Let's hope Ari Fleischer doesn't get wind of what happened Monday night at the Kimmel Center.

All good Americans need to watch what they say, the Bush administration spokesman once intoned. And watch what they play, too? Conductor Otto-Werner Mueller and the orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music began the evening with an unusual arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that was anything but the common flag-waving shout.

The musicians clearly veered into the subversive - but only if your definition of what's American is anything that could be interpreted as emotionally ambivalent.

The "problem" with Mueller's arrangement - made in the 1970s, tweaked after 9/11, and first performed by the Curtis orchestra last fall - is that it's subtle. When Mueller scored the opening for lone trumpet, as if playing Taps, might he have been suggesting the futility and solitude of war? The audience hardly seemed to recognize the piece in this form, since no one stood for the first few moments. That can't be good for national security.

More brass join in, and before you know it, you're in the land of Brahms and the brass choir from the Academic Festival Overture. Can Mueller's Germanic view of America possibly be legitimate?

And that triangle at the end sounded suspiciously Slavic. We all know how close that gets us to being communists, just by the mere act of listening.

Yup, this "Star-Spangled Banner" is downright un-American. Where's the might makes right?

Actually, by the end of the piece, with chest-swelling strings layering it on thick, there's no doubt in anyone's heart that this is a nationalistic statement. Its two-minute message is inevitably a more stirring vote for America than anything red, white and blue you could strip in the back window of your Ford pickup.

But what's great about it is that, through its emotional arc, it makes you question. It does not attempt to dictate mood blindly. It gives the American spirit a little credit as a thinking spirit, capable of withstanding its own ideals of discourse and debate.

That's the America, I think, Mueller was trying to evoke in sound.