In 1939, Igor Stravinsky emigrated to the United States, first arriving in New York, before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Readings at Harvard during the academic year of 1939-1940. While living in Boston, the composer led the Boston symphony and, on a famous occasion, he decided to conduct his own arrangement of “the star banner”, that he made a “desire to make my part in these serious times towards the favorite and the preservation of the spirit of patriotism in this country”. The date was in January 1944. And of course it referred to the role of America in the Second World War.
As you can expect, the version of Stravinsky from “The Star-Spangled Banner” was not entirely conventional, because it added a seventh agreement dominating to the arrangement. And the Boston police, not exactly an organization with avant-garde sensitivities, issued Stravinsky a warning, claiming that there was a law against the falsification of the national anthem. (They did not read the status.) Contrecue, Stravinsky drew it from the bill.
You can hear Stravinsky's “star banner” above, apparently interpreted by the London Symphony Orchestraand led by Michael Tilson Thomas. The YouTube video presents an apocryphal mugshot of Stravinsky. Despite the mythology created around this event, Stravinsky has never been arrested.
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