren. “The Fray’s national anthem at the NCAA title game was a little weird”. Washington Post. April 3, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/early-lead/post/the-frays-national-anthem-at-the-ncaa-title-game-was-a-little-weird/2012/04/03/gIQAgaHosS_blog.html
New York New Yorkers have been singing lots of fresh new songs over the past couple of months. They sing on the street, and in the park, and on the bridge. They even engage in what George Orwell once called “group-sing”. They sing syncopated 4/4 call-and-answer crowd-pleasers, sung with the People’s Microphone, at plus 120 beats per minute, many of them throwbacks to the 60’s anti-war folk era. That old standby “Hey Hey, Ho Ho”, while explicitly unsung throughout the movement, inspires many of the cadences you hear in modern day protest music. “The People United” as widgetized below, has the same feel as this revolutionary classic. To sing it is to realize a tambourine is never far behind. 
The postprandial song consists of octaves―octaves that make you go mmmm. It’s a funky ass groove too, alternating octaves with portamento bends going up and down. This is known as a ‘murky bass’ or ‘broken octaves’. The example above is near an F# octave. The high F#‘s bend up, while the low F#‘s bend down. The final tone actually bends a little lower than the second tone, because of the singer’s sustained gastronomic delight.
People in the 40’s used to laugh in major keys. Man’s guffaws and woman’s’ cackles were tuned to each other―an octave apart―and the glee of their sons and daughters lol’d like a pop choir. But those were jazzier times then, when it was okay for boys to laugh like birds, and girls to cry like dolphins. People didn’t just eat their words in those days, but full sentences as well, and whole songs too. 
