It was nighttime on September 13, 1814, and America was fighting the British in the War of 1812. The British Navy was shelling Fort McHenry in Baltimore. A young Washington, D.C. lawyer named Francis Scott Key watched the bombardment from the deck of a U.S. ship, the Minden. As dawn broke on the morning of September 14, Key was thrilled to see the Stars and Stripes still flying above the fort. Key sat down and wrote a poem that very day which he titled "The Star-Spangled Banner." It gradually became a popular patriotic song, sung to an old English melody called "To Anacreon in Heaven." In the 1890s, John Philip Sousa arranged it for his band to play, and in 1931, Congress made it our official national anthem. If you travel to Washington D.C., you can see on display at the Smithsonian Institute the very same flag that inspired Francis Scott Key.

The Russian composer Stravinsky once said of Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857), "All music in Russia stems from him." Though there was lots of music in Russia before Glinka was born, (including folk music and Russian orthodox chant), he was a pioneer of Russian Romanticism and was a very important influence on all Russian composers that followed him, including Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Russlan and Ludmilla is a fairy-tale opera based on a poem by Pushkin, Russia's most famous poet. It tells the story of Ludmilla, the beautiful daughter of the Grand Duke of Kiev, and Russlan, her betrothed. An evil wizard named Chernomor captures Ludmilla and the lovers must survive many perils before they are reunited. In the Overture, you hear a preview of the story and the characters in the clear, bright colors of Glinka's orchestration. Listen for the trombones when they come in with a sinister downward scale - the theme of the evil Chernomor! But don't worry, everything comes out all right in the end.

Tchaikovsky, like the true Romantic composer he was, could not work properly unless truly inspired. In 1878, he was commissioned to write a piece for a state celebration. It turned out to be the "1812 Overture," one of the most popular of all his works. But Tchaikovsky hated it, and hated working on it. At the same time, though, he was writing a piece he loved: the four-movement Serenade for Strings. He fondly described it as a "favorite child" and a "heartfelt pieceŠ not lacking in artistic quality." At its premiere in St. Petersburg in 1881, audiences loved the Serenade right away for its beauty and grace. Tchaikovsky's scoring is especially sensitive and skillful, allowing the orchestral strings to really sing. The Finale is full of the vigorous sounds of Russian folk music.

John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) wrote such wonderful marches that he was known as "The March King." His father was a musician in the U.S. Marine Band, and Sousa himself became an apprentice musician in that band when he was 14. Later, as a grownup, Sousa became a famous bandmaster. Under his direction, the Marine Band became the pride of Washington. Stars and Stripes Forever, after all these years, is still the most popular piece of band music ever written. Sousa himself sometimes named it as his personal favorite. Sousa's marches follow a form that you will be able to clearly hear in Stars and Stripes. First, you hear a short introduction, then the First Strain, usually a bright, upbeat melody. The tune changes and you hear the Second Strain, a melody that is usually a bit more aggressive and bold than the first strain. The next thing that happens is a section called the Breakstrain, or what band musicians call the "dogfight." This is a signal that a big change is coming. It is a section of instability that almost sounds like the march is about to come apart. But instead, it leads directly into the spacious, triumphant melody of the march's final section, called the Trio.

Tchaikovsky wrote this symphony at a particularly low point in his life, which you would never know from the brilliant and breezy use of pizzicato (plucked strings) in this energetic piece. The third movement is marked Scherzo pizzicato ostinato, which literally means a "joke" "plucked" in a "repeating pattern." See if it strikes you as funny.

Paul Dukas (1865-1935) was a French composer with a vivid sense of drama and orchestral color. He was a friend and admirer of both Debussy and Saint-Saëns, but he never imitated anyone; he was a real original, as you may already know if you have heard his famous work "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." He became an important figure on the French music scene and a revered teacher at the Paris Conservatory. His dance-poem La Peri was written in 1912 for the Russian dancer Mademoiselle Trukhanova, who was dancing at the Paris Opera at that time. Inspired by a far east legend, La Peri was premiered at Le Chatelet in Paris. It is preceded by a striking fanfare for the brass instruments.

In 1945, the young English composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) was asked to write music for a film being produced for English schoolchildren called "The Instruments of the Orchestra". Britten responded with a piece that is beautiful, instructive, and original. He put the final touches on the piece at midnight on New Year's Eve, 1945 and called it "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra." It is a theme and variations, featuring each section of the orchestra in turn in its own variation. For a finale, Britten brings all the sections together in a fugue. A fugue is one of the most difficult things a composer can write. It is something like solving a giant puzzle. And what did Britten use for his theme? A hornpipe, or dance tune, by the English baroque composer Henry Purcell (1659-1695).

Charles Gounod (1818-1893) was primarily an opera composer. During his early professional life, that's what his fellow Parisians were mostly interested in. But Gounod traveled widely throughout Europe and developed a deep respect for the symphony composers of Germany and Austria ­ Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and especially Mozart. Gounod tried writing symphonies himself, but they were not much noticed. Later in his career he turned to writing masses and oratorios. He did write one more symphony, though, a sort of tribute to the wind-ensemble works of Mozart. The Petite Symphonie was first performed in 1885 and is scored for winds only: flute, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns.

In writing Ogoun Badagris, composer Christopher Rouse was inspired by Haitian drumming and the rituals of voodoo. The gods of voodoo are called loas, and Ogoun Badagris is the most terrible and violent of all the loas. This work can be thought of as a dance of appeasement to this terrible god. There are lots of interesting percussion instruments used in the voodoo religion. The four basic drums are called be-be, seconde, manman, and asator. In this work, they are replaced by four conga drums. There is also a bell called an ogan, whose sound is represented by metal plates and sleighbells. Ogoun Badagris opens with a ceremonial call-to-action when the high priest shakes an enormous rattle. Then a really vigorous dance called a grouillere begins. It builds to the climactic danse vaudou, which is when the loa possesses the worshipper. At the end, the performers have to shriek the word "Reler!" which signals that the ceremony has come to an end.