Music, Words, and Nationalism: National Anthems and Songs in the Modern Era (Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature) 3031416430, 9783031416439

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Part I: Interpretative Frameworks
Chapter 2: Seeking Music for the State: Anthems, Nations and Political Conflict
“La Marseillaise” and Its Rivals
Anthems Without Words versus Mass Mobilization
Disputed Music in a Divided Continent
Controversies That Never End
References
Chapter 3: National Anthems in the Nineteenth Century: Honour Anthems versus Revolutionary Anthems
Introduction: Music and Meanings in National Anthems
The Sacred on Stage: The Anthem “God Save the King”
Appropriations, Transpositions, Contrafacta and Influences: The Transnational Dimension of “God Save the King”
The Military Style as a National Symbol: “La Marseillaise”
The Transnational Dimension of “La Marseillaise”
Coda
References
Chapter 4: A Connected History of Republican National Anthems: Independence and Nationalism in Latin America
The Making of National Anthems
The Authors, the Words, and the Languages
The Music
Epilogue
Appendix
References
Chapter 5: The Voices of the Nation: Form and Content of National Anthems
Introduction
1
2
3
4
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Redemption Songs: A Comparison of the Anthems of Modern Minority Nations
From Regional to National Anthems
Transnational(ist) Anthems
Do Lyrics Matter?
One or Several Anthems?
Some Conclusions
References
Part II: Case Studies
Chapter 7: (Re)Sounding Nations: Anthems and the Politics of Performing and Listening in Wartime Europe (1936–1945)
Composing the Nation: Old and New Anthems for Wartime
Performing the Nation: Rituals and Narratives
Imposing the Nation: Violence and Resistance
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: The Moment of National Song
Avant propos: At the Colonial Borderlands
Before Hebrew Song
The Chronotope of National Song
Paradox and Parody in Jewish Song
Inventing Jewish Song
“HaTikva”: The Biography of a National Anthem
Echoes in the Present: Before and After National Song
References
Chapter 9: “Kimigayo”: Japan’s National Anthem from a Global Historical Perspective
The Global Expansion of the National Anthem
The First “Kimigayo”
The Origins of the Hybrid “Kimigayo”
“Kimigayo” as the Imperial Anthem
The Global Reach of “Kimigayo”
References
Chapter 10: Anthemic: The Unofficial Boricua Ballad
Historical Deprecation of Puerto Rico
History of the Song
Beauty and Art as Opposed to Consumable Entertainment
Political Consensus Formed from a Song
References
Chapter 11: Anthems in Middle Childhood: Negotiating Musical Experiences and National Identities
Social and National Identity Development in Childhood
Identity Status in Childhood
Musical Identities in Childhood
Music in National Identities
Case Study Method
Data Collection
Participants
Findings and Discussion
Experiences with the SSB
Musical Roles with the SSB
SSB in National Identity
Meaning and Value of the SSB
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MUSIC AND LITERATURE

Music, Words, and Nationalism National Anthems and Songs in the Modern Era

Edited by  Javier Moreno-Luzón · María Nagore-Ferrer

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature Series Editors

Paul Lumsden City Centre Campus MacEwan University Edmonton, AB, Canada Marco Katz Montiel Facultad de Letras Pontifical Catholic University of Chile Santiago, RM - Santiago, Chile

This leading-edge series joins two disciplines in an exploration of how music and literature confront each other as dissonant antagonists while also functioning as consonant companions. By establishing a critical connection between literature and music, this series highlights the interaction between what we read and hear. Investigating the influence music has on narrative through history, theory, culture, or global perspectives provides a concrete framework for a seemingly abstract arena. Titles in the series, both monographs and edited volumes, explore musical encounters in novels and poetry, considerations of the ways in which narratives appropriate musical structures, examinations of musical form and function, and studies of interactions with sound. Editorial Advisory Board: Frances R. Aparicio, Northwestern University, US Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, US Barbara Brinson Curiel, Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Humboldt State University, US Gary Burns, Northern Illinois University, US Peter Dayan, Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Japan Javier F.  León, Latin American Music Center of the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, US Marilyn G. Miller, Tulane University, US Robin Moore, University of Texas at Austin, US Nduka Otiono, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, England Jesús Tejada, Universitat de València, Spain Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, Universidad del Valle, Colombia

Javier Moreno-Luzón María Nagore-Ferrer Editors

Music, Words, and Nationalism National Anthems and Songs in the Modern Era

Editors Javier Moreno-Luzón Complutense University of Madrid Madrid, Spain

María Nagore-Ferrer Complutense University of Madrid Madrid, Spain

ISSN 2946-5133     ISSN 2946-5141 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ISBN 978-3-031-41643-9    ISBN 978-3-031-41644-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Javier Moreno-Luzón and María Nagore-Ferrer References   6 Part I Interpretative Frameworks   9 2 S  eeking Music for the State: Anthems, Nations and Political Conflict 11 Javier Moreno-Luzón “La Marseillaise” and Its Rivals  14 Anthems Without Words versus Mass Mobilization  20 Disputed Music in a Divided Continent  24 Controversies That Never End  28 References  31 3 N  ational Anthems in the Nineteenth Century: Honour Anthems versus Revolutionary Anthems 33 María Nagore-Ferrer Introduction: Music and Meanings in National Anthems  33 The Sacred on Stage: The Anthem “God Save the King”  37 Appropriations, Transpositions, Contrafacta and Influences: The Transnational Dimension of “God Save the King”  42 The Military Style as a National Symbol: “La Marseillaise”  48 v

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Contents

The Transnational Dimension of “La Marseillaise”  53 Coda  54 References  55 4 A  Connected History of Republican National Anthems: Independence and Nationalism in Latin America 57 Verónica Zárate Toscano The Making of National Anthems  58 The Authors, the Words, and the Languages  64 The Music  72 Epilogue  76 Appendix  78 References  81 5 T  he Voices of the Nation: Form and Content of National Anthems 85 Bernat Castany Prado Introduction  85 1  88 2  94 3  98 4 105 Conclusion 106 References 106 6 R  edemption Songs: A Comparison of the Anthems of Modern Minority Nations109 Xosé M. Núñez Seixas From Regional to National Anthems 113 Transnational(ist) Anthems 117 Do Lyrics Matter? 121 One or Several Anthems? 126 Some Conclusions 128 References 130

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vii

Part II Case Studies 135 7 ( Re)Sounding Nations: Anthems and the Politics of Performing and Listening in Wartime Europe (1936–1945)137 Iván Iglesias Composing the Nation: Old and New Anthems for Wartime 139 Performing the Nation: Rituals and Narratives 144 Imposing the Nation: Violence and Resistance 148 Conclusion 153 References 153 8 T  he Moment of National Song159 Philip V. Bohlman Avant propos: At the Colonial Borderlands 159 Before Hebrew Song 164 The Chronotope of National Song 167 Paradox and Parody in Jewish Song 169 Inventing Jewish Song 170 “HaTikva”: The Biography of a National Anthem 176 Echoes in the Present: Before and After National Song 179 References 181 9 “  Kimigayo”: Japan’s National Anthem from a Global Historical Perspective183 Asahiko Hanzawa The Global Expansion of the National Anthem 185 The First “Kimigayo” 189 The Origins of the Hybrid “Kimigayo” 193 “Kimigayo” as the Imperial Anthem 196 The Global Reach of “Kimigayo” 201 References 204 10 A  nthemic: The Unofficial Boricua Ballad207 Marco Katz Montiel Historical Deprecation of Puerto Rico 209 History of the Song 211

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Contents

Beauty and Art as Opposed to Consumable Entertainment 215 Political Consensus Formed from a Song 221 References 226 11 A  nthems in Middle Childhood: Negotiating Musical Experiences and National Identities229 Sandra Sanchez Adorno Social and National Identity Development in Childhood 231 Identity Status in Childhood 233 Musical Identities in Childhood 234 Music in National Identities 235 Case Study Method 238 Findings and Discussion 240 Conclusion 248 References 249 Index

255

List of Contributors

Sandra  Sanchez  Miami, FL, USA

Adorno  Florida

International

University,

Philip V. Bohlman  University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Asahiko Hanzawa  Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan Iván Iglesias  University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain Marco Katz Montiel  The Ephesus Project, Edmonton, AB, Canada Javier Moreno-Luzón  Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain María Nagore-Ferrer  Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain Xosé M. Núñez Seixas  University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain Bernat Castany Prado  University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Verónica Zárate Toscano  Instituto Mora, México City, Mexico

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 15, 1745, 552. Note the changes in the first melodic phrase, due probably to transcription mistakes 40 Fig. 3.2 Franz Joseph Haydn: Manuscript score of the “Kaiserlied”, Nationalbibliothek in Wien, Mus. Hs. 16.501 46 Fig. 3.3 Rouget de Lisle: Parisian edition of “La Marseillaise” after the first Strasbourg edition for voice and harpsichord, 1792 (Source: Gallica bnf.fr. / Bibliothèque nationale de France) 49 Fig. 4.1 Words in the thirty-four national anthems, using NubeDePalabras.es68 Fig. 4.2 Words in the Mexican National Anthem, using NubeDePalabras.es70 Fig. 8.1 John Philip Sousa, National, Patriotic and Typical Airs of All Lands (1890) 162 Fig. 8.2 The chronotope matrix of national song 168 Fig. 8.3 The historical moment of Jewish song 171 Fig. 8.4 Heinrich Loewe, Lieder-Buch für Jüdische Vereine (1894), title page 173 Fig. 8.5 “HaTikva,” first line of melody and lyrics 177 Fig. 8.6 The matrix for “HaTikva” as national anthem 180 Fig. 10.1 Extract from the minor section of “Lamento borincano” (Hernández Marín 1929) 218 Fig. 10.2 Extract from the major section of “Lamento borincano” (Hernández Marín 1929) 219

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Javier Moreno-Luzón and María Nagore-Ferrer

Take national anthems, for example, sung on national holidays. No matter how banal the words and mediocre the tunes, there is in this singing an experience of simultaneity. —Benedict Anderson (1983 [2006], 145)

One cannot write the history of national identities or nationalism without referring, in one way or another, to national symbols, fundamental elements in the historical progress of the human communities we call nations, which have also, whether we like it or not, played leading roles in a good part of the political and cultural history of the modern era. In academic debates on these phenomena, which have become especially intense in the last half-century, their importance has been made very clear. The dominant school in studies on different forms of nationalism, the modernist or constructivist tendency, has recognized that such symbols constitute representations and projections of values that have been indispensable in the

J. Moreno-Luzón (*) • M. Nagore-Ferrer Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_1

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construction and reconstruction of nations, in the hands of political and social elites concerned to gain and retain power (Marsland 2001). From this point of view, they serve to mould national identities, assist the nationalization of the general population, and permit nationalist regimes and political movements to gain legitimacy. The principal alternative to modernism, which not by accident has been named ethnosymbolism, locates symbols at the very centre of its analysis, as elements of long duration without which modern nations would not have arisen, and as part of a set of cultural resources that guaranteed the transition from ethnic groups to nations (Smith 2009). Other approaches have also highlighted the crucial presence of these symbols in different societies, such as the highly successful theory of ‘banal nationalism’, which sees in the reproduction and repetition of national symbols one of the key factors in the everyday maintenance of national identities (Billig 1995). Within the ample range of national symbols, songs and anthems have acquired an undeniable significance. Although one could mention here any number of different artefacts and images, any list of national emblems has to feature among its foremost elements some kind of music, since it is expected that every nation, or nation-state, should have its own anthem, in the same way as it should have a flag and a national day holiday. However, the majority of studies on the relationship between music and nationalism have tended to pay little attention to national anthems, or have done so only in brief monographs, and have instead been more concerned with musics that adopted nationalist motifs. This phenomenon was especially marked during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when all the arts and intellectual disciplines were placed at the service of the nationalist cause, from painting and sculpture to geography or law; it was not by chance that national sovereignty became, with notable difficulties but progressively greater efficacy, the principal source of legitimacy for all political authorities. In general, European musicians set out to find their national spirit or Volksgeist in folklore, before proceeding to transform some of its distinctive features into music suited to high culture (Schöpflin 2001). Overall, nevertheless, the academic literature on national anthems has advanced considerably in recent decades. Having overcome historical elitism, which in the musical field customarily marginalized what were considered lesser genres, such as popular or military music, by comparison with the canonical repertoires of cultivated music, we have the possibility before us of exploring the symbolic role of songs and anthems, and their effective contribution in nourishing national identities (White and Murphy

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2001; Bohlman 2004), even when the authors of such music may be unknown or of secondary status. This process has been aided by the blurring of the frontiers between historical musicology and ethnomusicology, and between other relevant disciplines, as well as by new methodological practices that envisage a dialogue between musics and their context. With regard to national anthems, advances have been made in at least three directions: the gathering of information on the general characteristics of these pieces of music; the analysis of their qualities as means for generating cohesion in national communities, whether more or less ancient, or invented over time; and the tracing of the historical progress—in terms of origins, institutionalization, external influences—of some specific anthems, above all the most celebrated. We can also see an ever greater number of individual studies that allow us to go beyond the traditional western view of the topic, by focusing on geographical areas that have been less explored (e.g. Guy 2002; Cusack 2005; Mutemererwa et al. 2013). In general terms, one can say that the accumulated knowledge on this subject tends to be distributed between members of various disciplines: social scientists (sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists), who have been most concerned with the functions of symbols in contemporary societies; historians, most attentive to the contingencies and contexts that explain the adoption and subsequent progress of each anthem; and musicologists, experts in the styles and musical characteristics of different anthems and the study of their cultural and social dimensions. To these we should add a growing number of philologists, psychologists, educationalists, and communications specialists (see for example Cerulo 1995; Abril 2007; Machin 2017). This book brings together contributions by a variety of specialists on nationalist movements and the construction of national identities, political historians, philologists, educationalists, and musicologists, in a shared reflection on the history, fundamental features, evolution, and effects in terms of national feeling of national anthems in different parts of the world, primarily in Europe and the Americas but also in Asia. We seek to bring to the discussion a very wide range of perspectives, some previously little visited, all of which converge around what one could call the cultural history of nationalisms, and take into account comparative and transnational approaches in order to reach significant conclusions. We do so without any intention of exhausting a subject that admits multiple approaches and still requires many more monographical studies, since we still lack in-­ depth analyses of many particular cases.

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The volume is divided into two sections. The first (‘Interpretative Frameworks’) comprises chapters that aim to provide theoretical/interpretative frameworks in their respective subject areas. The second (‘Case Studies’) contains texts focusing around a well-delimited case study, from which the authors might theorize more broadly. Even so, throughout the book we deal with some of the crucial issues and tensions in this field, which run through the different essays in a transversal manner. Some chapters examine the political history of national anthems, observing their progress through the period that begin in the last years of the eighteenth century, with the rapid emergence of different nationalisms, and has continued to the present day. In this long history we can distinguish between national songs and traditional melodies, associated with nationalist values, and official anthems, which identify states in solemn ceremonies and in their relations with other states, from diplomatic encounters to, and especially most recently, sports competitions. These two conceptions did not coincide, but they did overlap and eventually converge, offering rulers and politicians, in an era of mass participation, an instrument with indispensable roots in public opinion. Not only did states become more ‘national’, but also some nationalist movements succeeded in forming independent states, so that their anthems also gained official status. An increasing awareness was felt of the need to nationalize and mobilize populations as a whole, experienced most acutely during wars, a time when some anthems became defined and crystallized. There was also an intensification in conflicts of different kinds that employed music as a weapon. In this section we examine these political processes in Europe (Moreno-Luzón, Iglesias) and Latin America (Zárate Toscano), comparing several national examples, but also in other more distant environments, such as Japan (Hanzawa), where musical developments of this kind formed part of general transnational and westernizing tendencies, or in specific movements such as Zionism (Bohlman), which formulated its own musical emblems, simultaneously traditional and modern. A variety of original interpretations are put forward regarding the classification of anthems, one of the most productive areas in this field. One can see a consolidation of the division between anthems that essentially pay homage, often religious in nature and constructed in the form of a prayer, and revolutionary anthems, civil in character and which frequently emulate the styles of a military march, albeit that both these broad classifications are subject to transnational and intertextual exchanges and influences that are as evident as they are suggestive (Nagore-Ferrer). Beneath

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the apparent solidity of these two groupings we can detect not only the confrontation between monarchies and republics, but also the internal tensions within nationalisms, between the cult of the nation and conceptions of the latter as a pact between its citizens. To this basic classification we also need to add the distinction between anthems focussed on warlike agitation and others that are more pacific, preferring to sing of the national landscapes, or the idea of progress. The frequent transmission of styles and influences across international boundaries resulted in an obvious paradox, associated with the ‘uniformity of differences’ (Kelen 2014): while national anthems supposedly represent the singular features of each nation, their words and music frequently have a family resemblance, and can even seem interchangeable. One could say that nationalisms resemble each other in the same way as two opposing armies do so. Similarly, one can find in the content of different anthems contradictions between the supposedly eternal continuity of their nation and its demonstrably contingent character, or between its ideal unity and its evident heterogeneity. To the conflicts that arise over anthems, one has to add their own ambiguities (Castany Prado). We also highlight in this collection the broad question of the relationship between words and music, the two habitual components in all anthems, and their respective importance when it comes to assessing an anthem’s potential for generating national feeling. Both elements appear important, even though at times, and with greater frequency than is generally realized, the words are dispensed with, perhaps because there is no single set of verses that is legally recognized or accepted by a majority of the community, or because the circumstances of a performance are more suited to the anthem’s presentation in purely instrumental form. As is noted in several chapters in this collection, music, a tune, is remembered better than words, and is more versatile in terms of potential adaptations to different words and to fulfil a range of purposes. The music of an anthem also contributes decisively to its ability to transmit emotions, since it triggers connections associated with the mechanisms for the formation and renewal of identity—a factor which also helps explain the preeminent position of certain melodies across a range of different anthems, albeit with different words. Even so, both elements, music and lyrics, contribute together to determining the broader meaning and impact of each anthem, which, in accordance with the principle of association (Burkholder 2006), is also conditioned by the temporal and spatial context in which the anthem is heard and sung. Among children, for example, the presence of

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national anthems is of fundamental importance in promoting their identification with the corresponding country (Sanchez Adorno). Aurality thus constitutes an essential factor in the transmission of the nation’s values. In the well-known terms employed by Benedict Anderson, author of some of the most influential interpretations in studies on nationalism, anthems create an experience of simultaneity—combined with the phenomenon of unisonance—which allow their hearers to imagine a national community (Anderson 1983 [2006]). Lastly, this collection underlines the varied encounters between local and global phenomena, as seen in the vicissitudes undergone by national songs and anthems. Encounters such as the complicated relationships between nationalisms and imperialisms, both formal and informal, in which one can see the desires for colonial liberation of nationalist movements reflected in a search for their own styles of music (Hanzawa). Or the decisive role played by the promotion of nationalist principles among emigrant diasporas, who found in national anthems instruments for maintaining and giving new life to their bonds of identity (Katz Montiel). Overall, the studies gathered together in this book give a new impetus to studies of the relationship between music and nations, and open the way to further interdisciplinary efforts to address a topic, simultaneously national and transnational, that is of unquestionable interest.

References Abril, Carlos R. 2007. Functions of a National Anthem in Society and Education. A Sociocultural Perspective. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 172: 69–87. Anderson, Benedict. 1983 [2006]. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Bohlman, Philip V. 2004. The Music of European Nationalism. Cultural Identity and Modern History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio. Burkholder, J. Peter. 2006. A Simple Model for Associative Musical Meaning. In Approaches to Meaning in Music, ed. Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall, 76–106. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Cerulo, Karen A. 1995. Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cusack, Igor. 2005. African National Anthems: ‘Beat the Drums, the Red Lion Has Roared’. Journal of African Cultural Studies 17 (2): 235–251. Guy, Nancy. 2002. ‘Republic of China National Anthem’ on Taiwan: One Anthem, One Performance, Multiple Realities. Ethnomusicology 46 (1): 96–119.

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Kelen, Christopher. 2014. Anthem Quality. National Songs: A Theoretical Survey. Bristol: Intellect. Machin, David. 2017. Music and sound as Discourse and Ideology. The Case of the National Anthem. In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics, ed. R. Wodak and B. Forchtner. New York: Routledge. Marsland, David. 2001. National Symbols. In Encyclopaedia of Nationalism, ed. A.S. Leoussi, 220–222. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Mutemererwa, S., V. Chamisa, and G. Chambwera. 2013. The National Anthem: A Mirror Image of the Zimbabwean Identity? Journal of Music Research in Africa 10 (1): 52–61. Schöpflin, George. 2001. Music and Nationalism. In Encyclopaedia of Nationalism, ed. A.S. Leoussi, 194–197. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Smith, Anthony. 2009. Ethno-symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach. New York: Routledge. White, Harry, and Michael Murphy, eds. 2001. Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture 1800–1945. Cork: Cork University Press.

PART I

Interpretative Frameworks

CHAPTER 2

Seeking Music for the State: Anthems, Nations and Political Conflict Javier Moreno-Luzón

The study of national anthems reveals significant ambiguities. In general, the idea of a national song, hymn or anthem, embraced by those who identify as members of a particular nation, tends to be equated with that of an official anthem, employed by the corresponding state in public ceremonies and in its contacts with foreign countries, obligatory on certain occasions, and with uses that are recognized and regulated in legislation. These two concepts overlap, but do not entirely coincide. Not all states in the course of the contemporary era have been national states, since there have also been plurinational or multi-ethnic states, such as some kingdoms and empires, or others that were indifferent to nationalist conceptions for ideological reasons. In addition, some states have not even taken the trouble to accord official status to a specific anthem, or have done so very late, and have otherwise been content to follow informal custom. In some cases they have only adopted a tune or melody, without words, to be played in solemn ceremonies. Moreover, in the anthems of many countries odes to

J. Moreno-Luzón (*) Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_2

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particular figures or political regimes (monarchs or leaders, republics or socialist principles) have taken priority over patriotic exhortations, albeit that the one is often associated with the other. In effect, in a world in which the nationalist legitimization of power has gradually become dominant ever since the late eighteenth century, the “officialization” of songs devoted to the nation has also been a constant tendency, but one that has been subject to multiple political pressures and fluctuations.1 At the same time, the analysis of these cultural artefacts, made up of music and—though not always—words, is frequently approached from a functionalist viewpoint, which marginalizes conflicts in favour of consensus. That is, they are regarded, together with other national symbols, in accordance with conceptions put forward in his day by Émile Durkheim, as mechanisms of social cohesion, the primordial purpose of which is to give their societies a sense of being a cohesive community, so that it is from this purpose that their characteristics and main uses are derived (Durkheim 1912; Cerulo 1995; Kyridis et al. 2009). Hence it is not unusual to read that each national anthem expresses the characteristics and values of its nation, which it incorporates, and renews time and again whenever it is collectively sung, in a spontaneous and natural manner. Equally, propagandists concerned with these matters have spoken of such anthems as artefacts with near-magical properties, which were immediately accepted by their respective peoples—who felt a kind of love for them at first sight— and exist virtually outside of time, perpetual and immutable. In some cases they give the impression that a particular anthem, although it may have encountered difficulties along the way, has gained its unchallenged status almost as a matter of necessity, due to the extent to which it corresponded to the essence of the nation, the Volksgeist or national soul. These approaches ignore or underestimate the sinuous, often conflictive and very varied progress of different national or official anthems through history. The histories of these pieces of music are similar to those of other significant symbols that are also linked to the nation, such as flags or national holidays. Anthems, which generally appeared after flags but before national public holidays, have been used, like them, as political weapons by rival parties and factions, in a mutual struggle to impose their 1  Specific bibliographical references are indicated in the course of the text. In addition I have also made use of information draw from other sources, such as https://nationalanthems.info/, Boyd (1980), Maugendre (1996) and Grocholski (2007). I am grateful for the comments made on this chapter by Lucía Blasco, María Nagore and Françoise Martinez.

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particular principles and, once in power, convert their preferences into legal statutes. Alternatively, once a particular option had become rooted in public opinion and so difficult to change, these same factions struggled to associate this anthem with their own interests, at times even distorting its meaning. This occurred, above all, after the eruption of the masses into public life, when gaining the support of citizens, shaping public opinion, mobilizing this opinion and recruiting large numbers into sympathetic organizations became unavoidable priorities for rulers and politicians of every tendency. This was the origin of the leading role taken by national anthems in mass nationalization, most visibly through state institutions such as schools and the armed forces, but also in informal settings and civil society initiatives. Consequently, it will be advisable for us also to employ, alongside the Durkheimian emphasis on the existence of solid agreement around symbols that are conceived of as immovable totems, other approaches that—as derived from the work of another classic author, Max Weber—point to the actors involved, and examine the meanings they give their own actions in the political arena, in the course of an exacting competition for power (Weber 1922 [1964]). Actors who brandished their own choice of anthem against their enemies, and sought in each case to monopolize the increasingly influential idea of the nation and give their emblems official status, as part of a search for legitimacy for the state they controlled, the regime they supported and their government itself. As a consequence the history of any national anthem, like that of political life in general, has always been unpredictable, has never been predetermined, and has scarcely contained any element of necessity, even though its sacred value may subsequently have been mythologized. There have been anthems instituted by nationalist movements when they succeeded in forming a nation-state, but also monarchist anthems that were displaced by republicans or revolutionaries, and anthems manipulated by a diverse range of forces to the point where their use caused unease, or led to them being amended for practical or ideological reasons. In whichever case, they have scarcely ever lost their character as significant political instruments, useful both in winning power and in legitimizing one’s power among the nation’s citizens. These struggles have ultimately been as or more decisive than any peculiar suitability of an anthem to the character and nature of each nation, which, equally, actually tend to be quite similar to those of other nations. National and official anthems do not refer only to established, already-formed nations, but also, and first of all, to the legitimacy of the state, which is associated

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in turn with oscillating and never-ending processes of national construction. In other words, with political circumstances, dependent at times on chance, or on the whims of a particular ruler. In this chapter we will examine some examples of the conflictive progress of national anthems, through some well-studied cases, mostly from Europe but also from the Americas. These examples will serve to reveal the vicissitudes, unforeseeable and always contingent, that different anthems have undergone in their path to institutional status, while at the same time indicating the particular characteristics of each phase in the contemporary era. Beginning with the long nineteenth century, with special emphasis on its final decades, when the division between monarchies and republics took on a crucial significance, and the search on both continents for official anthems as a resource for nationalization became urgent, a search that in many cases was consolidated during the First World War. Following on from that era, the interwar period, in which the symbolic repertoire inherited from the past had to confront an eruption of diverse forms of authoritarianism, some with totalitarian goals, and an extreme level of political mobilization. Finally, the period that followed the Second World War, which divided Europe and the rest of the world into two great blocs, and which, after the fall of one of them, has still not completely eliminated controversies around the complicated relationships between states, nations and their music.

“La Marseillaise” and Its Rivals The two most influential state anthems have been, without doubt, the British “God Save the King/Queen”, first performed in 1744–1745, and the French “La Marseillaise”, composed in 1792. The former, employed consistently in the United Kingdom since at least the early nineteenth century but never formally given official status, has embodied through its continuity up to the present day the lasting legitimacy of British parliamentary monarchy, transformed over time into a democracy but still closely attached to its traditions and rituals, revised or invented when necessary. By focusing attention on the holder of the Crown, its words pass over the plurinational nature of its subjects, which to a point has been compatible with the monarchist system, and permitted it to be retained, at least temporarily, by the dominions that gradually separated themselves from the imperial hub but kept the same head of state. In reality, the anthem’s longevity makes it more of an exception than the rule, free from

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the controversies and alterations that have nearly always disturbed the progress of other national anthems. It is actually surpassed in antiquity by the Dutch “Wilhelmus”, which dates from the sixteenth century, and is dedicated to the national champion William of Orange and his dynasty, which led first the Republic and then the Kingdom of the Netherlands. However, this was not formally adopted as a national anthem until 1932, after more than eight decades in which another composition, considered less partisan, was employed. Thanks to the importance of Great Britain as a European and world power, “God Save the King” acted as a model for several other monarchies, which with a few retouches also felt able to use it as a gesture of solemn and semi-religious homage to their respective monarchs. That is, the spread of this piece of music was associated with dynastic, rather than national, conceptions (Buch 1999). Hence, from the latter years of the eighteenth century the same melody was adopted, sung in their own language, by the majority of the German principalities—for which an all-­ purpose set of lyrics became available, in which it was only necessary to change the name of the sovereign—and the kingdoms of Prussia, Norway and Sweden, the latter as late as the early nineteenth century. The Austrian and Russian empires also employed the tune until, in 1796 and 1833, respectively; they acquired their own monarchist anthems, equally impressive and with music of the highest class, but the German Empire officially retained the British anthem until its own disappearance in 1918. Nor did some republics ignore the grand and evocative music of “God Save the King”, such as Switzerland, which employed it until another more original anthem was provisionally accepted in 1961, or the United States of America, with new words dedicated to the land of liberty as “America” or “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”. In the United States it served as one of the songs habitually performed at public events for decades, until the formal establishment of an official anthem by Congress, “The Star-Spangled Banner”, as late as 1931. At the same time, the musical tone and style of the British anthem also served as a broader inspiration for many other national anthems, as is explained in another chapter of this book. As to “La Marseillaise”, its dual character, both patriotic and warlike, together with its association with the values of the French Revolution and consequent capacity to act as a motor of agitation for revolutionary and republican movements led it to gain a significant presence in both Europe and the Americas through the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth. On the one hand, once translated into different languages, it

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was sung by the adherents of republicanism on both continents, and heard in the most intense moments of political ferment, such as the European revolutions of 1848, simultaneously democratic and nationalist, the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, or the German and Hungarian movements of 1918–1919, the protagonists of which saw themselves as continuing the transformative work of the French Girondins and Jacobins. On the other, the French anthem also acted as an example for other countries, which similarly adopted warlike marches that called upon their citizens to take up arms against their enemies, or even die for the fatherland. One such case was Belgium, with “La Brabançonne”, composed on the occasion of the country gaining independence in 1830, the words of which were subsequently modified to eliminate aggressive references to the Netherlands. On both sides of the Atlantic anthems appeared inspired by “La Marseillaise”, with greater or lesser success, from Spain and Italy to various countries in Central America and the Caribbean. In France, the history of “La Marseillaise”, a frequent focus of national pride, has often been portrayed as the steady advance of a symbol that, thanks to its patriotic qualities, was inevitably destined to triumph. Something of a genuine emanation from the French people, into which was incorporated its mythicized creator, the soldier-musician Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. However, it was not declared France’s official anthem until 1879, nearly ninety years after it was written, and its general public acceptance was not consolidated until the Great War of 1914, with some discrepancies persisting even then. It had immense initial success, being associated with the armed resistance of the French revolutionaries to the other European powers and the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in 1792, establishing a republic. Immediately afterwards it became part of the civic religion associated with the new revolutionary calendar of celebrations, within which diverse symbols were combined to indicate the beginning of a new era, and acquired a certain primacy among them. It still had to coexist with other popular songs, however, and was challenged by counter-revolutionary rivals, such as “Le Réveil du Peuple” (1795), a denunciation of the bloody Jacobin Terror. The early splendour of the “Marseillaise” gave way, moreover, to its being eclipsed for long periods in later decades. It was revived at certain times, thanks to the warrior ardour it was felt to instil in soldiers, but France’s monarchist regimes preferred other pieces of political music to indicate their legitimacy. Rather than the anthem of France, it was the anthem of the French Republic.

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Thus, Napoleon’s empire officially used the anthem “Veillons au salut de l’Empire”, initially composed in 1791 as another harangue against tyrants and in favour of French liberty, and kept the “La Marseillaise”, which sounded too radical, in reserve for arousing additional military support in times of crisis. The restored monarchy established after the definitive defeat of Napoleon in 1815 prohibited the revolutionary “La Marseillaise” for fifteen years, while the authorities imposed other anthems such as “Vive Henri IV!”, celebrating the gentlemanly valour of France’s first king from the Bourbon dynasty. For its part, the constitutional monarchy born out of the revolution of 1830, headed by Louis-Philippe of Orléans, tolerated “La Marseillaise” on the barricades but then employed “La Parisienne”, a song written to honour the French people as they rose up for freedom and in pursuit of glory, which also ultimately became too subversive. The Second Empire of Napoleon III once again condemned the old revolutionary march of 1792 to an underground existence and chose a completely different option, “Partant pour la Syrie”. From 1809, this was a romance about a Napoleonic soldier marching off to fight in the Orient, the music of which was attributed to none other than the Emperor’s mother. Outside of its appearance in some military campaigns, “La Marseillaise” would only be heard again forcefully in the streets of Paris during the Commune of 1871, as a revolutionary anthem associated with radical and egalitarian democracy. It was the politicians at the head of France’s Third Republic who finally decided on the return of “La Marseillaise” as an official national anthem, but even then this did not occur automatically. Its association with the Commune, crushed by the republican authorities after the fall of Napoleon III, did not, in principle, seem to facilitate such a development. In effect, it was necessary to await the departure of President Patrice de MacMahon, a conservative of monarchist preferences, in 1879 before his enemies could take the next steps in restoring “La Marseillaise”, by reviving a decree of 1795 which had never been repealed. The institutionalization of the anthem formed part of a search for legitimacy by republicans by drawing on memories of the Great Revolution, reinforced by symbols that alluded to it: the tricolour flag, the fête nationale of 14 July (recalling the fall of the Bastille, one of the most celebrated revolutionary incidents), and “La Marseillaise”. In the following decades, the anthem became established as the indispensable accompaniment to all state rituals, enshrining a patriotism nourished by the humiliating defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1871, and acting as an instrument of republican

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nationalization in schools and barracks. This was so even though it was still not obligatory in schools until 1911, and still aroused resistance among the Catholic and monarchist right, who detested official secularism, and the working-class left, who increasingly identified the song with the bourgeois state, and by the end of the century generally sang the “Internationale”, from 1889. In fact, it was only the nationalistic fervour that accompanied the First World War that dispelled the greater part of the doubts and ensured a certain consensus in France around its national anthem. President Raymond Poincaré, who in 1915 transferred the mortal remains of Rouget de Lisle to the military pantheon of Les Invalides, consecrated “La Marseillaise” as an emblem of a sovereign nation that preferred death to servitude, one capable of arousing “in the heart of the nation, so many superhuman virtues”. Even the far right accepted it after the fighting, while the forces of the left rejected its bellicose tone only until, after 1935, it was also adopted as a symbol of the Popular Front, the anti-fascist coalition of the republican and workers’ left. During the Second World War, the French regime that collaborated with the German occupiers tried to use other songs, such as “Maréchal, nous voilà!”, honouring the head of the Vichy state Marshal Philippe Pétain. However, it respected the pre-­ eminent role of the republican anthem, around which so many Frenchmen had died, in its most important ceremonies, albeit reducing its number of verses to those of more purely patriotic content. By this time the revolutionary echoes of “La Marseillaise” had been dimmed in favour of its nationalistic message, since it was accepted by every sector of the French political spectrum, from collaborationism to the resistance. Each of them sought to appropriate the anthem for their cause. Naturally, the Allied victory over the Axis only reinforced its indisputable presence in French life, and it was referred to explicitly, like the tricolour flag, in the Constitutions of 1946 and 1958 (Vovelle 1984; Robert 1989: quotation, 272; Prevot 1997; Dompnier 2001). These conflicts and variations were reproduced to a lesser extent in other European countries, where one of the deepest political rifts separated monarchies, whether absolute or constitutional, which retained their official, dynastic music, from the revolutionary and nationalist regimes and movements, more or less inspired by the French Revolution, that exhibited alternative styles of anthem. Similar situations were seen in Latin America as well, where republican regimes eventually consolidated their hold on power, and the state authorities guided the selection of anthems,

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when the moment came to find compositions that would be acceptable for the bulk of the different parties and factions in each country. Among these heterogeneous territories one exception was Argentina, whose assembly officially adopted a patriotic song that has been employed uninterruptedly from 1813 to the present day, and has numerous imitators in other countries. Hence it has been possible to claim that the national anthem preceded the nation. Brazil, which became an independent empire in 1822, adopted a piece of music without clear words that was retained when it became a republic in 1889—despite efforts to change it—and only given adequate lyrics twenty years later, although they were not made official until the centenary of independence. In both countries the national anthems facilitated the gigantic processes of nationalization of inflows of immigrants, while also prompting disputes over the anthems’ own characteristics and how they were to be interpreted. In the Argentina of 1900 several of the anthem’s verses, considered offensive for the Spanish community, were eliminated, but later, in the 1920s, and in the midst of controversy, President Marcelo T. Alvear failed in his attempts to revise the melody (Buch 1994; Hagemeyer 2011). Another complicated case was that of Mexico, where attempts to publicize and popularize patriotic songs proliferated after the definitive achievement of independence in 1821. They included an abundance of explicit hymns of praise to the military leaders and caudillos of the moment, which condemned them to an ephemeral existence. It was only in 1854 that an anthem was performed that eventually became established, although in the following years several verses that referred to Agustín de Iturbide, whose army had secured independence before he declared himself “emperor”, and to the later dictator General Antonio López de Santa Anna were removed. This anthem, however, was still relatively forgotten until it was promoted by the long-lasting conservative regime of Porfirio Díaz, from the 1870s onwards. Elsewhere, many Latin American republics took decades to decide upon an official anthem, or at least one that was minimally enduring, despite sometimes holding several unsuccessful competitions to find one. Bolivia used “La Marseillaise” until mid-century. In the case of Colombia, it has only had a durable anthem since 1887, with words written by then-President Rafael Núñez and officially ratified in 1920. In Nicaragua, an extreme example, changes of government after 1876 brought at least four different national anthems, while in Costa Rica its anthem had four different sets of words. The texts of the anthems chosen in Latin America gradually changed during the same period, from

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warlike ardour and evocations of an idealized pre-Hispanic past to positivist hymns to peace and progress. Despite the myths that have arisen regarding the early historic roots of such anthems and their quasi-sacred qualities, the majority were only popularized and given institutional status after a laborious political effort, especially during the period of mass nationalization of the changing populations of their respective countries (Poch 1998; Martinez 2017; Alvarado 2018).

Anthems Without Words versus Mass Mobilization The political earthquake brought by the war of 1914–1918 led to the collapse of several European empires, in Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany, with the consequent disappearance of their official symbols, and the simultaneous emergence of new states in Central Europe. In the territories they divided up between them, these successor-states needed to select their own symbols and emblems, which they did through a diversity of means. Where a nationalist movement existed that was ready to take power, musical choices fell upon songs that were already established among their militants and adherents. As in Poland, where the “Dabrowski Mazurka”, dedicated to the commander of the Polish Legion in Napoleon’s army during the Italian campaign of 1797, had taken root during the nationalist revolts of the nineteenth century, and was officially declared the country’s anthem in 1926. In Czechoslovakia, the anthem mixed together Czech and Slovak songs. The small Austrian republic initially adopted an anthem with fairly innocuous words by the Social Democrat Chancellor Karl Renner, but in 1929 a conservative government re-­ established the immensely famous melody of the “Kaiser Lied” or Imperial Hymn, written in 1797 by Joseph Haydn in honour of the Habsburg emperor, using “God Save the King” as a model, and which by the 1920s had also become the national anthem of Germany, the “Deutschlandlied”, with different, pan-Germanic lyrics. Through the 1920s and 1930s, political changes brought a still more intensive and politicized deployment of state anthems and associated music. A good example of the political turbulence of the interwar period and its effect on official anthems can be seen in Spain, which up to that point had managed to make a political history as unstable as that of France compatible with fairly lasting official symbols. Since 1768, in the wake of other monarchies such as Britain, the anonymous “Marcha Granadera” (Grenadiers’ March), later known as the “Marcha Real” (Royal March),

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had been played to show respect to the King. In addition, in an extension of authority that accorded with the official status of the Catholic religion in Spain, the same music was also played to accompany the consecration of the Holy Sacrament and the presentation of sacred images in certain ceremonies, a usage that has continued to the present day. Although it had no words, it was considered sufficient for solemn occasions. It had only one clear rival, from the first half of the following century onwards, when the “Himno de Riego” (Riego Hymn), an agitational harangue in the style of “La Marseillaise” celebrating a liberal army officer who had fought against absolutism, became a favourite of the progressive left, and consequently unacceptable for conservatives of all kinds. After Queen Isabel II was expelled in 1868, the leading figures in the liberal-democratic revolution sought unsuccessfully to find an alternative to the “Marcha Real”, rechristened Nacional under the new parliamentary regime. The ephemeral First Republic of 1873 did not dare to change it either, while the subsequent constitutional monarchy under the restored Bourbon dynasty, which would survive for nearly half a century, from 1876 to 1923, reinstated the anthem’s traditional name and uses. The colonial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made evident the scarce capacity for popular mobilization possessed by the Spanish national anthem, wordless and conceived to be heard in a respectful silence and without any participation by ordinary citizens. Nevertheless, it was declared the country’s official anthem in a law of 1906, which penalized potential offences against it with prison sentences. This was one aspect of a broader reaction to the challenge of the sub-state nationalisms, Basque and above all Catalan, which were emerging at this time and confronting the existing centralized state, unleashing constant battles of symbols in the following decades. Due to the shortcomings of the official anthem, demonstrations of Spanish patriotism preferred to feature songs from zarzuelas, Spanish light operas, or other theatrical productions. One such for example was the “Pasodoble de la bandera” (Pasodoble of the Flag) from the review Las Corsarias of 1919, known as La Banderita and the most successful song in a popular repertoire that was promoted to encourage the soldiers fighting in Morocco, where the army was struggling to occupy the territory Spain claimed as a colonial protectorate (Nagore 2011; Moreno-Luzón 2017). The wave of authoritarianism that overwhelmed many liberal and democratic regimes in Europe in the years after the First World War reached Spain in 1923 with the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera,

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who enjoyed the decisive support of King Alfonso XIII. The new regime launched a campaign of mass nationalization of the population at large, intended to strengthen Spaniards’ loyalty to their rulers and weaken the forces of centrifugal nationalism. In the musical field, these efforts led to a search for words that could be sung to the monarchist anthem, such as the set of lyrics commissioned by the King himself from the writer Eduardo Marquina and first performed in 1927, with verses dedicated to the flag, the sacrifices demanded by the fatherland, and the potential “extension” of Spanish nationalism to include Hispanic America. However, they were not made official. Meanwhile, the close connections between the Crown and military authoritarianism were simultaneously undermining acceptance of the “Marcha Real”, which was booed, for example, by Catalan nationalists. When the deterioration in legitimacy of the monarchy led to the proclamation of Spain’s Second Republic in 1931, the new government had to select a worthy substitute. In the massive demonstrations that accompanied the change of regime, many people had sung to the tune of “La Marseillaise”, a composition long favoured by Spanish republicanism and for which separate sets of words already existed in several of Spain’s languages, but the use of a foreign anthem in state ceremonies did not appear a viable option. Hence the “Himno de Riego” was revived, although with only provisional approval, since it was considered excessively vulgar, while other proposals failed to gain acceptance. At the same time, whenever the old monarchist march was played it provoked violent incidents, and so, proscribed by the Republican authorities, it took on a clandestine status. The Spanish Civil War that began in 1936 presented fresh problems on both sides regarding the anthems they were to employ. Among those loyal to the Republic, the “Himno de Riego” competed with the anthems of the left-wing parties and unions, which were much more appreciated, such as the Internationale for all the working-class left or the A las barricadas of the anarchosyndicalists. Among the rebels, brought together in a complex coalition of the right, the piece of music that stood out for its emotive qualities was the fascist marching song “Cara al sol” (Face to the Sun), composed in 1935 for the Spanish Falange, the nucleus of the sole official party of the dictatorship that would be headed from October 1936 by General Francisco Franco. However, the Francoist government, among which military officers and reactionaries predominated, decided to re-­ establish the “Marcha Real”, now once again titled the “Marcha Granadera”, an anthem that was much-loved by the army and considered

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adequate for a nationalism that fused together fatherland and religion. Its nationalist, albeit authoritarian, import thus took priority over its monarchist symbolism. Alongside the national anthem, the Franco regime also ordered the regular performance of other forms of nationalist music, such as “Cara al sol” or the anthem of the Catholic Traditionalists. During its long existence, over nearly four decades, the Franco dictatorship still did not decide on any official words for the anthem, although some sets of verses of a Falangist or religious nature were in circulation, as well as others that sought to make it an object of ridicule. On the death of the dictator in 1975, the transition to democracy was presided over by his heir, King Juan Carlos I, and resulted in a parliamentary monarchy, so the anthem was left untouched. Overall, only the Republic in the 1930s has managed to dethrone the veteran “Marcha Real”, and then only for a few brief years (Moreno-Luzón and Núñez-Seixas 2017a, 2017b). Spain in the 1930s recalled Portugal following the revolution of 1910, when the arrival of a republic had also led to a change in the official symbols of the nation. The anthem known as the “Hino da Carta” (Hymn of the Charter), composed in 1822 by the future King Pedro IV (and later Emperor Pedro I of Brazil), which associated the monarchy with religion and liberal constitutionalism, was discarded. It was replaced by “A Portuguesa”, a patriotic song and call to arms, in the style of “La Marseillaise”, written in 1890  in response to a colonial humiliation inflicted on the Portuguese by Great Britain in Africa. The republicans also did away with other monarchist emblems, as in France, Germany, Austria or Spain in 1931. However, the Spanish case also exhibited certain features in common with that of Italy, where in 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III had called upon the fascist leader Benito Mussolini to form a government, which developed into a regime with totalitarian ambitions. Under Mussolini’s dictatorship, for two decades, a forced coexistence was imposed between the symbols of the monarchy and those of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, which were fused together in the institutions of the state. Two anthems were employed in official ceremonies. One, the “Marcia Reale” of 1834, associated with the Savoy dynasty and, with them, with the manner in which national unification had been achieved in the nineteenth century, when the institutions of the Kingdom of Piedmont had been transferred to the new state. Like the Spanish anthem, to which it was similar in style, the Italian “Marcia Reale” had been created to pay honour to the monarch, and lacked any words acknowledged by legal statute. The other was

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the fascist anthem “Giovinezza” (Youth), a first version of which had already been sung by some Italian troops during the Great War, a call to youth to die with honour for their fatherland. In the 1920s its words were altered to introduce references to the Duce Mussolini, and it acquired preeminent status among the songs of the fascist movement, which made intensive use of music for propaganda purposes in the configuration of its political religion. If the “Marcia” was played in the presence of the King, and was the only anthem performed in older ceremonies such as those of the constitutional state, at other events “Giovinezza” was given equivalent status (Gentile 1993). Traditional musical forms were thus combined in Italy, as in Nazi Germany or Franco’s Spain, with those of mass parties.

Disputed Music in a Divided Continent The victors of the Second World War did not only redraw frontiers and ensure the fall of the defeated political regimes, they also brought about the division of Europe, and a large part of the globe, into two antagonistic blocs. The Communist bloc, under the influence of the Soviet Union, was made up of republics that eventually emulated many of the features of the Soviet system. In music, Moscow had also set the tone by seeking an anthem that, despite the regime’s theoretical proletarian internationalism, would legitimize its hold on power without abandoning nationalistic messages. The revolutionaries of 1917 had abolished the old Imperial Russian anthem, which paid homage to the Czar, and the Bolsheviks had adopted the “Internationale”, a decision consistent with their Marxist ideas and the universalist ambitions of their programme. However, after the German invasion of 1941 the all-powerful Joseph Stalin set out to find a new official anthem, one that would be emotionally powerful and easy to understand, and inspire bravery and resistance in what had already been christened the “Great Patriotic War”. In the process that then ensued to select the right composition, the dictator himself played a leading role. He intervened in the writing of the words, entrusted to the writers, and army officers, Sergey Mikhalkov and Gabriyel Ureklyan, an Armenian poet and journalist better known as El-Registan. As Mikhalkov later recounted, his interviews with Stalin went as follows: “  ‘Familiarize yourselves with this!’, he [Stalin] says sharply [handing them the paper with his corrections]. ‘Do you have any objections? The most important thing is to preserve these thoughts’ ”. He also chose the score, that of an already-existing Bolshevik anthem by General

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Alexander Alexandrov, founder of the Red Army choirs. The result was a “Civic Prayer for Victory”, first performed in 1944, dedicated to a motherland made up of free republics united around Russia, and destined to secure the triumph of Communism under the red flag and the leadership of Stalin. This basic formula, with great emotional strength, would be retained for decades, even though, after the death of Stalin and the subsequent process of de-Stalinization, it became usual for only the music to be played. Until, in 1977, Mikhalkov himself revised the words to eliminate the discomforting name of the anthem’s sponsor, and highlight that of Lenin, the charismatic leader of the revolution (Daughtry 2003: quotation, 46). In the rest of the Soviet bloc not every country followed the same path. The weight of nationalism in Hungary and Poland let to them retaining, unchanged, their earlier anthems. In other cases, the question became notably complicated. In Romania the traditional anthem had been dedicated to the King, and had to be changed. The different socialist hymns that followed it, however, featured an ever more accentuated patriotic content, to the point of giving priority to praise for the national flag. The divergence of the regime of Nicolae Ceaucescu from the policies of the Soviet Union even led to the elimination for a considerable period of certain verses that mentioned Romania’s powerful neighbour. There were also shifts and changes in Bulgaria, with different anthems that linked the country to its Russian or Soviet protector. Perhaps the most complicated example was the Yugoslavia of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, which unofficially employed a Pan-Slavic poem with the same melody as the Polish anthem. Numerous attempts to replace it failed time and again, until finally the original song was effectively given official status. In the German Democratic Republic an anthem was chosen that called for a rebirth of German fraternity out of the ruins of war, but was rarely sung due to its lack of Communist fervour. Perhaps the most interesting case was that of the German Federal Republic, West Germany, where the democratic nature of state and society allowed debates over the proper forms of official music to reach great intensity in the century’s second postwar period. As we have seen, unified Imperial Germany had employed, like the Kingdom of Prussia from which it stemmed, the music of “God Save the King”, with verses devoted to the Kaiser, “Heil Dir im Siegerkranz” (Hail to the Victor’s Crown), but had never made the anthem fully official, and it had had to share the stage with other pieces from the extensive musical repertoire of German nationalism,

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which included an abundance of warlike compositions. Among them was the so-called “Lied der Deutschen” (Song of the Germans) or “Deutschlandlied”, which combined the music of the Austrian anthem by Haydn with a poem written in 1841 by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben. This romantic writer and teacher had chosen Haydn’s score because he was an advocate of Greater Germany, which included Austria, in opposition to a “Little Germany” headed by Prussia, which led to his being persecuted for a time by the Prussian authorities. His lyrics, which began with a powerful Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles, were addressed initially to the small states that still spread over extensive territories populated by German-speaking peoples, and took on connotations that were not only nationalistic but also liberal in the movements that resulted in the revolutions of 1848. However, it did not achieve a massive impact until the First World War, when the story circulated that in 1914 thousands of volunteer soldiers had died with the anthem on their lips. As George Mosse pointed out, not only did the majority of national anthems include appeals to sacrifice oneself for the fatherland, but some of the most notable, such as “La Marseillaise”, “Giovinezza” or the “Deutschlandlied”, were directly tested in the trenches of the Great War (Mosse 1993). By the time the war ended, the “Deutschlandlied” was sung by Germans of nearly every ideology. The Weimar Republic that succeeded the fallen Empire made it its official anthem in 1922 through a decision by its first president, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, who hoped to unite all political tendencies around this national symbol. He did highlight the patriotic messages contained in its third verse (“Unity, justice and freedom”) over the expansionist and imperialist language of the first (“From the Maas to the Memel, from the Adige to the Baltic”). The far left showed some reticence towards the anthem, but the National Socialists enthusiastically embraced these more aggressive interpretations, and after they took power in 1933 enshrined the first verse, combining it with their own party anthem, the “Horst-Wessel-Lied”, written by a recent Nazi martyr killed in street battles. Both were sung with the arm raised in the Nazi salute. Like the fascists in Italy, the Nazis thus emphasized their commitment to the nation’s history in combination with their revolutionary intentions. The old song became more charged than ever with rightist connotations, and would be firmly associated with the policies of Adolf Hitler, leading to a war of genocidal annihilation. Consequently, the Allied powers that occupied the country after the catastrophe prohibited the anthem.

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During the postwar years the German Federal Republic, created through the unification of the zones occupied by the western allies in 1949, survived for several years without an official anthem. The “Deutschlandlied” had its sympathizers, above all among the Germans deported from the East, but the problematic nature of its nationalistic implications led the Republic’s first president, the liberal Theodor Heuss, to commission a new anthem, the “Hymne an Deutschland”, which celebrated a land of faith, hope and love. However, public discussions of the subject made it evident that, for a large number of the new state’s citizens, the anthem was something that could not be given up, since they saw it as a symbol that had emerged from the people, with an excellent melody that highlighted the qualities of German culture. Without doubt, the vicissitudes of the war, Germany’s failure and the miseries of defeat had reinforced the emotive power of the song, and this attachment to it revealed a form of reactive nationalism, in a depressing period. Hence, the Christian Democrat Chancellor Konrad Adenauer initiated a campaign to restore the former anthem, with which he succeeded in overcoming the scruples of Heuss. After a popular consultation in which the “Deutschlandlied” won an overwhelming victory, the President recognized his error in having underestimated Germans’ attachment to traditions. The third verse was thus declared the official anthem of the Federal Republic in 1952. Subsequently, the Christian Democrats of the CDU, determined to make West Germany a normal country, no longer stigmatized by its dark past, sought several times during the 1980s to restore the “Deutschlandlied” in full with all its verses. However, they did not succeed, because progressive opinion could not accept such an apparent vindication of German nationalism, which had evolved in such a singular manner within Europe as a whole, as part of the “Sonderweg” or “special path” followed by Germany in the contemporary era, and had had such disastrous consequences. Later, the reunification of 1991 revived the issued once again, with varied suggestions such as the possible addition of the old anthem of the GDR, which had still been sung by the demonstrators who took down the Berlin Wall, or a pacifist anthem written in the 1930s by Bertold Brecht. Nevertheless, in face of the lack of agreement on any alternatives, the existing norms were confirmed. In practice, whenever its celebrated melody is heard, many listeners still sing or imagine the complete anthem (Feinstein 2001; Geisler 2005; Hermand 2022).

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Controversies That Never End In the post-Soviet world, after 1989–1991, the problem of national anthems emerged once again in the ex-Communist republics, which experienced a thoroughgoing victory for their respective nationalisms. In nearly all of them, and particularly wherever such motifs had not already been incorporated, the new governments chose old patriotic songs from the nineteenth century. The Baltic states, for example, retrieved the anthems they had already used during their two decades of independence between the wars, prohibited since their annexation by Moscow in 1940. The new Russian Federation, on the other hand, has followed a peculiar path since the collapse of the Soviet Union in relation to its official anthems. Initially it employed a nineteenth-century patriotic song by Mikhail Glinka, considered the father of Russian musical nationalism, which the first President of the Republic, Boris Yeltsin, personally selected in 1990. However, ongoing doubts among the government prevented it from being given an accepted set of words, despite thousands of proposals and the complaints of sportsmen and women who had nothing to sing whenever they succeeded in international competitions. Ultimately, though, it became discredited because Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, considered it insufficient. As a result in 2000 the Russian Duma approved a special law on the national anthem, which once again gave official status to the music chosen by Stalin in the 1940s, and shortly afterwards a new set of verses were approved, by the same writer as the two previous versions, Sergey Mikhalkov, with a more nationalistic tone and without references to Communism. Roughly translatable as “Russia, Our Sacred State”, it proclaims the eternal glories of a homeland blessed by God. A combination well suited to the ultra-conservative nationalism of President Putin, linked to the aspiration to regain the lost greatness of the empire, first Russian and then Soviet. The grandiloquent Stalinist music, which everyone recognizes and associates with the anti-fascist epic of the Second World War, has aided these intentions, though now with more anodyne words. The process of selection and confirmation was still accompanied by intense arguments, between the supporters of the “new” anthem—Putin’s followers and the Communists, who thus recovered a much-loved symbol, even if partly diminished—and their liberal and pro-western enemies, who saw in this gesture an insult to the victims of the totalitarian regime and a symptom of a return to authoritarianism in Russia. The President settled the question himself, citing the will of the people and the unquestionable popularity of the anthem (Daughtry 2003).

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One can also mention some more recent examples of conflicts over national and official anthems. There is once again the case of Spain, where from time to time discussions have resuscitated on the possibility of providing words for the “Marcha Real”, normally, as in Russia, in connection with sports competitions. All attempts have failed, while at the same time the national anthem has been repeatedly whistled in stadiums by Catalan and Basque crowds. Another is seen in France, where the apparent unanimity around “La Marseillaise” was broken between 2001 and 2008 precisely at football matches, where it was booed by spectators of Maghrebi heritage, with the resulting political scandal. The confrontations between nationalisms and the dilemmas associated with the civic integration of diverse communities underlie these incidents. Lastly, in Italy debates have continued around the anthem provisionally adopted after the Second World War, the “Canto degli Italiani” or “Inno di Mameli”, a composition from 1847 that became a symbol of the Risorgimento that led to unification. The author of its lyrics, the poet Goffredo Mameli, died very young on the revolutionary barricades, and was subsequently mythicized as a romantic hero. Also known by its opening line, “Fratelli d’Italia”, this Italian “Marseillaise” speaks of a readiness to die for the fatherland when called upon to do so. Italy’s First Republic turned to it after the war when, with fascism defeated and the monarchy abolished, both “Giovinezza” and the “Marcia Reale” were discarded. However, it long suffered a fairly languid existence, interspersed with proposals to replace it, as anachronistic and unstimulating. Until it experienced a revival at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when progressive authorities chose to focus on national symbols as a means of opposing the growing wave of secessionism fostered by the Lega Nord. As an alternative this right-wing regionalist party promoted, rather contradictorily, “Va Pensiero”, the celebrated chorus from Nabucco by Giuseppe Verdi—in his day, the foremost musician of the Risorgimento—and a recurring candidate to replace the Canto. What is surprising, however, is that this renewed prominence of the “Inno di Mameli”, reinforced particularly around the 150th of unification in 2011—when it was made obligatory to teach it in schools—and culminating in its finally being given official status by law in 2017, has resulted in its overt exploitation by the far right of Italian nationalism. Regrouped in a new party precisely called “Fratelli d’Italia”, heirs to neofascism, this new right makes prominent use of the national anthem in its campaigns, a feature it shares with equivalent radical and populist movements in other countries of Europe and the Americas (Maiorino et al. 2001; Carrer 2020).

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On the basis of these examples one can say that the anthems of states have been subject to numerous conflicts and political vagaries, in parallel with processes of national construction that have always been complex and uncertain, never predetermined, open-ended, and marked by permanent negotiation between a complex range of actors. The unquestionable significance of these musical compositions and verses in the construction of imagined communities that could give legitimacy to states, regimes, governments and even individual political leaders has led to constant disputes over what kind of anthem should be used, how it should be chosen and what meaning should be attributed to it. For a long time, the most evident division in Europe regarding anthems was between models that could be grouped together in two large families: on one side, that of the monarchists, champions of musical styles that paid respect to princes, kings and emperors, which in the long term only survived in countries where the crowned heads could appeal to national legitimacy and eventually shed their direct powers to become mere symbols of the nation; and on the other, the liberal and democratic revolutionaries and republicans, convinced advocates of national sovereignty, joined later by the socialists, who, despite their “official” internationalism, ultimately also embraced the nation as a frame of reference. The fascists, as extreme nationalists, resorted to a mix of traditional and modern formulas. The growth of political participation, in an era of mass society, brought with it an intensive use of national anthems in Europe and the Americas to further the nationalization of ordinary citizens, who in some cases interiorized these symbols as an emotional link to their homelands that has proved difficult to excise. However, this general acceptance only came very late, and was associated with quite complex nationalizing practices and procedures and, above all, the experience of war, in which the bonds between the national community were sealed with the blood of those fallen in battle. In many cases, the granting of full official status to an anthem was delayed, or even never came. Hence, in general, the currency of an anthem depended, primarily, on the wishes of rulers, party preferences and changes, of course, due to circumstantial decisions by assemblies, presidents and dictators. In some instances anthems were even composed by particular monarchs or government ministers. When a piece of music took root among public opinion, something that did not always occur, the battle moved on to focus on changes or cuts to the words, or the regulation of the anthem’s usage.

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Nationalism eventually became predominant in the bulk of contemporary states, even in those with forms of government apparently based on different starting points, such as monarchies or Communist systems. However, the history of national and official anthems cannot be explained solely with Durkheimian interpretations, giving primacy to the fusion of a community around “totems” with cohesive qualities, but also, and preferentially, with Weberian reasoning, which analyses the political interplay between different forces that utilize such anthems as weapons in their mutual confrontations and attribute different meanings to them, with ample room open for contingency and chance. That is, with a vision that views this history as a question of power.

References Alvarado, Leonel. 2018. El lirismo patriótico centroamericano. Himnos, nacionalismo e identidad. San José: Editorial Universidad Estatal a Distancia. Boyd, Malcolm. 1980. National Anthems. In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 13, 46–75. London: Macmillan. Buch, Esteban. 1994. O juremos con gloria morir. Historia de una épica de Estado. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. ———. 1999. La ‘Neuvième’ de Beethoven. Une histoire politique. Paris: Gallimard. Carrer, Mateo. 2020. In musica e parole: gli inni nazionali nella doctrina dello stato moderno, XLI. Amministrazione e Contabilità dello Stato e degli Enti Pubblici. Cerulo, Karen A. 1995. Identity Designs. The Sights and Sounds of a Nation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Daughtry, J. Martin. 2003. Russia’s New Anthem and the Negotiation of National Identity. Ethnomusicology 47 (1): 42–67. Dompnier, Nathalie. 2001. Entre La Marseillaise et Maréchal, nous voilà! Quel hymne pour le régime de Vichy? In La Vie musicale sous Vichy, ed. Myriam Chimènes, 69–88. Paris: Complexe/IHTP/CNRS. Durkheim, Émile. 1912. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en Australie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Feinstein, Margarete Myers. 2001. State Symbols. The Quest for Legitimacy in the Federal Republic of Germany. Boston: Brill. Geisler, Michael E. 2005. In the Shadow of Exceptionalism. Germany’s National Symbols and Public Memory after 1989. In National Symbols, Fractured Identities. Contesting the National Narrative, ed. Michael E. Geisler, 63–100. Lebanon NH: University Press of New England. Gentile, Emilio. 1993. Il culto del littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista. Bari: Laterza.

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Grocholski, Ian. 2007. Une histoire de l’Europe a travers ses chants nationaux. Origine et histoire des chants nationaux d’Europe, des Etats-Unis d’Amerique et de Russie. Paris: Edilivre. Hagemeyer, Rafael Rosa. 2011. La nación cantada: la reglamentación de los himnos nacionales en Brasil y Argentina. Cuadernos Americanos 2 (136): 99–116. Hermand, Jost. 2022. On the History of the Deutschlandlied. In Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 251–268. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kyridis, Argyris, Anna Mavrikou, Christos Zagkos, Paraskevi Golia, Ifigenia Vamvakidou, and Nikos Fotopoulos. 2009. Nationalism through State-­ Constructed Symbols: The Case of National Anthems. The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 4 (6): 1–14. Maiorino, Tarquino, Giuseppe Marchetti Tricamo, and Piero Giordana. 2001. Fratelli d’Italia. La vera storia dell’inno di Mameli. Milan: Mondadori. Martinez, Françoise. 2017. Fêter la nation. Mexique et Bolivie pendant leur premier siècle de vie indépendante (1810–1925). Paris: Presses Universitaires de Nanterre. Maugendre, Xavier. 1996. L’Europe des hymnes dans leur contexte historique et musicale. Sprimont: Pierre Mardaga. Moreno-Luzón, Javier. 2017. The Strange Case of a National Anthem without Lyrics: Music and Political Identities in Spain (1785–1913). Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 2: 367–382. Moreno-Luzón, Javier, and Xosé M.  Núñez-Seixas. 2017a. Los colores de la patria. In Símbolos nacionales en la España contemporánea. Madrid: Tecnos. ———. 2017b. The Flag and the Anthem: The Disputed Official Symbols of Spain. In Metaphors of Spain. Representations of Spanish National Identity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Javier Moreno-Luzón and Xosé M.  Núñez-Seixas, 3–62. New York: Berghahn Books. Nagore Ferrer, María. 2011. Historia de un fracaso: el ‘himno nacional’ en la España del siglo XIX. Arbor 751: 827–845. Poch, Susana. 1998. Himnos nacionales de América: poesía, Estado y poder en el siglo XIX. In La fundación por la palabra: letra y nación en América Latina en el siglo XIX, ed. Hugo Achugar, 79–134. Montevideo: Universidad de la República. Prevot, Michel. 1997. La Marseillaise. Étude sociologique de l’Hymne national. Paris: Ministère de la Defense. Robert, Frédéric. 1989. La Marsellaise. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale. Vovelle, Michel. 1984. La Marsellaise. La guerre ou la paix In Les lieux de mémoire. I—La République, ed. Pierre Nora, 85–136. Paris: Gallimard. Weber, Max. 1922 [1964]. Economía y sociedad. Esbozo de sociología comprensiva. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

CHAPTER 3

National Anthems in the Nineteenth Century: Honour Anthems versus Revolutionary Anthems María Nagore-Ferrer

Introduction: Music and Meanings in National Anthems Let there be no doubt about it: soon we’ll hear in the fields, the villages, the towns, the districts, the workshops and the cities, songs, chants, airs, national anthems and moral, political, religious hymns made by the people, taught to the people, and sung by the craftsmen, artisans, labourers, youngsters and daughters … of the people. (Franz Liszt)1 1  “Oui, n’en doutons pas, bientôt nous entendrons éclater dans les champs, les hameaux, les villages, les faubourgs, les ateliers et dans les villes, des chants, des cantiques, des airs, des hymnes nationaux, moraux, politiques, religieux, faits pour le peuple, enseignés au peuple, chantés par les laboureurs, les artisans, les ouvriers, les garçons et les filles … du peuple…” (Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris, 30 August 1835).

M. Nagore-Ferrer (*) Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_3

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Europe took to song in the nineteenth century: revolutionary and patriotic anthems (it was the century of revolutions and nationalist aspirations); improvised and festive street choruses; chants in the fields and in the factories (it was the era of Industrial Revolution and social utopias); choruses in recreational, cultural, political and economic societies (it was the century of associations); and serious hymns in churches and temples. Music permeated all spaces, formed the background to all the important events, moved intentions and often became an effective weapon in the hands of leaders, political parties and the people itself. The power of music lies in its ability to associate itself with certain ideas and circumstances, and bring into play individual and collective emotions and feelings. That is precisely the reason for national anthems, which became a growing necessity in the nineteenth century for many territories which defended their borders, fought for their independence or were immersed in a process of national construction. In 1901, at the turn of a century of conflict, the pages of a progressive Spanish daily made the following request: We need an anthem. This is not our most pressing need, but it is undoubtedly a need. We need a harmony that can foster patriotism in our hearts, that can enthuse citizens at work and soldiers in combat, whose verses can resound in workshops, in schools, in the barracks and in public squares, whether for private enthusiasms or foreign honours, which can serve for the mutual exchange of hospitality at formal international occasions. Anthems are as necessary for peoples, like the colours of a flag or the emblems on a coat of arms. Spain is mute. We need a national anthem which can serve as the voice of the fatherland. (Calderón 1901)2

In reality, several marches and songs played the role of de facto national anthems of Spain in the nineteenth century, although they had not become official. Among them were the “Marcha real”, the current national anthem, and the “Himno de Riego”, which had been declared a “national 2  “Necesitamos un himno. No es nuestra necesidad más apremiante, pero es sin duda una necesidad. Hace falta una armonía que exalte en los corazones el patriotismo, que aliente al ciudadano en la labor y al soldado en el combate, cuyas estrofas resuenen en el taller, en la escuela, en el cuartel, en la plaza pública, que sea para los propios entusiasmos y en los extraños homenajes, que sirva para el mutuo cambio de agasajos en las solemnidades internacionales. Un himno es tan necesario para los pueblos como los colores de la bandera o los emblemas del escudo. España está afónica. Necesitamos un himno nacional que venga a ser como la voz misma de la patria.”

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march” for a short period of time (1822–1823) (Nagore Ferrer 2011; Moreno-Luzón 2017). But the “Himno de Riego” had been imbued with radical political connotations and the “Marcha real” had not managed to unite aspirations, as the newspaper article itself pointed out, “It lacks a certain requirement to be a national anthem: the approval of the nation”. In this respect, the models cited were the anthems of France, the UK and the Netherlands. “In its captivating patriotism, the French intone the vibrant verses of “La Marseillaise”, the English alternate “God Save the Queen” with “Rule Britannia”, the Boers intone the semi-biblical song whose chords inspire such great heroism. I have never seen a Spaniard enraptured with patriotic enthusiasm who bursts into the well-known popular song: “Chinda, chinda, tachinda, chinda, chinda…”3 (Calderón 1901). The aforementioned anthems had the advantage of having words, unlike the Spanish, thus helping to identify with a message. However, what is highlighted in the text we have quoted when it refers to the “captivating patriotism” and the “great heroics” are not the words, but the “vibrant measures” sung and the “chords”—i.e. the music—even in anthems as different as the British “God Save the King/Queen” and the French “La Marseillaise”, considered as contrasting models (Nettl 1952; Buch 1999). However, despite their major differences, both anthems are notable for having received the approval of the nation. The success of these anthems—a success understood in terms of popular acceptance—was probably due to luck and historical opportunity: both were sung in a conflictive context—the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 and the declaration of war by France against Austria in 1792 at the height of the revolutionary period. These circumstances were propitious for their perception and assumption by the public as collective symbols. “Va pensiero” from Verdi’s Nabucco in Italy (Martin 2005) or the “Marcha de Cádiz” in Spain (Nagore 2011) could also have become national anthems at a certain time in the past, but political decisions or subsequent circumstances prevented it. That did not happen with “La Marseillaise”, despite its hazardous institutional history (Robert 1989). However, in the same historical situations, many other similar songs or marches with comparable 3  This has changed in recent decades, above all thanks to Spanish sporting triumphs in international competitions. The anthem does not have any words, despite a number of attempts to add them, and at times is sung by Spanish spectators to Lolo, lolo, lolololo, lolo, lolo…..

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messages in their words could have been chosen as the national anthem. Why these? No single reason can be given; rather, it is a combination of factors which favour popular identification, among them chance, political decisions, the role of propaganda or the inherent qualities of the music. In the not always clear balance between music and text inherent to any song, and in particular patriotic songs and national anthems, some authors have noted that the words are more decisive than the music in forging a national significance. For example, Eyck says that the music gives wing to the poem, and sometimes the melody is better known than the verses; but yet only in a few instances the melodies act as true indicators of a national identity, because music, by definition, is transnational, and tunes are interchangeable (Eyck 1995, xiv). In an article on the Finnish national anthem (composed by Frederik Pacius, a German composer based in Helsinki), Tarasti notes that although one would assume that every nation wants to distinguish itself from other nations by all possible signs, it is ironic to note that music can in fact unite different nations, as in itself it does not have ideological boundaries, nor can it serve a specific religious belief or idea: the same tune may accompany different words and serve different purposes (Tarasti 1999, 111). Nettl calls attention to the apparent contradiction represented by the fact that a melody from one country can become the national anthem of another. This leads him to distinguish between “objective” anthems (those whose melody can be and has been taken over by other peoples, would seem to prove that the psychological impact of an anthem is not exclusively determined by the emotional appeal of its music, but by both the tune and the lines or the association and relationship between the two) and others which are hardly ever taken by other nations due to their musical characteristics rooted in the folk or national expression. Examples of “objective” anthems are the British “God Save the King/Queen”, the Austrian “Gott erhalte”, and “La Marseillaise”; and anthems which are difficult to export are the Hungarian “Himnusz”, the Polish “Mazurek Da ̨browskiego” and the American “Yankee Doodle” (Nettl 1952, 30). However, even if we accept the fact that music and words often constitute an indissoluble whole without which an anthem loses its meaning, the texts of many anthems could also be exported or exchanged, with slight touching up, as the same ideas of homeland, freedom, unity, king, etc. are common in them. More importantly still, the versatility of a melody to be adapted in different places and contexts does not depend so much on a supposed “objectivity” as on the potential associations which may be

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triggered in those listening at a specific time and place, and which determine its meaning. And these associations may only occur on the basis of a common language, as unlike what was thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, music is not a universal language: as is the case with any other language, it has to be known to be understood; in other words, the meaning of the music depends on familiarity (Burkholder 2006).4 In the case of national anthems, their success as anthems, whether official or not, depends on the level of identification of a national community with the ideas to which refer not only the words, but also, in a more subliminal and emotional way, the music itself. The following sections analyse the music of some of the most relevant European national anthems. We will look for the musical elements and topics5 which define their style and which help determine their meaning at a specific time and place. We have used as a tool the associative model proposed by Burkholder to study musical meaning (2006), based on an analysis of the elements which are familiar to listeners when they hear specific music and the possible mechanisms of association triggered by these elements.6

The Sacred on Stage: The Anthem “God Save the King” The choicest gifts in store On him be please to pour,     Long may he reign. May he defend our laws, And ever give us cause, With heart and voice to sing,     God save the King.

4  The notion of the universality of music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was linked to the existence of a Western musical language that was recognised in Europe and the Americas across national and linguistic borders. But this language was strange in other planes, as Hanzawa mentions in the case of Japan, in one of the articles in this volume. 5  We make use of the category of musical topic from the semiotic perspective, as a musical type or style taken out of its own context and used in another (Ratner 1980; Mirka 2014). 6  For each element recognised, there are two levels of association: the primary relates the element to other music heard before, which uses the same element; the secondary takes us to a more extensive network of associations, potentially infinite, triggered by the first association (Burkholder 2006).

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On 28 September 1745, at the end of the performance of a Ben Jonson comedy at the Drury Lane theatre in London, the theatre’s company sang an old melody of uncertain origins, in an arrangement for two voices by the composer Thomas Arne. Arne had added to the two stanzas pre-­ existing, which started with the words “God save our noble King”, a new one, “The choicest gifts in store…”. This song had been interpreted before in homage to various kings from the time of the Suarts (Buch 1999), but this time it produced great enthusiasm among the public, as revealed by the Daily Advertiser in a review of the performance published on 30 September: On Saturday night last, the audience at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, were agreeably surprized by the Gentlemen belonging to that House performing the Anthem of God save our noble King. The universal Applause it met with, being encored with repeated Huzzas, sufficiently denoted in how just an Abhorrence they hold the arbitrary Schemes of our insidious Enemies, and detest the despotick Attempts of Papal power.

The public’s immediate acceptance and enthusiasm can be explained by the special political circumstances in England at the time: Prince Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) had landed in Scotland and was on his way to London at the head of an army of Highlanders, with the aim of reclaiming the crown in the name of the dynasty removed in 1688, and thus take it back from George II, who had been called on urgently from his dominions in Hannover. A wave of panic shook London, and resistance was organised across the whole of England of volunteers who enlisted to defend the Protestant dynasty against the “representatives of the Pope” (Buch 1999). It was in this atmosphere that Thomas Arne, a successful composer who four years earlier had composed the patriotic song “Rule, Britannia!” (1740) on James Thomson’s poem, was able to choose a work adapted to the circumstances: an anonymous song which had been published in 1744 in the annual collection Thesaurus Musicus.7 The song had two verses in homage to the king, invoking divine protection for him and the dispersion and destruction of his enemies, which could be applied to the Jacobite crisis. These ideas were now supplemented by two new petitions: the defence of the laws (“May he defend our laws”) 7  Thesaurus Musicus: A Collection of Two, Three, and Four Part Songs, Several of Them Never Before Printed, to Which Are Added Some Choice Dialogues, London 1744.

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and the adherence of the people, who become “we” (“with heart and voice to sing God Save the King”). The success of the anthem immediately led the directors of other theatres to follow the example of Drury Lane, incorporating what was already called “God Save the King” at the end of performances at Goodman’s Fields and at the Theatre Royal Covent Carden (Cummings 1878). In October, the Gentlemen’s Magazine reproduced it in its pages (Fig. 3.1), with the initial words “God save great George our King”,8 and the London Magazine did the same not long after. This marked a milestone, as the anthem emerged from the theatre onto the street: from being heard, performed by a company of actors within the framework of a theatrical production, to being sung, thus making the exhortation of the last verse a reality. Beyond the historical circumstances which explain the public’s immediate acceptance of the song, and its subsequent development, detailed in several works, we are going to look into more detail at the music of the anthem, in order to establish its possible meanings for that time. It is a very simple melody, in syllabic style, and does not go beyond a seventh, making it easy to sing. It is divided into two sections which coincide with the two parts of each stanza: the first moves by conjunct degrees around G, the key of the piece, while the second starts higher up, at D, after an upward leap of a fifth, and descends down to G only in the final cadence. Both the rise of a fifth and the higher range infuse the music with more emotion in the second section, and the extension of the phrase, which coincides with the greater extension of the second part of the poem, avoids monotony. The rhythm is typical of the galliard, a court dance in triple meter of French origin, which was very popular in the sixteenth century and the start of the seventeenth, and remained in vogue in instrumental suites. In this case, as the tempo is moderate, it could be considered a more ancient variety of the galliard, called tourdion (or tordion), which is slower and 8  This heading also figures in the new version published in the volume of the Thesaurus Musicus corresponding to 1745, with the significant title of “A Loyal Song, sung at the Theatres Royal”. In the same year, Arne wrote a new version entitled “God bless our noble King”, harmonised for a three-part chorus accompanied by two horns and viola. Its autographed manuscript is in the British Library (Add MS 29378). It is the last piece of the compilation entitled A Collection of Songs, Excerpts from Operas and an Anthem, by Dr Thomas Augustine Arne. In the table of contents on f. 7, it is said to have been “made for Drury Lane theatre, 1745”.

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Fig. 3.1  Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 15, 1745, 552. Note the changes in the first melodic phrase, due probably to transcription mistakes

more ponderous (Arbeau 1589). The galliard had been one of the favourite dances of Queen Elizabeth I, and sung galliards had also been very common in the English repertoire, as can be seen in the examples by John Dowland. The simple harmonisation of the song in two voices in homophony, combined with the melodic simplicity, links this song to religious hymns

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of a simple and sentimental nature, which became very popular in the eighteenth century, thanks above all to the Methodists. The text invoking God reinforces this link, which explains how the review of the Daily Advertiser cited above calls the song an anthem, which is a term that at the time only applied to sacred music. Although anthems were more elaborate musically than hymns, they had a great prestige thanks to the works of authors such as Handel, Greene and Arne himself. As Buch notes, the shift of the term to the political sphere clearly shows “to what point the patriotic identity was linked in Great Britain to religion”. It also expresses the appearance of a sacralised discourse on the nation (Buch 1999). The initial performance of the anthem in a stage, in the form of a two-­ part choir for male voices, also associates its meaning with the profane choral music in the fashionable male clubs in the Georgian period, where the repertoire consisted of many glees and catches (Robins 2006). Thomas Arne himself was a notable composer of glees, and the most popular composer of songs for the theatre and the recreational gardens of London. The music historian Thomas Busby would say in 1825 that Arne “begat a partiality for that flowing, sweet, and lucid style of melody, which captivates the ear by the simplicity of its motivo […] and settled a manner which, more justly than any other, may be denominated English” (quoted in Gilman 2009, 529). With all these elements, the success of this melody, which is a synthesis between tradition and modernity and between the ecclesiastic, court and popular styles, is no surprise. The alleged antiquity and anonymous nature of the tune, combined with its simplicity, associate it with popular tradition; but a tradition mediated by a successful composer in a cultured milieu, which gives it an air of respectability. The rhythm of the galliard adds connotations of a court dance, combining tradition and the Crown. The hymn style associates this song with the religious sphere; however, its “representation” in the theatre brings it closer to the ceremonial in a profane context. The performance by a male chorus also connects this piece to the fashionable songs in the male English clubs, making clear the bias of masculine dominion implicit in the “we” of the text. And the political situation gives it the connotation of a patriotic song. All this, combined with the words, lent a meaning to this song that little by little would become charged with other meanings by virtue of its growing use.

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Appropriations, Transpositions, Contrafacta and Influences: The Transnational Dimension of “God Save the King” One of the qualities of “God Save the King” which made it a candidate for national anthem (though not official) is its simplicity. This distinguished it from the other famous British anthem, “Rule, Britannia!”, the work of Arne and Thomson, which has a Handelian style and difficult melody, except for the famous last lines. In contrast, the simple anonymous anthem could be recalled by listeners after its theatrical performance, and the press contributed to its dissemination, so that little by little it became increasingly popular. Its connotation as a state anthem was also reinforced by its use in civic and military ceremonies, in particular in acts associated with the royal family. Three years after its performance at Drury Lane, the bells of St. Margaret’s in Westminster began to play the melody (Branham and Hartnett 2002), and during the long reign of George III the song gradually became adopted as the national anthem. In the Victorian age, “God Save the Queen” was heard in practically all the ceremonies of state and in all public appearances by the queen, and its music had gained international recognition as a symbol of the British nation. In fact, the anthem was present in practically all the collections of national songs or anthems published in large print runs from the mid-nineteenth century in Europe and America, and composers of the fame of Beethoven and Weber cite it to represent the British troops in the Battle Symphony (1815) and in the cantata Kampf und Sieg (1820), respectively. But the key point in its establishment as national anthem was its passage from the ceremonial to the public sphere. Scholes (1954) notes its pictorial representation in William Hogarth’s engraving The March to Finchley (1750), of which there is a copy in the Tate Gallery in London.9 In the image, which represents the British army in its march to Scotland in 1745 to fight against Prince Charles, we see a ballad singer holding a basket full of copies of “God Save the King”. Opposite her is an old woman dressed in black with a crucifix hanging from her neck, holding a rolled-up Jacobite 9  Tate Gallery, T01802, 1750–1761. Writing-engraving “A Representation of the March of the Guards towards Scotland, in the Year 1745. Painted by Willm. Hogarth & Publish’d Decbr 31st. 1750. According to Act of Parliament Engrav’d by Luke Sullivan Retouched and Improved by Wm. Hogarth, republish’d June 12th. 1761 To His MAIESTY the KING of PRUSSIA, an Encourager of ARTS and SCIENCES!”

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newspaper. In this way, Hogarth highlights the swift popularisation of the anthem as a symbol of public support for the Crown. This popularisation becomes a reality when the anthem begins to be sung spontaneously. The solemn and slow pace of “God Save the King” makes it a model of music to sing in chorus, like the hymns of the Anglican or Methodist churches, the Reformed Church choirs or the songs in popular style which dominated the choral music of amateurs in much of Europe. The collective singing means blend our own individual voices in an imagined, yet inescapably real, community built on the words and melodies crafted, sanctioned and performed by others (Branham 2002). In some ways, it means an identification which, in the case of the national anthem, is a declaration of identity and belonging, explicit in the words themselves and implicit in the meanings suggested to us by the music. The collective singing of an anthem in a public performance or solemn ceremony legitimises it. That is why the decision not to join in the song has such a powerful symbolism, as was made clear recently in the decision of the national football team of Iran not to sing the national anthem before their match in the World Cup in Qatar. The prestige and representative symbolism of the British national anthem exercised a great influence outside the country’s borders from early days. Initially it was spread by translating its text, but gradually many territories adopted it as their own by changing the words, in a kind of appropriation. At the same time, it was used as a model for creating other anthems which shared with it the link to the Crown and its character as a prayer; these elements contributed to the sacralisation of the nation and the strengthening of the monarch’s power. Possibly the first publication of the British anthem with the words translated into another language was the Dutch version which appeared in 1763 in the collection La Lire Maçonne (Buch 1999). In 1782, August Niemann wrote in Kiel the first adaptation of the text into German, “Heil, Kaiser Joseph, Heil!” in honour of the Emperor Joseph II. In the 1790s, the music of the British anthem, with the German words “Heil dir im Siegerkranz” began to be used in Denmark and in Prussia in honour of the kings Christian VII and Frederick William II, respectively. Soon it became used in other German states, such as Bavaria in honour of Maximilian I, and later in Hanover, Saxony, Brunswick, Weimar or Lichtenstein, so the melody of the British anthem became a symbol of the German states in the nineteenth century.

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In these adaptations of the anthem, the only thing that changed was the words, which were adapted to the circumstances and attitudes of each territory. In “Heil dir im Siegerkranz”, for example, the divine invocation for the monarch was replaced with the people’s devotion (“Hail to thee, Emperor”) and the ideas of the homeland and freedom were introduced as fundamentals of support for the throne (“Love of the fatherland,/Love of the Freemans,/Create the ruler’s throne”). But the music remained invariable, which makes us wonder how it could adequately reflect these new meanings. The key is surely the simplicity of the music, which shares many codes with the German music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The melody of the British anthem could be mistaken for German; one of those profusely used at the time, in both the religious and profane spheres. The fact that it was an old melody by an unknown author could have favoured this appropriation, and in fact at times it was taken for an ancient German melody. Its simple and popular nature means it was adopted at a time when, as Bohlman has found, a concept of an imagined “German folk song” was being constructed, which in the nineteenth century would become a visible player in the struggle to construct German nationalism. It is significant that Herder, who coined the term Volkslied in the 1770s, giving to this concept a quality of Germanness which it did not have before, compiled songs from the whole continent and beyond in the volumes Völker in Liedern (1778) and Volkslieder (1779) (Bohlman 2002, 108). A further step was taken in the adaptations of the British anthem when the king was replaced with the fatherland, which assumed the sacred character originally linked to the Crown. This is the case of the version adopted in Switzerland by the German-speaking cantons, “Rufst du, mein Vaterland”, with words by Johann Rudolf Wyss, which was used as a de facto national anthem between 1840 and 1961; and that of the American “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (“America”), with words written in 1832 by Samuel F.  Smith. It achieved great popularity, particularly in the North during the Civil War. In the first of these, the king was replaced by “My Fatherland”, “Helvetia”; in the second, by “My Country”, and God by liberty (“Sweet land of liberty, of Thee I sing”), although there is an invocation to “Our fathers’ God” as “Author of Liberty”, demonstrating the sacred concept of liberty, which was to become one of the foundations of the new nation. The use of the first-person singular in the American version is noteworthy: a reflection of an individualistic mentality; while the

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Swiss anthem, except for the emphatic expression “my Fatherland”, uses “us” and also adds a final reference to “sons going to battle joyously”. The American case is particularly interesting, as it shows how in the process of appropriating a melody, it may end up spreading a different or even opposed message to the original, thus shifting from a simple adaptation or transposition to a true contrafactum. According to Goodman, the use of the melody of “God Save the King” reveals how the United States continued to be linked to Great Britain, even when the words—and the objectives of the Revolution—repudiated this link (Goodman 2017). Branham and Hartnett point to the advantages of adapting British songs like “Yankee Doodle”, “Rule, Britannia!”, “To Anacreon in Heaven” (whose melody would be used in the anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner”) and, of course, above all “God Save the King”. For the American revolutionaries, the borrowed melodies had advantages as emotional intertextual resources for the expression of their revolutionary principles. The new words could be learned more easily if they were set to well-known melodies and were also easier to spread. Thus, “God Save the King” became, slowly but surely, a simple “America” and finally “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (Branham and Hartnett 2002). Despite these examples, as Buch says, at a time when the French enemy united all the European monarchies, the melody of “God Save the King” remained more linked to the monarchies than republics. The Russian tzar himself would adopt it as the official anthem to the words of Vasili Zhukosky (“God Save the Tzar”) until 1833, when Tzar Nicholas I commissioned a new melody to the same text from the composer Aleksei Lvov. This dynastic logic, rather than the idea of nation, seems to inspire the dissemination of the English melody on the continent, within a nascent public sphere tightly controlled by states dedicated firmly to policing (Buch 1999). The British song could also serve as a model for other anthems which shared the solemn character of a homage to the Crown. The clearest and most documented case is that of the Austrian “Gott erhalte” (“God Save Francis the Emperor”) or “Kaiserlied”, the anthem dedicated to Emperor Francis II in 1797 by the composer Franz Joseph Haydn, with words by Lorenz Leopold Haschka. It was adopted as the imperial anthem. Subsequently, historical circumstances would turn it into the German national anthem in 1922, with words by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, “Deutschland über alles” (Hermand 2002). In this case, as Buch explain, it is not a song performed in a public space and accepted by the people

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which ends up becoming an anthem, but an anthem commissioned by the state and imposed by the authorities to strengthen support for the emperor at a time of conflict between Austria and France (Buch 1999). It is very interesting to note how in these final years of the eighteenth century, “God Save the King” and “La Marseillaise”, which will be analysed in the next section, had already become undoubted models of symbolically representative songs. When looking for a model, it is reasonable to assume that Haydn would use the British anthem, whose success he could have experienced in England. Haydn’s anthem (Fig. 3.2) shares with the British anthem a simplicity, slow tempo (Langsam) and the tonality of G major, which is not banal, at least in this case, as G is also the first letter of “Gott” (and also of “God” and “George”). Somfai has analysed in detail the Quartet in D Op. 76 No. 3, in which Haydn uses the “Kaiserlied” in its original tonality as the theme of the second movement (thus the common nickname of “Emperor Quartet”), and shows how the first five notes of the first movement constitute a hidden key symbolising the emperor, with the progression of notes G-E-F-D-C (“Gott Erhalte Franz Den Kaiser”, with the K replaced by the C of Caesar) (Somfai 1986).

Fig. 3.2 Franz Joseph Haydn: Manuscript score of the “Kaiserlied”, Nationalbibliothek in Wien, Mus. Hs. 16.501

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In any case, without entering into technical questions, there is in this anthem a wish to sing the praises of the monarch in a way that is very close to that of the British anthem: the content of the text is very similar, and the melodic and structural characteristics as well, albeit with somewhat more elaboration. The melodic range is here an octave, and the phrases have a more wide, although the intervals are natural and therefore easy to sing. Compared with the simple A-B structure of “God Save the King”, Haydn produces a basic A-B-C scheme with repetitions and a great expressive intensity in the final part of the melody, which becomes loaded with emotion, while the intervals become more extensive and the rhythm more animated. As Buch has noted, this coincides with the emotional rhetoric of “La Marseillaise” (Buch 1999). Also from the point of view of rhythm, while the British anthem has a three-beat dance rhythm, Haydn chooses a binary rhythm in four parts. All the phrases begin with an anacrusis, giving this piece the rhythm of a slow march, which is very appropriate to the formal ceremonies linked to the imperial court. This is reinforced by the regularity and symmetry of the phrases, inherent to the classical style, which contrasts with the irregularity of the two phrases of “God Save the King”. The harmonisation is very simple, with homophonic chords and without modulations to other keys, in similar fashion to the British anthem. It is therefore well adapted for a collective performance. The anthem was sung for the first time in public in the whole empire on 12 February 1797, on the occasion of the birthday of Francis II, translated into the main languages spoken in the Hapsburg territories. In many cities it was performed in theatres, after the corresponding theatrical productions concluded (Buch 1999). If we analyse the possible associations of this anthem, as well as the obvious link to the emperor and to a state policy, we should highlight the prestige of Haydn, one of the most famous composers in Europe at the time, who was closely linked to the cultured and refined world, also with close links to the court, as he had worked much of his career for the powerful Hungarian Esterhazy family. This gave the anthem a halo of prestige as elevated music, despite its simplicity. In this way, it also approaches the religious choral music of the austere style, which would be heightened by the text (“God keep Francis the Emperor”). As Francfort notes, the solemn and religious slowness of “God Save the Queen” or “Gott erhalte” makes them models of music to be sung in chorus (Francfort 2004). The Hungarian anthem composed by Frenc Erkel to a poem by Kölcsey, “Hymnusz”, written in 1823 and published in 1828, which functioned as the Hungarian national anthem since 1844,

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has the same features: both the tempo Andante religioso and the words of the anthem highlight its character of a prayer, although the accent is not on the emperor, whose praises had already been sung in the imperial anthem, but on the Hungarian people, asking for divine protection for them (“Isten, áldd meg a magyart”, “God bless the Hungarians”). The heroic past and the suffering of the Hungarian people are expressed through the wide melodic intervals and dynamic intensification, which begins as pp (pianissimo) and reaches ff (fortissimo), before finally ending with a pp.

The Military Style as a National Symbol: “La Marseillaise” This masterpiece of passion and enthusiasm, terrible poetry of indignation and vengeance, song of war and victory, song of terror and anguish, patriotic song par excellence and cry of horror forever abhorred, accents of hatred and fury, triumphant and all-powerful anthem, eternal subject of discord, disorder, controversy and contradiction, tossed about by four regimes of government; this grandiose and imposing air, to the sound of which the French soldiers have gathered so many laurels and defeated so many enemies, has at last been adopted, by the Third Republic, as the national Song of France.10 (François Noël Le Roy de Sainte-Croix 1880)

Unlike the British “God Save the King/Queen”, of uncertain origin, we know much more about the composition of “La Marseillaise”, one of the patriotic songs which proliferated in France during the revolutionary period. Its author, Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, a musician and captain assigned to Strasbourg, composed this “Chant de guerre pour l’Armée du Rhin” (Fig. 3.3) in response to a commission by the mayor of the French city after France declared war on Austria in April 1792. The song was dedicated to Marshal Luckner, commander of the army charged with defending the 10  “Ce chef-d’oeuvre de passion et d’enthousiasme, poésie terrible d’indignation et de vengeance, chant de guerre et de Victoire, chant de terreur et d’angoisse, chant patriotique par excellence et cri d’horreur à jamais abhorré, accents de haine et de fureur, hymne triomphateur et tout-puissant, éternel sujet de discorde, de désordre, de controverse et de contradiction, balloté par quatre régimes de gouvernement; cet air grandiose et imposant, au son duquel les soldats français ont cueilli tant de lauriers et vaincu tant d’ennemis, a été enfin adopté, par la troisième République, comme le Chant national de la France” (Le Roy de Sainte-Croix 1880, 40).

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Fig. 3.3  Rouget de Lisle: Parisian edition of “La Marseillaise” after the first Strasbourg edition for voice and harpsichord, 1792 (Source: Gallica bnf.fr. / Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Rhine border. It was performed for the first time in public at a military parade on Sunday, 29 April, but it would be the volunteer troops of Marseille who adopted it as a marching song and sung it at their triumphant entry into Paris on 30 July 1792, when the Parisians dubbed it “La Marseillaise”. In the summer of 1792, “La Marseillaise” became well-known in the press. It was printed on sheets of paper and sung in the streets, theatres and private salons in Paris and the provinces. In September, a further step was taken in the consideration of this song as a national anthem: after the occupation of Savoy by the French navy, the Convention decreed the celebration of a civic festival, and at the proposal of the minister of war Servan, it was decided that instead of the normal Te Deum the “Anthem of the Marseillais” should be sung. It is the first mention in the Assembly of the future national anthem, and the festival, held on 14 October, would become the setting for the first official performance of the anthem (Tiersot 1915). On 30 September, it received further important institutional recognition from Gossec, one of the most famous composers of the revolution, who

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introduced “La Marseillaise” into the patriotic tableau L’Offrande à la Liberté, which premiered at the Paris Opera. In only five months, a war march created and performed within the sphere of military music had conquered all the public and private spaces, from streets to salons, theatres and even the National Assembly. In contrast to what happened in England, where a song emerged from the theatre to occupy the streets, in this case a march performed in the streets came to occupy the theatres. The musical features of the French anthem are also the opposite of the British. Compared with the prayer-like style, in moderate tempo, of “God Save the King”, “La Marseillaise” is dominated by an energetic martial style, marked by Rouget de Lisle as “Temps de Marche animée”. Compared with the serene melody of the English anthem, which moves by conjunct degrees, now the tune imitates the brass fanfares of military bands, with their typical fourth and fifth intervals, and with a predominantly ascending profile. In contrast to “God Save the King”, all the phrases begin with an anacrusis, which imbues the music with movement and drive, and this movement is intensified by the dotted rhythm, also typical of military marches and calls. Compared with the structural and harmonic simplicity of the British anthem, there is more development: the music is structured into three sections, A-B-C, corresponding to the three parts of each stanza, each of which has a different degree of expressive intensity. Allons, enfants de la Patrie! Le jour de gloire est arrivé. Contre nous de la tyrannie, L’Étendard sanglant est levé (bis).

Arise, children of the Fatherland! The day of glory has arrived. Against us the tyranny, bloody Flag is raised (bis).

Entendez-­vous dans les Campagnes, Mugir ces féroces soldats? Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras, égorger vos fils, vos Compagnes!

Do you hear, in the Countryside, The roar of those ferocious soldiers? They’re coming right into your arms, To cut the throats of your sons, your comrades!

Aux armes, Citoyens! Formez vos Bataillons: Marchez, marchez, Qu’un sang impur, abreuve nos sillons.a

To arms, Citizens! Form your battalions: Let’s march, let’s march, Let an impure blood water our furrows.

a This is the text as it appears in the first Strasbourg edition, that is, as it was conceived by Rouget de Lisle. It should be noted that, except for the first four stanzas, the third-person plural is used, as an exhortation which comes from outside, while the later version uses the first-person plural in the whole text. Moreover, the last stanza is not repeated, as is common in the current versions to strengthen the cry of the final call. Instead of this repetition, in Lisle’s score there is an instrumental ritornello by way of a trumpet call that links to the following couplets

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The first section, which corresponds to the call “Allons, enfants de la Patrie!” is inspired in the common bugle call to arms of the time, on brass instruments. The key signature of C major was normal in the trumpet calls. Already in the first stanza, which reaches a melodic range of a tenth, the culminating point is reached on the word “Patrie”. The expressive intensity is also reflected in the extension of the section: the four verses are organised into two regular melodic phrases, each of them of four measures, but the regularity is broken with the repetition of the last verse, “l’Étendard sanglant est levé”, with new music, like an urgent call which promotes a reaction, also marked with the indication ff. Very interesting is the harmonic change to the minor mode (C minor) in the second section, which corresponds with the text referring to the enemy soldiers who come “roaring” to “slit the throats of thy sons”. This change reveals the anthem’s status as elaborate and non-popular music, and gives the section a dramatic expression. The two phrases here are regular (4+4), but both are rising and the dynamic intensity grows in each, with a crescendo from p to f. This growing intensity culminates in the third section. The expressive climax is reached in the repeated cry “Aux armes, Citoyens! Formez vos Bataillons”, sung as a clarion call. There are no regular four-measure phrases here, but five emotional phrases of two measures each, which reflect the urgency of the mobilisation to which the whole song is directed. The key is once more C major and the dynamic ff. If we compare the emotional qualities of the chosen key of each anthem, as described in the musical treatises of the eighteenth century, we see that they are very different: the key of G major is described as sweet, jovial, affectionate or happy, while C major is classified as warlike, angry or lively.11 The association of C major with war is due to its use in military music. Each anthem uses a different musical style, belonging to a different sphere. In the eighteenth century, Matheson added the martial style to the main musical styles outlined in seventeenth-century musical theory: ecclesiastic, theatrical and chamber (1739). At the end of the eighteenth century, these styles can be recognised, and can function as topics when used in another context. This is what happens in “God Save the King” when it is played in the theatre, but is recognised as a chorus with characteristics inherent to the ecclesiastic style; or with “La Marseillaise” when it is also played in the theatre and is recognised as a march with the characteristics 11  These adjectives have been extracted from the musical treatises of Charpentier, Mattheson and Rameau (López Cano 2000).

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inherent to the military style. The use of these topics was common in cultured music, but in these cases there is an additional component: listeners link their meaning to their own national reality. Monelle notes that military evocations in music are an extensive, varied and very complex topic. With respect to meaning, the two main aspects of the topic—the military march and the trumpet call—are closely related. The march is essential in military music. Its purpose is to regulate the steps and raise the spirits of the soldiers, and speaks of heroism and victory. But most of the associations are modern: armies did not march in step until the eighteenth century and even then marched mainly to the rhythm marked by the drum, without any accompaniment; while the instrumental march was ceremonial music, which accompanied state events, entries into cities, proclamations and assemblies (Monelle 2006). “La Marseillaise” combines both associations with its symbolism: it became accepted when the battalion of Marseillais entered Paris and joined the festival in honour of the Revolution; but in turn, by virtue of the words, is associated with heroism and the victory of the soldiers in battle. If we wonder what the reason for the success of the war song of Rouget de Lisle is, the answer is that it is enormously effective as a mobiliser. The quality and expressive force of this music explain its success and acceptance when compared with a multitude of patriotic and revolutionary songs which emerged from the start of the Revolution. This expressive effectiveness, linked to the revolution and the Republic, explains the turbulent later story of the anthem, accepted or rejected by the authorities as a national anthem according to the political regime, but also explains why it has remained despite these circumstances. Thus, after being proclaimed as national chant in 1795 by the Convention, it was ousted by Méhul’s “Chant du Départ” during the Empire, and was abandoned in the Restoration. It returned during the revolution of the “Three Glorious Days” which brought Louis-Philippe to power, although Louis-Philippe then replaced it by “La Parisienne”, which had been banned in public places during the Second Empire. It finally became the national anthem in 1879 under the Third Republic, with a brief interval during the Vichy government. Although the anthems chosen as replacement for “La Marseillaise” in the nineteenth century—“Le Chant du départ”, “La Parisienne”, “Partant pour la Syrie”—have the same style, none was capable of replacing the war song of Rouget de Lisle.

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The Transnational Dimension of “La Marseillaise” Just as “God Save the King” became a model of transnational anthem in the nineteenth century, which is replicated or imitated not only in the territories of the British empire (including places not mentioned in the above points, such as Canada, Australia, or New Zealand), but in many other places, particularly linked to monarchies, “La Marseillaise” would assume a very important role beyond the French borders as a republican symbol. As Buch explains, the French anthem became a symbol of union for all republicans, whether English, German, Austrian, Italian or Polish, who translated it, circulated it in published editions and sang it. This marked the beginning of a path which in the nineteenth century would turn it into the republican anthem par excellence, and the focal point of a vast store of political music, through the indirect engendering of songs as different as “La Brabançonne” and “L’Internationale” (Buch 1999). But besides the ideological affinity, the anthems inspired by “La Marseillaise” in the nineteenth century share elements that also define them musically. The main one is the martial style, but it does not refer to the processional or ceremonial march, but to the military march (Mosse 1993). This is not banal, since musical style, as we have seen, acquires connotations and meanings that go beyond the music itself, embracing ceremonial elements and even different performance practices. While the anthems in the British style are very apt to be listened to religiously, or to be performed collectively on ceremonial occasions, the anthems impregnated with the military style of the French anthem are more appropriate to be sung in parades or open-air ceremonies, even accompanied by music bands; and although they may be interpreted collectively, normally they are sung in unison by all the voices and are very likely to be sung by one soloist converted into the voice of the people. Nettl defines this style as “exalted” or “expansive”, compared with the religious style characterising the British anthem (Nettl 1956). Thus, while Haydn’s “Got erhalte” may recall a ceremonial march, and the Spanish “Marcha real” is a military march in homage to the king or queen (and therefore a slow march for the infantry), “La Marseillaise” is a swift parade march, conceived to mark the step of the infantry troops. When this martial music emerges from the barracks, is performed in the theatres and directed to the public, it evokes the cultural myth of military splendour, as well as the ideas of victory and heroism. The same applies to the Spanish “Himno de Riego” and the Portuguese national anthem “A

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Portuguesa”: both are military marches that share the same musical codes as the French anthem. The anthems of Belgium –“La Brabançonne”—and Italy—“Canto degli italiani” or “Inno di Mameli”—are also written in the same style, although their origin is not military, which proves that the military style had been assimilated to the concept of national anthem with liberal connotations. If we examine the lyrics of these anthems, we see that they all use the ideas of fatherland and freedom, but also exhortations “to conquer or to die” (“Himno de Riego”), “to arms” (“A Portuguesa”) or to prepare for death (“Inno di Mameli”). In other words, they use a rhetoric of war. An exceptional case is the Polish anthem, Da ̨browski’s March (or Mazurka), one of the most popular liberation songs in the nineteenth century and a prototype for several Eastern European anthems. Although the song was created for the Polish Legions of the French revolutionary army and its lyrics are an exhortation to march into battle (“Marsz, marsz, Da ̨browski”), its melody has a popular origin and a mazurka rhythm, a Polish dance with a triple meter. This symbiosis of martial and folk elements makes the Polish march a theme with strong identity connotations at a historical moment when Poles lacked a state of their own (Bohlman 2019).

Coda We could be tempted to classify the two anthem models described above as representative of two different political models: one conservative, linked to the monarchies associated with the ancien régime, and the other representative of the revolutionary and liberal movements. However, the topical meanings of these songs are not stable, since they are adapted to different circumstances and contexts and provide fertile ground for new references and associations, not always differentiated so clearly and sometimes even opposed. This can be verified in the fascist, Nazi, falangist or counter-revolutionary anthems “Giovinezza” in Italy, “Horst Wessel Lied” in Germany, “Himno de Oriamendi” or “Cara al sol” in Spain, all in military style; or, on the other hand, in the Soviet anthem, currently the Russian anthem, in ceremonial style. What unites any of these anthems, independent of their ideological orientation, is their strong symbolic weight, capable of arousing and, at times, tapping emotions of those assembled with the help of rites and liturgies that become practices of political sacralisation.

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References Arbeau, Thoinot. 1589. Orchésographie. Langres: Jean des Preyz. Bohlman, Philip V. 2002. Landscape—Region—Nation—Reich: German Folk Song in the Nexus of National Identity. In Music & German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 105–127. Chicago and London: The University Chicago Press. Bohlman, Andrea F. 2019. Orienting the Martial. Polish Legion Songs on the Map. In Hearing the Crimean War. Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense, ed. Gavin Williams, 105–126. New York: Oxford University Press. Branham, Robert James, and Stephen Hartnett. 2002. ‘God Save the___!’ Institutionalizing, Appropriating, and Contesting Nationalism through Song, 1744–1798. In Sweet Freedom’s Son. “My Country ‘is of Thee’ and Democracy in America”. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buch, Esteban. 1999. La Neuvième de Beethoven. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Burkholder, J. Peter. 2006. A Simple Model for Associative Musical Meaning. In Approaches to Meaning in Music, ed. Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall, 76–106. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Calderón, Alfredo. 1901. Un himno. El Motín. Madrid, año XX, No. 30, August 24, 1901: 1. Cummings, William H. 1878. God Save the King. The Musical Times 19 (424): 315–318. Eyck, F.  Gunther. 1995. The Voice of Nations. European National Anthems and Their Authors. Greenwood Press. Francfort, Didier. 2004. Le chant des nations. Musiques et cultures en Europe, 1870–1914. Paris: Hachette. Gilman, Tod. 2009. Arne, Handel, the Beautiful, and the Sublime. Eighteenth-­ Century Studies 42 (4): 529–555. Goodman, Glenda. 2017. Transatlantic Contrafacta, Musical Formats, and the Creation of Political Culture in Revolutionary America. Journal of the Society for American Music 11 (4): 392–419. Hermand, Jost. 2002. On the History of the ‘Deutschlandlied’. In Music & German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 251–268. Chicago and London: The University Chicago Press. López Cano, Rubén. 2000. Música y retórica en el Barroco. México D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Martin, George Whitney. 2005. Verdi, Politics, and ‘Va, pensiero’: The Scholars Squabble. The Opera Quarterly 21 (1): 109–132. Mattheson, Johann. 1739. Der vollkommene Capellmeister. Hamburg: Christian Herold. Mirka, Danuta. 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Monelle, Raymond. 2006. The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moreno-Luzón, Javier. 2017. The Strange Case of a National Anthem without Lyrics: Music and Political Identities in Spain (1785–1913). Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1470184 7.2017.1385220. Mosse, George L. 1993. National Anthems: The Nation Militant. In Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism, 13–26. London: Brandeis University Press. Nagore Ferrer, María. 2011. Historia de un fracaso: el ‘himno nacional’ en la España del siglo XIX. Arbor, vol. 187, n° 751, 827-845. Nettl, Paul. 1952. National Anthems. New York: Storm Publishers. Ratner, Leonard G. 1980. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer Books. Robert, Frédéric. 1989. La Marseillaise. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale. Robins, Brian. 2006. Catch and Glee Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. UK: Boydell & Brewer. Le Roy de Sainte Croix, François Noël. 1880. Le chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin ou la Marseillaise. Paroles et musique de la Marsellaise, son histoire, contestations à propos de son auteur, imitations et parodies de ce chant national français. Strasbourg: Hagemann et Cie. Scholes, Percy. 1954. God Save the Queen! The History and Romance of the World’s First National Anthem. London: Oxford University Press. Somfai, László. 1986. ‘Learned Style’ in Two Late String Quartet Movements of Haydn. Studia Musicologia Academmiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 28, Fasc. 1/4: 325–349. Tarasti, Eero. 1999. Finland among the Paradigms of National Anthems. In Snow, Forest, Silence: The Finnish Tradition of Semiotics, ed. Eero Tarasti, Paul Forsell, and Richard Littlefield, 108–125. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tiersot, Julien. 1915. Histoire de la Marseillaise. Paris: Éditions Delagrave.

CHAPTER 4

A Connected History of Republican National Anthems: Independence and Nationalism in Latin America Verónica Zárate Toscano

National anthems are part of national and patriotic ideology. Therefore, when we analyse their history, their meaning and their impact, a few issues need to be considered. When reaching out to the musical displays of patriotism, we can find a great variety of national anthems. However, it is also possible to discover tight connections between them, similarities that are not mere coincidences. To understand these and other related questions, we must pay attention to several aspects, such as the historical period in which they were written and composed, the process of their creation, the

I want to express my deepest gratitude to Aurea Maya, who read very carefully this chapter and, with her observations, enlightened my musical vision of the anthems. I am also in debt with Will Fowler for making this chapter more readable.

V. Zárate Toscano (*) Instituto Mora, Mexico City, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_4

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bond between their composers and lyricists, their influences, the characteristics of the chosen music, the lyrics words, and their meaning. With all these elements, we can discover the emotions they transmit as part of a pedagogic programme intended to create a community of citizens. Many national anthems emerged in the heat of combat, the struggle for independence, or civil war between political factions. In the nineteenth century, throughout the continent, there was continuous political upheaval as the new nations struggled with the consequences of their separation from their former colonial powers. There were also deep internal divisions that arose around the different projects they tried to implement in order to establish the foundations upon which they hoped to build a prosperous future. It was in this context that those groups that came to power searched for different means to survive and impose their ideology. Music was one of the tools they used to do this. For this study, I focus on a number of countries from the Americas, excluding Canada and the United States.1 I embrace the Caribbean independent countries leaving out all those islands that belong to the Kingdom of Netherlands, the British Overseas Territories, and those in the Département et Region d’Outre mer. As for the territories linked with the United States, I decided to incorporate Puerto Rico only because it has a recognized national anthem, while the others have local or regional national songs and marches. Finally, Surinam and Guyana are included as part of the South American continent. The result is the analysis of thirty-­ four national anthems, whose connected histories are explored in this chapter. (See Appendix.)

The Making of National Anthems As a general scheme, we can say that the birth of a national anthem is not instantaneous; on the contrary, the process can be long and tortuous. Perhaps a patriotic song becomes popular among fighting battalions, then it spreads to other groups in arms, to towns, provinces, and so on and, eventually, it becomes a national anthem adopted and recognized by the 1  “Oh Canada” is sung in English and in French and has its own history but not necessarily connected with Spanish America (Duffin 2020). As for the American anthem, “The Star-­ Spangled Banner”, a poem written by an American lawyer, it was set to the tune of a popular British song, “To Anacreon in Heaven”. A thorough analysis of these anthems exceeds the purpose of this chapter.

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government. This was the case of “La Marseillese”, the French national anthem (Vovelle 1997). This process is also present in some of the new republics in the Americas, which explains the contents, the ardent phrases, the fiery verses that made sense in times of war, but that seem out of place—or unnecessary—in times of peace. However, an invasion by foreigners was a constant menace in the nineteenth century, when most of the national anthems were written, and the inhabitants of the country had to remain alert and willing to defend their new fatherland, even at the cost of their own lives. We find a connecting point when we consider patriotic chants as a way of motivating those who were fighting against internal or foreign enemies. For instance, the first version of the Argentinian national anthem, which dates from 1813, was written when most of the American continent was in turmoil (Buch 1994). Therefore, the lyrics refer to the struggle against the Spanish lion in Mexico, Quito, Potosí, Cochabamba, La Paz, and, of course, in the Argentinian provinces. Eventually, most of these provinces obtained their independence from the Spanish crown, giving birth to new nations with their own national anthem. After their independence, Spain appears in the lyrics of many national anthems, with the use of the noun or mentioned through its symbols (Miguel Trula 2020). The original lyrics—not sung anymore—say “Cuba libre, ya España murió”. The Peruvians claim that in the fighting, they broke “el cetro que España, / reclinaba orgullosa”. The other mentions refer to the lion, the symbol of the kingdom, representing the strength and courage of the Spaniards. It appears beaten, defeated, when Argentina sings, in its first verse, “Una nueva y gloriosa Nación: / Coronada su sien de laureles / Y a su planta rendido un León”. Ecuador praises that “libertad tras el triunfo venía, / y al león destrozado se oía / de impotencia y despecho rugir”. Honduras recounts that after three centuries, one fine day, from the distance and powerful “indignado rugía un león”. And finally, the Dominican Republic emphasizes how the arrogant lion was astonished by their island’s people’s fiery resistance. With these examples, we discover the historical sense of national anthems that outline that, after three centuries of Spanish domination, after being colonized, the countries found their way to emancipation, mostly after significant fighting.2 “¡Cesó la horrible noche!” cries the 2  Similar phenomena occurred if we consider the Independence from Portugal, the British Empire, and the Netherlands in a minority of the anthems we analyse here.

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Colombian anthem. Paraguay sings “A los pueblos de América, infausto / Tres centurias un cetro oprimió”. Chile has a more conciliatory vision: “Ya es hermano el que ayer invasor / De tres siglos lavamos la afrenta”. Hardly any of these national anthems survived the passing of time or retain their original length, lyrics, or even the music that accompanied them. In the process of consolidation of the new nation, changes were introduced in the words and in parts of the music, especially modulations to facilitate singing. The reasons that justified the patriotic allocutions were modified and so, those who were reluctant enemies became friends and even part of shared symbolic families. There is another country that is mentioned directly as an inspiration for the struggle for freedom and as a model of civilization: France (Escobar Jiménez 2015). The notes of its national anthem, “La Marselleise”, are not included, but there is a direct reference in the Honduran national anthem: “Era Francia, la libre, la heroica, / que en su sueño de siglos dormida / despertaba iracunda a la vida / al reclamo viril de Dantón; / era Francia que enviaba a la muerte / la cabeza del rey consagrado / y que alzaba, soberbia a su lado / el altar de la Diosa razón”. Concerning Latin America, obviously many of the new-born republics share a common past, not only in terms of the colonial period but also in the way they experienced shared contexts at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Central America was part of the Mexican Empire for a few months, but there is no mention in the national anthems of how this annexation contributed to their independence from Spain. In the Andes, there is a huge bond as the various Andean countries were impacted upon by the presence of the Ejército Liberador de los Andes as it made its way across vast extensions of their respective territories. Simón Bolivar and José de San Martín were the military leaders and are mentioned in the national anthems of numerous neighbouring countries. And the link is also present because, in certain periods of history, they even shared the same national anthem. Uruguay, Chile, and Peru used the Argentinian national anthem in their early years, until they had their own ones (Vega 1962, 36–37). With these elements in mind, we can say that a national anthem not only represents a certain geographic reality or unity, constrained by political reasons within the confines of a specific country, but that it can also spread its influence to the neighbouring territories. The Peruvian national

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anthem says it very clearly: “Con su influjo los pueblos despiertan, / y cual rayo corrió la opinión, / desde el Istmo a las Tierras del Fuego”. We have to ask ourselves what did the composers and lyricists intend to write, and the meaning they gave to the national anthem. Clearly, the intention was to promote patriotism, the exaltation of the land, the heroes, the past, the road to liberty and to incite the singers and their audience, in case this was needed, to defend the country against any menaces that usually came from abroad. Nevertheless, with time, the situation changed; uprisings, internal turmoil, crisis, a change of leaders, and politics put the original national anthems under scrutiny and resulted in the proliferation of variations and, in some instances, the erasure of certain historical milestones from the given country’s cultural memory. Another reason to modify or supress certain passages or verses was to make the national anthems politically correct. There are several versions in some republics; in some cases, there is a long and a short one, depending on the political agenda of a given moment. Political decisions have not only shortened the length of national anthems, but they have also censored the lyrics, suppressing certain unacceptable or unpalatable parts. There is an official historical vision where some heroes do not have a permanent place in it. If they were included in the first version, they could be erased later on. The lyrics of the Mexican national anthem, created in 1854, mention directly the name of Agustín de Iturbide, the achiever of independence and first emperor. Moreover, on that year, the president was Antonio López de Santa Anna, and he is indirectly referred to as the “Guerrero inmortal de Zempoala”. Both historical figures have disappeared from the authorized version nowadays. On the other hand, Bolívar is mentioned in the national anthems of the country that even took his name, Bolivia, but also appears in the Colombian lyrics. San Martín features in the national anthem of Peru; Dessalines even gives name to the Haitian national anthem. Nevertheless, what prevails in the lyrics is not only the exaltation of the souvenir of the sacrifice made by individual heroes, but the construction of upstanding citizens, the need to celebrate a collective in which each and every man fulfils his duties for the country (Escobar Jiménez 2015, 63). As mentioned earlier, a national anthem is not written in a day or two. Some of them are the result of a long process, with different versions, drafts, and modifications. In the beginning of a new republic, after gaining

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independence—or even as part of the process of obtaining it—there were patriotic chants sung in limited spaces or with limited dissemination. Nevertheless, the authorities eventually decided to bring together everybody’s patriotism into the one national anthem to increase the amalgamation of the components of a country, its citizens, and to look for a specific way to unite them, to build an imaginary community (Anderson 1993). Consequently, music and words were put to work in a patriotic sense. Therefore, a competition was organized to inspire the country’s poets and composers to write a national anthem. The first national anthem drafted following this procedure was the Peruvian one. Shortly after proclaiming independence, General José de San Martín announced the organization of competition to write the national anthem in August 1821. After one month, the jury chose the music written by the Afro-Peruvian musician José Bernardo Alzedo and a poem by José de la Torre Ugarte. The first time it was played publicly was on September 23, 1821 (Ramírez Núñez 2021, Himno Perú n.d.). People later endorsed the jury’s decision. After 1821, when Mexico freed itself from Spanish rule, several patriotic marches or chants emerged, including one piece written by the Austrian musician Henri Herz, but none of these was accepted at a national level (Jiménez Codinach 2005, 50–56). In November 1853, the authorities promoted a competition for a national anthem, because they were well aware of the importance of uniting all Mexicans under a truly patriotic song. From the twenty-six poems that competed—only one proposed by a woman3—the jury chose the verses written by Francisco González Bocanegra. After selecting the winning words, there was a second call, this time for the music, and the winner was Jaime Nunó out of fifteen contestants. The first performance was on September 15, 1854 (Molina and Bellinghausen 2004; Porrúa 2010). In Guatemala, the president ordered that a competition was hosted in 1887 to find the lyrics for the national anthem, which was won by Ramón Pereira. However, it didn’t work out properly. Then another competition was organized to select the music and the winner was Rafael Alvarez Ovalle. However, it was not adopted officially, and a new competition was put in place. Alvarez’ composition won again but the lyrics chosen were 3

 The woman was Catalina Espinosa de los Monteros (Jiménez Codinach 2005, 66).

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presented anonymously. Many years later, in his dying bed, José Joaquín Palma revealed that he was the author but had not signed with his name because he was part of the jury (Himno Guatemala n.d.). Nevertheless, he is now officially recognized as the author. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the president of Honduras followed the advice of distinguished intellectuals to commission a national anthem through a competition. The chosen words were by Augusto Coello and it was set to music by Carlos Hartling. It was formally adopted in 1915 (Himno Honduras n.d.). The case of neighbouring Nicaragua is almost contemporary but slightly different. A competition was held by the president in 1918 to write the lyrics of the national anthem. The winner was Salomón Ibarra Mayorga and his words were used with an ancient liturgical psalm from the eighteenth century by Anselmo Castinove (Himno Nicaragua n.d.). In other countries, a competition was organized with no satisfactory result and therefore direct actions had to be taken to select a composer or a lyricist. Such was the case of Colombia. After reviewing the proposals received for a competition in 1881, there was no winner. Later on, in 1887 they asked Oreste Sindici to put music to a poem by the former president Rafael Nuñez (Himno Colombia n.d.). In Brazil, after the declaration of independence from Portugal and the establishment of an empire led by Pedro I, Francisco Manuel da Silva composed a national anthem with lyrics by Joaquim Osório Duque Estrada. Decades later, in 1890, the first republican president made a call for a new national anthem to be composed, which was won by composer Leopoldo Miguez with lyrics by Medeiros e Albuquerque, but the people did not accept the new version and, therefore, the already popular anthem was formally adopted (Himno Brasil n.d.). Commemorations were used, as well, as an excuse to have an official national anthem. Such was the case of Haiti where, in 1903, the centennial of its independence, a competition was organized. The jury chose “La Dessalinienne”, by Justin Lhérisson L., and later a competition was organized to select the music, which was won by Nicolas Geffrard (La Dessalinienne n.d.). Half a century later, when Guyana gained its independence in 1966, a competition was organized to provide the new country with its own national anthem. The winner was the Rev. Archibald Leonard Luker.

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We must take into account when each national anthem was written, or when each government decided it was time to have an official one. The Mexican national anthem was born after the war against the United States, where it lost half of its territory, at a time when there was a desperate need to preserve the rest of the country and the republic was afflicted by significant internal conflicts. Other national anthems had to be careful with the words used to avoid causing political turmoil or a confrontation with their neighbouring countries. Nevertheless, as in any historical process, the national anthems experienced their own evolution and had to adapt to the changing realities their countries faced without losing their original goal: to exalt their people’s patriotism and sense of unity. A national anthem, born as an individual creation, reaches maturity and may be adopted by the people at large and remain valid forever, become a tradition, or it can disappear without trace for political reasons. Updates are sanctioned by governments for few or many years after it is first heard in a process that continues to unfold and develop depending on the political agenda of each country.

The Authors, the Words, and the Languages Having described how national anthems came into being in Latin America, we have to turn our attention to the authors who, in general terms, acted in a similar way. A certain writer provided a poem and somebody else put it to music. There are only a couple of cases that differ from the rest, when the same person wrote the music and the lyrics, and when the same people wrote the anthem for different countries. As examples of this, we have Pedro Felipe Figueredo, aka Perucho, creator of the Cuban national anthem in 1867; Patrick Castagne wrote the national anthem of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962; Timothy Gibson authored that of the Bahamas in 1973 and Kenrick Georges wrote that of Saint Kitts and Nevis in 1983. It is evident that all these songs belong to Caribbean countries and were written in the twentieth century under different independence conditions from the continental national anthems discussed so far. The second case involves the neoclassic Uruguayan poet, Francisco Acuña de Figueroa, who wrote the lyrics for the Uruguayan national anthem, finished in 1846. Years before, in 1833, he had written a poem and given it as a present to the Paraguayan president, and it became the anthem (Tissera 2018). The music of both national anthems is another issue, but we shall come back to this later.

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After going through all the data gathered for this chapter, I realize that a very high 88% of the authors are men, which leaves only three women. Irva Merle Baptiste-Blackett, a schoolteacher, wrote the words for Grenada in 1974.4 Five years later, Phyllis Joyce McClean Punnett authored the lyrics for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 1979. And then there is Lola, Dolores Rodríguez de Astudillo y Ponce de León, aka Lola Rodríguez de Tió. She was a revolutionary poet, who, in the middle of the 1868 Puerto Rican insurrection, wrote the patriotic poem “La Borinqueña”, whose words were clearly revolutionary. It became the revolutionary anthem but in 1977, the governor of Puerto Rico, already an unincorporated territory of the United States, decided to change it by replacing its words with the more neutral, peaceful, and unifying lyrics of Manuel Fernández Juncos. However, “La Borinqueña” is still popular in certain sectors, associated with the independent movement of Puerto Rico, while the other is the official national anthem.5 The authors of the lyrics are mostly local writers, poets that have been qualified as neoclassical and romantic. Some of them wrote the pieces at the beginning of their literary production; others were already prestigious. However, as always, there were a few exceptions when foreigners expressed in words the patriotic feeling of a given nation. The Cuban-born poet José Joaquín Palma had to flee from his native island because he was involved in an uprising and sought refuge elsewhere. He finally established himself in Guatemala, where he was well received and wrote the words of the Guatemalan national anthem in 1896.6 The other exception is the English Anglican priest Archibald Leonard Luker, author of Dear Land of Guyana, who in 1966 was in charge of the All Saints’ Church in New Amsterdam, Guyana.7 Other Caribbean countries such as Saint Lucia, Jamaica, and Surinam also have the words of their national anthems written by spiritual leaders, resulting in contents that are not so much bellicose, but, on the contrary, more dedicated to the exaltation of the homeland and to the 4  https://www.nowgrenada.com/2020/09/condolences-to-family-of-irva-baptisteblackette/ 5  In Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story, the Sharks sing La Borinqueña as a revolutionary anthem. “La Borinqueña”, en Amino, https://aminoapps.com/c/comics-es/ page/item/la-borinquena/N08u_WIldap1YJePbYgxp5Ro6lJBgg7 (Access February 14, 2022). And there is even a comic heroine with that name. https://aminoapps.com/c/comics-­es/page/item/la-borinquena/N08u_WIldap1YJePbYgxp5Ro6lJBgg7 6  Poesía de Cuba n.d. 7  Who is Archibald… 2019

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recognition of the blessings it has received from God. The rest of the writers were involved in politics—a couple were even former presidents—lawyers, educators, and a doctor. The words used in the national anthems to praise the country and its inhabitants may go through several kinds of analysis. We approach them here both qualitatively and quantitatively. First, let us go through the qualitative analysis. The topics contained in the national anthems vary from nation to nation but there are some connecting points. As mentioned before, many national anthems were born in the face of the threat of war. Therefore, the verb morir, “to die”, is specifically present in the lyrics of the following national anthems: “Coronados de gloria vivamos / O juremos con Gloria morir” [Argentina] “¡Morir antes que esclavos vivir!” [Bolivia] “Si pretende el cañón extranjero / Nuestros pueblos osado invadir; / Desnudemos al punto el acero / Y sepamos vencer o morir.” [Chile] “No temáis una muerte gloriosa / que morir por la patria ¡es vivir!” [Cuba]. “Si mañana tu suelo sagrado / lo amenaza invasión extranjera, / libre al viento tu hermosa bandera / a vencer o a morir llamará” [Guatemala) (Gálvez 1964). “¡Orientales, la Patria ó la tumba! / ¡Libertad ó con gloria morir!” [Uruguay]

This concept is also used as muerte, death, as in the Paraguayan national anthem: “Paraguayos, ¡República o Muerte!” In the long version of the Mexican national anthem, we can sing “y la muerte o la Gloria buscar”. However, the idea is also expressed in other words such as afrenta, lealtad or verbs that suggest actions against the enemy, such as alzaos, combatir, conquistar, lidiar, luchar, salvar, vencer, or vivir. And of course, there is the reference to war instruments, such as weapons like the machete or metralla, but also the musical instruments that accompany the troops, such as the tambor or “el clarín con su bélico acento” and of course “al sonoro rugir del cañón” in the Mexican anthem. The Costa Rican national anthem even talks of the will to swap the tools for weapons if needed to defend the homeland. The homeland is also a central theme in the lyrics. It is not only the place where it all began, but it also stands out because of its beauty and richness. The hills, mountains and valleys, the coasts and beaches, the

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flowers, and snow are mentioned alongside the weather, winds, sun, moon, and stars. One clear example is “Dear Land of Guyana, of Rivers and Plains”, which makes reference to the country’s geographical traits, and to the fact that a significant percentage of the Guyanese soil is not inhabited because of its dense foliage. Furthermore, Guyana is humanized as a mother of the people that have lived in that green and fertile soil. (Cambridge 2015). The territory is not only described but also depicted as being blessed because, with the effort of its inhabitants, it can contribute to the progress of the newly born country. Therefore, we can think of a clear path through the lyrics: after the war and the need to protect the homeland, we can recognize its beauty and take it marching on the path of progress. This liberal sequence resonates with the past, its people’s multicultural heritage, the bonding of different cultures in the kind of crossbread melting-­ pot of mestizaje that characterizes most Latin American countries. Honduras sings about the Indian Virgin who was found by the bold navigator, who then fell into a state of ecstasy faced with her beauty and consecrated the future of the nation with a tender kiss of love. In addition, the words emphasize the sacrifice of the fathers of the land because they came out of slavery to forge a bright future. Some other motifs can be analysed but I will have to do it elsewhere. Here I will just point out that these national anthems mention several symbols that go from the Guatemalan quetzal to the flag and the national emblem. They are part of a cultural heritage that includes not only an immaterial patrimony but also material aspects including emblematic structures, such as its buildings. The original version of the Mexican national anthem praises: Antes, Patria, que inermes tus hijos Bajo el yugo su cuello dobleguen, Tus campiñas con sangre se rieguen, Sobre sangre se estampe su pie. Y tus templos, palacios y torres Se derrumben con hórrido estruendo, Y sus ruinas existan diciendo: De mil héroes la patria aquí fue.

In other words, it outlines the wish for fields watered with blood before the Mexicans, defenceless, are subdued. It even considers how buildings

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Fig. 4.1  Words in the thirty-four national anthems, using NubeDePalabras.es

and constructions may collapse and yet those ruins will bear witness of the heroism of the fallen patriots. The sacrifice to survive thus involves not only human victims but also their patrimony. As for the quantitative analysis, I profited from the help provided by a webpage called NubeDePalabras.es (Fig. 4.1).8 This tool allowed me to create a word cloud to outline the most used words in all the thirty-four national anthems analysed here. It is a representation where the size of the words in the graphic is larger for those that appear more frequently. As 8

 https://www.nubedepalabras.es/

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most of the national anthems are in Spanish, I used the official actual version and, if they are in another language, I used a translation into Spanish. I standardized a few words, with number and gender variations, that were common in the national anthems, such as nuestro, nuestra, nuestras, nuestros.9 At first sight the words “gloria”,10 “patria”, and “libre-libertad” pop up because of the biggest size, which means they are the most used in the national anthems. This could be obvious considering that their key objective is to inspire nationalism. However, the will to die, as mentioned before, is also very obvious in the lyrics. Other words that are used repeatedly are not always mentioned by different countries. For instance, the word “cumplir” (“to fulfil”) seems to be important because it is emphasized in the graphic, but the reason is that the Uruguayan national anthem insists that their soul promises “libertad o con gloria morir”, something that “heroicos sabremos cumplir” and it is repeatedly sung in the chorus. On the other hand, the sense of belonging is also present in the lyrics. Take for example the words “hijos” and “pueblo”. And of course, the love for the homeland is ever-present in “querida” and “honramos”. Finally, yet importantly, is the duality “guerra” and “paz” which involves “valientes”, “inmortales”, “heroicos”. It is obvious there is a clear connection with the concepts used in the anthems that contribute to strengthening the bonds between the inhabitants of a country. If we apply this quantitative analysis to each of the national anthems, the results would be equally interesting. I made a smaller exercise with the words of the Mexican national anthem and the most frequent words are “patria” and “guerra”, followed by “sangre”, “gloria”, and “hijos” (Fig.  4.2). The bellicosity of the anthem is evident and has often been contested. From time to time, proposals to change the lyrics emerge, but none has become a reality. A few publications have focused their attention on the Mexican national anthem and, as in other countries, have included a glossary to make the lyrics more understandable or accessible to contemporary Mexicans (Crespo 2019). But there are other issues regarding the meaning of the national anthems.

9  The programme excludes automatically short words such as articles and conjunctions, and it is pretty accurate. 10  As Françoise Martinez points out, the first hymns were odes to the glory of divinities and later on became odes to the glory of people and nation. (Martinez 2017, 74-75).

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Fig. 4.2  Words in the Mexican National Anthem, using NubeDePalabras.es

A little over half of the lyrics of the thirty-four national anthems from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are in Spanish, one third in English and the rest in French, Portuguese and Dutch. Those are the official languages, but there are many bilingual or multilingual countries and therefore, the national anthem has to be translated into the various native languages by their respective indigenous communities. For example, in Mexico there are 11 linguistic families, 68 ethnolinguistic groups and 364 linguistic variants (Catálogo 2009; Valiñas Coalla 2020, 480). There are about fifteen versions of the national anthem in other languages; some examples can be found in YouTube (Himno México 2021). Recently, some countries have tried to rescue the remote pre-Hispanic past and have given certain strength to what is called Native American groups or “pueblos originarios” or First Nations. In addition, as part of this effort, there are several projects to recover and preserve the original languages and to sing the national anthem in them. These efforts are made public in official ceremonies linked to political acts. For example, in July 2021, Peru celebrated its centennial of independence and the

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interpretation of the national anthem was, besides being in Spanish, in Quechua, Ashaninka and Awajun, only three of the forty-eight original languages.11 This presents certain difficulties as the music in the national anthems is based on a metric directly linked to the lyrics. Verses are not always loose but rigid and when they are put into music, the whole composition makes sense. Nevertheless, if the national anthem is translated, part of the original sense is lost in translation because there are not always equivalent words for every language. In the original version, each word fits within the metric of the music and so variations cannot be easily introduced.12 The idea of translating the national anthem can be interpreted as a desire to outline that native communities are also a part of the country, and can be included with their own specificity. For example, Spanish as national language is no longer imposed, and there is space for diversity. Besides, languages do not always recognize frontiers and they are widespread in bigger geographic spaces. For instance, Nahuatl is spoken in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, where there is a translation of the national anthem to Nahuatl. Guaraní is spoken in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay where it shares the status of official language with Spanish, and so there are versions of the national anthem in Guaraní in those countries. Quechua languages are used in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. And therefore, one family of languages can be used for the interpretation of the national anthems of various countries. A peculiar example is the Haitian national anthem. There is a version sung in French and another sung in Creole that includes some variations excluded in the French version. As for the way we sing the national anthems, there are a few variations: in certain public ceremonies, there is a lead—and perhaps famous—singer and the rest of the audience accompanies the lyrics. The important thing  Lengua indígenas… n.d.  On September 2021, the Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas presented the Mayan translation of the national anthem at the Festival of Indigenous Languages. Teachers, ethnomusicologists, interpreters, translators, and musicians worked together. They were very careful to adjust the Mayan rules of writing, to analyse each word, ways of expression, syllabic patterns, and musical notes. See https://www.inali.gob.mx/es/comunicados/913-202109-15-20-36-29.html. 11 12

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is that, in a collective act of singing or listening to the national anthem, it introduces a sense of unity, which aims through this medium to instil a shared sense of identity and patriotism, even if each person can have different reactions to the same national anthem. There is significant repetition of words and melodies in national anthems and no variety is introduced because they use a strophic form. We will always hear “o juremos con gloria morir” the same way. But we must also consider that national anthems can extend the meaning of words, using music to emphasize some of them, precisely in the repetitions, where they are sung with more feeling or strength. The repetitions are necessary to engrave certain concepts such as freedom, homeland, war, glory in people’s minds (Durand 2018, 72). Language is selected to depict the official discourse, and the national anthem is one of the foundational texts of a nation. We cannot forget that a national anthem emerges from the dominant ideology of the moment in which it is created, and so it is a personal vision, but one that is sanctioned by the authorities. It responds to an image of a certain period and so its validity is disputed. Even if the lyrics seem anachronistic, it is part of the official discourse and is sanctioned in ritual, in civic ceremonies. Considering the moment in which national anthems were born, in a post-­ independent and romantic period, the lyrics focus on highlighting the countries’ victories against their former rulers, emphasizing a clear anticolonial discourse. But some of them also praise the ideal of order and progress as a means to obtain collective happiness, merging bellicose and positive ideas together. The ideal for the new country is sublime. They insist that the dramas lived in the past must not be relived and that the nations must develop their potential and focus on building the future (Alvarado 2018, 3–17). These elements are mostly present in the Caribbean national anthems, born in the twentieth century. They differ not only in content but also in a music that is far from martial, because the authors tend to belong to religious orders, as in Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, and Surinam. And therefore, the national anthem can be sung inside a temple as part of a religious ritual and not just in an open space or as part of a civic ceremony.

The Music The music of national anthems has been studied for many years and has generated several controversies and publications. Here we only mention a few examples related to Latin American national anthems.

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As noted earlier, there are only four cases in which the national anthems were the work of one single author, i.e. both the words and the music: Timothy Gibson (Bahamas), Pedro Felipe Figueredo, aka Perucho (Cuba), Kenrick Georges (Saint Kitts and Nevis), and Patrick Castagne (Trinidad and Tobago). The vast majority involved different people in the writing of the national anthem. Some authors consider that the composers responsible for writing the musical notes for the national anthems were, except for a few cases, minor, second-rate musicians: they were either composers of scores that were written with another purpose in mind and that eventually became the national anthem; composers who participated in a competition to write a national anthem; or, quite simply, amateur musicians (Máynez 2020). And we must note that there are no female composers registered as authors of any national anthem. After analysing the lyricists and the composers of the thirty-four national anthems taken into consideration for this chapter, take note that one third of them were born in a country other than that they wrote the national anthem for (Martinez 2017, 77). The German Carlos Hartling composed the national anthem of Honduras; Antonio Neumane born in France from German parents wrote that of Ecuador. Three Italian composers are the authors of national anthems: Benedetto Vicenti (Bolivia), Oreste Sindici (Colombia), and Juan Aberle (Ecuador). Five more composers were born on Spanish soil: Santos Jorge (Panamá), Blas Parera (Argentina). And among them, we must highlight three Catalans: Félix Astol Artés (Puerto Rico), Ramón Carnicer (Chile), and Jaime Nunó (México). If music is set to ancient poems or poems are put to ancient music, many difficulties appear in linking the words and the music. And when foreign composers are involved, they must have a certain knowledge of the local language and the history of the country whose patriotic song they are to put to music. So, a collaboration might be needed between the lyricist and the composer if they are contemporaries of each other. The Uruguayan national anthem is attributed to Francisco José Debali, a Hungarian-born composer. However, the decree which gave official status to the anthem in 1848 states that the author was Fernando José Quijano, a native Uruguayan. Lauro Ayestarán considers that the music is far too complex to have been written by an amateur such as Quijano (Ayestarán 1953, 724–727). But Debali recognized that Quijano had

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helped him penetrate the spirit of the national anthem,13 especially because he was not a native Spanish speaker himself and needed help to understand the intentions of Acuña’s poem. In other words, there was only one author; one who benefitted from a little help from a local composer. Let’s not forget the link between the Uruguayan and Paraguayan national anthems, whose lyrics were both written by Francisco Esteban Acuña de Figueroa. However, the Paraguayan score got lost and so there are several accounts as to who the composer might have been. The list that was drafted to settle the question includes Debali, but it also mentions the French composer François Sauvageot de Dupuis and the Italian Francesco Cassale. Furthermore, there have been additional modifications to the  national anthem: in 1874 by Luis Cavedagni and in 1934, by the Paraguayan Remberto Giménez. Needless to say, it is a subject still immersed in controversy.14 We also have to take into consideration the link between the music of the national anthems and the art form of opera. When you start listening to the Uruguayan anthem, it sounds like an opera overture with some resemblance to the aria “Largo al Factotum” from Il Barbero di Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini. Furthermore, considering the great Italian operatic influence, the Prologue to Lucrecia Borgia by Gaetano Donizetti is also present in the Uruguayan anthem. How did the composers get this inspiration or influence? The aforesaid Ayestarán denies that local composers could possibly have ever listened to European operas, much less be influenced by them.15 However, it is well documented that European operas spread widely in the Americas, where they were performed few years after their debut in the old continent. So, they could well have been an important source of inspiration. Another national anthem that shows this relationship with nineteenth-­ century European opera is El Salvador’s national anthem, which starts with a variation of the final motif of Gioachino Rossini’s “Overture” to William Tell. And some musical notes later there is a great resemblance 13  Letter published by Debali in El Nacional, Montevideo, 23 de julio de 1855, included in Ayestarán, 723 (Himno Uruguay 2017). 14  A few years ago, César Manuel Barrios published a book and spoke in different places about the secrets of the anthem https://www.listennotes.com/es/podcasts/nambi-­ ret%C3%A3-arte-y/53-secretos-del-himno-MdCAkuphb6R/?t=775 (Barrios 2017). 15  http://anterior.mensuarioidentidad.com.uy/cartas/himno-10-de-diciembre-de-2017. Lauro Ayestarán considers that “la noble música itálica engendra todos los himnos nacionales de Sudamérica” (Ayestarán 1953, 551).

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with the “Coronation March” from The Prophet by Giacomo Meyerbeer. A further national anthem that presents reminiscences of operatic influences is “La bayamesa”, the Cuban national one, in which some authors point out that it is inspired by Mozart (González Acosta 2021, 43; Sierra 2018). There is a slight resemblance, in a free version, of the aria “Non più andrai” from W. A. Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, although in martial time. Therefore, can we talk of inspiration, copy or “pastiche” which is a mixture of notes from other musical pieces by imitation or falsification? The influence of Italian music is undeniable, and since the concept of copyright was not common in the days when these pieces were written, those borrowed aspects become evident now. But not only operatic notes are found in Latin American national anthems. Victor de Rubertis concluded that the opening bars of the Argentinian anthem are similar to Muzio Clementi’s Sonatina opus 36, n. 4 (1938). If we listen carefully, we might detect the presence in certain national anthems of music originating from operas, symphonies, patriotic songs, and so on. In Dio Salvi la Patria, a sinfonia-inno by the Mexican composer Melesio Morales (Miranda 2021), we can clearly hear the notes of “La Marseillaise”. This phenomenon is not unique because we can also find it in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Symphony.16 On the other hand, a few notes of the Mexican national anthem are included in the opera Anita, also by Melesio Morales, left unperformed during the life of its composer. An interesting piece of music that links certain national anthems is the Marche Franco-Mexicaine, by Alfredo Bablot, a French-born composer and journalist, who directed the Mexican Conservatory of Music. It links “La Marseillaise”, the Mexican national anthem, and another important patriotic piece, la Marcha Zaragoza by Aniceto Ortega (Máynez Champion 2019). The author thought it was a way of enhancing the good relations between both countries through these anthems. One final example from Mexico is a fantasia of the national anthem made public in 1885 by Ricardo Castro, which is a piano transcription but with a few variations (Álvarez Meneses 2021, 201–217).17 Castro got his 16  There are more than fifteen pieces of music that include notes from “La Marseillaise” by authors such as Rossini, Schumann, Wagner, and Verdi. However, we can also find that the most famous notes at the beginning of the anthem come from Mozart’s concert n. 25 for piano, written six years before Rouget de Lisle gave birth to the most famous anthem (Máynez Champion, 2020). 17  Mexican laws forbid the interpretation of any arrangement made to the anthem, so this piece is hardly ever played because it needs an official permission.

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inspiration from Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who made a version from the Brazilian national anthem, which, in certain ways, transcends its own notes. First, it is inspired—copied in part—by the Opera Don Sanche ou le château de l’amour written by Franz Liszt in 1824, seven years before the national anthem was composed by Francisco Manoel Da Silva. Furthermore, it inspired Gottschalk to compose Fantasy on the Brazilian National Anthem (Curt Lange 1951, 83–84). The American composer also wrote a symphony called A Montevideo based on the Uruguayan anthem (Máynez Champion 2020). Several composers involved in putting music to the national anthems can be identified as romantics. Therefore, they were able to compose for the people and to make a popular song become a national anthem, thus serving their nation (Herreras Carrera 2016, 44). The language of sounds is very important in the transmission of patriotic ideas, and they fulfilled the task of contributing to the creation of a community. In addition, they promoted the foundational images of national history.

Epilogue In recent times, globalization has increased enormously, and so national anthems, linked to a, so to say, local interest, might lose some strength. On the other hand, migration has contributed to the spread of national anthems, local first, then transnational. In order to keep their identities, those who have left their homeland clearly seek certain ways of maintaining their bond to their homelands, and national anthems help with this. A national anthem is ultimately a conjunction of music and poetry that, together, makes citizens aware of their sense of belonging to a larger collectivity: the words are symbols of what is sacred in a homeland and the notes are a vehicle to spread the components of that very particular national soul. The fatherland is often associated with war because it has to be defended against all aggressions. Therefore, many national anthems have a militaristic sense, as in an allocution made to ignite a fighting form of patriotism. A significant percentage of national anthems have this martial component not only in the music but also in the lyrics. Other songs are more peaceful, though, and describe the beauty and richness of the homeland. Nations rely on many emblems, in this case, sound emblems to nourish patriotism. The collective imaginary lives in emotions expressed through

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music and touches the hearts of listeners inside or outside the homeland and so works as part of the state propaganda to build a national identity. Even if the national anthems are changed, there are laws to protect their identities once they are modified. Once an official version is decreed, no alterations or unauthorized versions can be played. However, there are a few examples of peculiar versions that have become quite popular. I have shown in this chapter the importance that national anthems have had at all times across Latin America. This is clearly evidenced through the universal tendency that has always existed to associate the national anthem itself with the hopes and spirit of a given people. As Alex Marshall notes, national “anthems became one of the main things that explained to people who they belonged to, what their characters were, what they were meant to strive for, even what language they were meant to speak” (Marshall 2016). The national anthems that were written in the early national years, when the new nations had just obtained their independence, share the desire for a safe and good future and tend to exalt their country’s newly acquired freedom, with a discourse that is squarely anticolonial, that depicts the recent opprobrious years and exults that the best is yet to come. Therefore, there is a mixture of belligerent and positivist visions: the condemnation of aggressions against the homeland and the need to protect it with the help of its inhabitants are combined with the exaltation of the richness, the beauty, and the possibilities to build a great future. Pacifism versus civic militancy. The decolonization process is evident with the birth of Caribbean countries, and it is a phenomenon of recent decades. The rhythms of their anthems are less martial and sometimes more in a religious style because many were written by religious ministers. Anticolonialism is present in the lyrics as a result of recent emancipation, whereas it is in the beginning of the nineteenth century or in the 1960s and 1970s, as in the Caribbean national anthems. Religion is present as a discourse of the anthems, either in the direct mention of God or with other appellations. Seen over a long period of time, national anthems and patriotic chants are part of a pedagogic programme to encourage the citizens of a given country to feel a sense of belonging and national identity. And that is a strong connecting point between countries.

Dominica

Cuba

Costa Rica

Colombia

Chile

Brasil

Bolivia

Belice

Barbados

Lyricist

1966 Irving Louis Burgie

1967 Novelle Hamilton Richards 1813 Vicente Lopez y Planes 1973 Timothy Gibson

Year

1981 Samjuel Alfred Haynes Canción patriótica 1845 José Ignacio de Sanjinés Hino Nacional 1831 Joaquim Osorio Brasileiro Duque Estrada Canción Nacional 1847 Eusebio Lillo y de Chile Bernardo de Vera y Pintado Oh gloria 1887 Rafael Núñez inmarcesible Himno Nacional 1852 José María Zeledón de Costa Rica Brenes La Bayamesa o El 1867 Pedro Felipe Himno de Figueredo, a.k.a Bayamo Perucho Isle of Beauty, Isle 1967 Wilfred Oscar of Splendour Morgan Pond

Fair Antigua, we salute thee Himno nacional argentino March On, Bahamaland In Plenty and In Time of Need Land of the free

Antigua y Barbuda Argentina

Bahamas

Title

Country

Dominica

Cuba

Costa Rica

Colombia

Chile

Brasil

Bolivia

Belice

U.S.A.

Bahamas

Argentina

Antigua

Country of origin L

Appendix

Belice

?

Bahamas

España

Antigua

Country of origin C

Lemuel McPherson Christian

Perucho Figueredo

Manuel María Gutiérrez

Oreste Sindici

Ramón Carnicer

Francisco Manuel da Silva

Saint Kitts and Nevis

Cuba

Costa Rica

Italia

España/ Cataluña

Brasil

Leopoldo Benedetto Vincenti Bolivia

Selwyn Walford Young

C. Van Roland Edwards

Timothy Gibson

Wallet Garnet Picart Chambers Blas Parera

Composer

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Salve Oh Patria

Himno Nacional de El Salvador Hail Grenada Himno Nacional de Guatemala Dear Land of Guyana, of Rivers and Plains La Dessalinienne Himno Nacional de Honduras Jamaica, Land We Love Himno Nacional Mexicano Salve a ti, Nicaragua Himno Istmeño Himno Nacional Paraguayo

Himno Nacional del Perú

Ecuador

El Salvador

Perú

Panamá Paraguay

Nicaragua

Mexico

Jamaica

Haití Honduras

Guyana

Grenada Guatemala

Title

Country

Lyricist

Great Britain

Grenada cubano

El Salvador

Ecuador

Country of origin L

1821 José de la Torre Ugarte y Alarcón

1854 Francisco González Bocanegra 1918 Salomón Ibarra Mayorga 1925 Jerónimo de la Ossa 1846 Francisco Acuña de Figueroa

Perú

Panamá Uruguay

Nicaragua

Mexico

1904 Justin Lhérisson Haití 1915 Augusto Constancio Honduras Coello 1962 Hugh Sherlock Jamaica

1966 Archibald Leonard Luker

1974 Irva Merle Baptiste 1896 José Joaquín Palma

1879 Juan José Cañas

1870 Juan León Mera

Year

salmo litúrgico del XVIII de Anselmo Castinove Santos Jorge Francisco José Debali, Francisco Sauvageot de Dupuis, Francesco Cassale, Luis Cavedagni, Remberto Giménez José Bernardo Alcedo

Jaime Nunó

Robert Lightbourne

Nicolas Geffrard Carlos Hartling

Robert Cyril Gladston Potter

Louis Arnold Masanto Rafael Alvarez Ovalle

Juan Aberle

Antonio Neumane

Composer

Perú (continued)

España Hungría/ Francia/Italia/ Paraguay

España/ Cataluña España

Jamaica

Haití Alemania

Guyana

Grenada guatemalteco

Francia/ Alemania Italia

Country of origin C

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Lyricist

Forged from the Love of Liberty Himno Nacional

Gloria al Bravo Pueblo

Venezuela

God zij met ons Suriname

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Surinam

República Dominicana Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia

Puerto Rico

Country of origin L

1848 Francisco Acuña de Figueroa 1881 Vicente Salias

Venezuela

Uruguay

1959 Cornelis Atses Hoekstra and Henry de Ziel 1962 Patrick Castagne Guyana

Sons and 1979 Charles Jesse Daughters of Saint Lucia Saint Vincent, 1979 Phyllis Joyce Land so beautiful McClean Punnett

Trinidad y Tobago Uruguay

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Surinam

República Dominicana Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia

La Borinqueña

Puerto Rico

Year

1867 Lola Rodriguez de Tió/Manuel Fernández Juncos Himno Nacional 1934 Emilio Prud’Homme O Land of Beauty! 1983 Kenrick Georges

Title

Country

(continued)

Juan José Landaeta

Francisco José Debali

Patrick Castagne

John Corstianus de Puy

Joel Bertram Miguel

Leton Felix Thomas

Kenrick Georges

José Rufino Reyes y Siancas

Félix Astol Artés

Composer

Venezuela

Hungría

Guyana

Surinam

?

República Dominicana Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia

España/ Cataluña

Country of origin C

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References Alvarado, Leonel. 2018. El lirismo patriótico centroamericano: himnos, nacionalismo e identidad. San José, Costa Rica: EUNED. Álvarez Meneses, Rogelio. 2021. Ricardo Castro (1864–1907). Documentación y análisis de su obra musical. Colima: Universidad de Colima. Anderson, Benedict. 1993. Comunidades imaginadas. Reflexiones sobre el origen y la difusión del nacionalismo. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica (Colección popular, 498). Ayestarán, Lauro. 1953. La música en el Uruguay. Vol. I. Montevideo: Servicio Oficial de Difusión Radio Eléctrica. Barrios, César Manuel. 2017. Secretos del Himno Nacional paraguayo-uruguayo, edición del autor. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.listennotes.com/ es/podcasts/nambi-­r et%C3%A3-­a rte-­y /53-­s ecretos-­d el-­h imno-­M dC Akuphb6R/?t=775. Buch, Esteban. 1994. O juremos con gloria morir. Historia de una épica de Estado. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Cambridge, Vibert C. 2015. Musical Life in Guyana: History and Politics of Controlling Creativity. Columbia. Univ. Press of Mississippi (Caribbean Studies Series). Carlos Ramírez Núñez, Cinco interesantes datos sobre el Himno Nacional del Perú, 11 de febrero del 2021, https://blogs.usil.edu.pe/facultad-artes-y-­ humanidades/musica/cinco-interesantes-datos-sobre-el-himno-nacionaldel-­peru. Accessed September 5, 2023. Catálogo. 2009. Catálogo de las Lenguas Indígenas Nacionales. Variantes Linguísticas de México con sus autodenominaciones y referencias geoestadísticas. México: INALI. Condolences to Family of Irva Baptiste-Blackett. 2020. Now Grenada, September 8. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.nowgrenada.com/2020/09/ condolences-­to-­family-­of-­irva-­baptiste-­blackette/. Crespo, José Antonio. 2019. ¡Al grito de guerra! Historia y significado del himno nacional. México, Cámara de Diputados LXIV Legislatura, Consejo Editorial H. Cámara de Diputados. Curt Lange, Francisco. 1951. Vida y muerte de Louis Moreau Gottschalk en Rio de Janeiro (1869). El ambiente musical en la mitad del segundo imperio. Mendoza: Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Duffin, Ross W. 2020. Calixa Lavallée and the Construction of a National Anthem. The Musical Quarterly 103 (1–2): 9–32. Durand, Gilbert. 2018. Escritos musicales: la estructura musical de lo imaginario, selección, traducción y notas y ensayo de Blanca Solares. Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial, Cuernavaca, UNAM, Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias.

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Escobar Jiménez, Christian. 2015. La razón que nos asiste a los segundos: música, política y esteta en los himnos nacionales de América Latina. Kipus, Revista Andina de Letras 37 (1), semestre, Quito: 55–66. Gálvez G., María Albertina. 1964. Historia del Himno Nacional de Guatemala y sus autores, maestro Rafael Alvarez Ovalle y poeta J. Joaquín Palma, Guatemala CXLIII aniversario de la independencia. Guatemala: Ministerio de Educación Pública, Centro Editorial José de Pineda Ibarra. González Acosta, Alejandro. 2021. En el bicentenario de la independencia: notas sobre el himno nacional de México … y dos cubanos. Boletín de la Biblioteca Nacional de México 10: 42–58. Herreras Carrera, Aleix. 2016. Los himnos nacionales. Interpelaciones musicales, recursos armónicos, aplicaciones a la comunicación política. Universitat de Barcelona, Treball de Fi de Máster de Comunicació Especialitzada en Comunicació Cultural. Himno Brasil. n.d. Himno Nacional de Brasil. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://promocionmusical.es/himnos-­nacionales/himno-­de-­brasil/ Himno Colombia. n.d. Letra del Himno Nacional de Colombia, historia. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://himnode.com/paises/america/himno-­nacional-­ de-­colombia-­audio-­y-­letra/ Himno Guatemala. n.d. Himno nacional de Guatemala. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.mineduc.gob.gt/DIGECADE/documents/Telesecun daria/Recursos%20Digitales/2o%20Recursos%20Digitales%20TS%20 BY-­SA%203.0/04%20EXPRESION%20ARTISTICA/U1%20pp%2025%20 himno%20nacional%20[Guatemala].pdf Himno Honduras. n.d. Himno nacional de Honduras. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://data.miraquetemiro.org/sites/default/files/documentos/ Himno%20Nacional_0.pdf. Himno México. 2021. El himno nacional mexicano debe cantarse con respeto en las versiones autorizadas en lenguas indígenas, coincidieron especialistas, en Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas, 15 de septiembre de 2021. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.inali.gob.mx/es/comunicados/913-­2021-­ 09-­15-­20-­36-­29.html Himno Nicaragua. n.d. Himno Nacional de Nicaragua. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.ecured.cu/Himno_Nacional_de_Nicaragua. Himno Perú. n.d. El Himno Nacional Peruano. Congreso de la República de Perú. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.congreso.gob.pe/Docs/participacion/museo/visitavirtual/himno_nacional_peruano.html Himno Uruguay. 2017. ¿El himno uruguayo un plagio? Identidad, December 10, Accessed February 14, 2022. http://anterior.mensuarioidentidad.com.uy/ cartas/himno-­10-­de-­diciembre-­de-­2017. Jiménez Codinach, Guadalupe. 2005. La guía del Himno Nacional Mexicano. México: CONACULTA, Artes de México.

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La Borinqueña. n.d. Amino. Accessed February 14, 2022 https://aminoapps. com/c/comics-­e s/page/item/la-­b orinquena/N08u_WIldap1YJePbY gxp5Ro6lJBgg7. La Dessalinienne. n.d. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.ecured.cu/ La_Dessalinienne. Lenguas indígenas: avances y retos pendientes al bicentenario. n.d. In Proyecto Especial Bicentenario de la Independencia del Perú. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://bicentenario.gob.pe/lenguas-­indigenas-­avances-­y-­retos-­ pendientes-­al-­bicentenario/. Marshall, Alex. 2016. Republic or Death!: Travels in Search of National Anthems. London: Windmill Books. Martinez, Françoise. 2017. Fêter la nation. Mexique et Bolivie pendant leur premier siècle de vie indépendante (1810–1925). Paris: Presse Universitaires de Paris Nanterre. Máynez Champion, Samuel. 2019. Allons enfants al grito de guerra. Proceso, n. 2250, December 18. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.proceso.com. m x / e s t r o -­a r m o n i c o / 2 0 1 9 / 1 2 / 1 8 / a l l o n s -­e n f a n t s -­a l -­g r i t o -­d e -­ guerra-­235960.html. ———. 2020. Los sonidos del patriotismo. Proceso, first part, January 13. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.proceso.com.mx/estro-­armonico/2020/ 1/13/los-­sonidos-­del-­patriotismo-­primera-­parte-­236988.html; second part, January 27. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.proceso.com.mx/ estro-­a rmonico/2020/1/27/los-­s onidos-­d el-­p atriotismo-­s egunda-­ parte-­237680.html; third part, February 2. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.proceso.com.mx/estro-­armonico/2020/2/12/los-­sonidos-­ del-­patriotismo-­tercera-­ultima-­parte-­238419.html. Miguel Trula, Esther. 2020. España es el país al que más se menciona en los himnos de otros países. Y siempre para mal. Magnet, October 28. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://magnet.xataka.com/preguntas-­no-­tan-­frecuentes/espana­pais-­al-­que-­se-­menciona-­himnos-­otros-­paises-­siempre-­para-­mal. Miranda, Ricardo. 2021. Lo que dijeron las brujas: Juárez y el estreno de la Sinfonía Himno Dios Salve a la Patria. Historia Mexicana LXX (4): 280, abril-junio:1949–1986. Molina, Daniel, and Karl Bellinghausen. 2004. Más sí osare un extraño enemigo …: CL aniversario del Himno Nacional Mexicano, antología conmemorativa. México: Secretaria de Cultura de la Ciudad de México, Océano. Nube de palabras. n.d. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.nubedepalabras.es/. Poesía de Cuba, José Joaquin Palma. n.d. Isliada. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.isliada.org/poetas/jose-­joaquin-­palma/ Porrúa, Miguel Angel, ed. 2010. Himno nacional mexicano. Su historia. México: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, H. Cámara de Diputados, LXI Legislatura.

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Rubertis, Victor de. 1938. La fuente temática de la música del himno nacional argentino. Buenos Aires: Editorial Casa Granda. Sierra, Manuel C. 2018. El plagio del himno nacional cubano. Regresión Cubana, February 21. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://regresioncubana.blogspot. com/2018/02/el-­plagio-­del-­himno-­nacional-­cubano.html. Tissera, Ana. 2018. Historia, poética y doctrina: los himnos nacionales de Paraguay. La Colmena, n. 97, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, https:// www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=446356088006 Valiñas Coalla, Leopoldo. 2020. Lenguas originarias y pueblos indígenas de México. Familias y lenguas aisladas. México: Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. Vega, Carlos. 1962. El himno nacional argentino: creación, difusión, autores, texto, música. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires (Biblioteca de América. Libros del tiempo nuevo, 4). Vovelle, Michel. 1997. La Marseillaise. La guerre ou la paix. In Les Lieux de Mémoire 1, edi. Pierre Nora, 107–152. Paris: Gallimard. Who is Archibald Leonard Luker. 2019. Degenchronicles.com, April 21. Accessed February 14, 2022. https://dengenchronicles.com/who-­is-­archibald-­leonard­luker/.

CHAPTER 5

The Voices of the Nation: Form and Content of National Anthems Bernat Castany Prado

Introduction The first striking aspect of national anthems, as of any other nationalist expression, is their dual religious and civil nature. The religious component of national anthems is partly explained by the fact that they are heirs to religious hymns. In Greek culture, the term hymnos referred to a genre of religious hymn, frequented by authors such as Homer, Anacreon, Sappho, or Pindar, in which a god was invoked, exalted, implored, or thanked. The Latin World inherited the genre of “hymns,” which passed (joining the Hebrew tradition of psalms and hymns) to the Christian world, where authors such as St. Ambrose, St. Gregory, St. Bernard, or St. Thomas, practiced it. Beyond the generic filiation, which would imply a mere transfer of literary features, we find a deep continuity, because in the heart of the national anthems, the nation will inherit, together with the sacred rhetoric, the

B. Castany Prado (*) University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_5

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attributes of divinity. Thus, where the religious hymn exalted God and the religious community, the national anthem will exalt the nation in its double invocation as deus and as congregatio fidelium. Evidently, it is not the national anthem that generates the transition from the religious-­dynastic paradigm to the national one, but rather the one that followed or catalyzed, which was the result of a plethora of social, economic, political, religious, and philosophical processes that took place during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries (Crespo 2003, 57–75). Two opposing, but complementary, interpretative families try to account for this process (Roger 2001; Leoussi and Smith 2001). The first considers that nationalism replaced religion as a political-social tool destined to be used for either the subjugation of peoples or the competition between opposing elites. Such would be the case, for example, of classical Marxism, which considers that nationalism generates an alienating fiction of identity and community of interests between bourgeois and proletarians, with the aim that the latter does not perceive their exploited condition; or of the theories of identity competition, which affirm that nationalism is nothing more than a means by which a certain social group seeks to promote itself politically, socially, and economically. The second interpretative family considers that the nation replaces religion as a symbolic system capable of giving meaning to reality. According to Benedict Anderson, enlightened secular rationalism limited itself to deactivating religion, without being able, afterwards, to elaborate a secular eschatology that would confront experiences such as death or meaninglessness, which, as was to be expected, did not disappear with secularization. This lack of meaning led to a pseudo-religious reformulation of the nation, which, in the beginning, was fundamentally a secular reality, with the aim of endowing it with the divine capacity to transform death into continuity and contingency into necessity. This gave rise to a new nationalist eschatology, in which a religious argument of the type, “my existence seems accidental, but within the divine plan it is necessary,” was replaced by another of the type, “my existence seems accidental, but within the destiny of my nation, it is necessary” (Anderson 1991, 6–7). This movement is reflected in the dictum of Italian nationalism which states that “he who dies for the fatherland, has lived” (Primo Levi, 600), and will be a fundamental motif in numerous anthems, such as, for example, “La congolaise”: “if it is necessary to die / what does it matter, since

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our children / everywhere will say in what way / we triumph by fighting”;1 or the Cuban anthem: “Do not fear a glorious death, / to die for the fatherland is to live.” To succeed in imposing itself and to endure as a religion of substitution, nationalism needed to divinize the nation. From this point of view, what Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world” would have been nothing more than a covert redistribution of the sacred in culture.2 That is why we consider, following the Spinozian terminology, that nationalism is not a political system, but a “theological-political” one. What interests us here is to see how the double components of nationalism, religious and secular, translated into a double foundational mythology that will present the nation both as a human product and as a divine entity. The first foundational myth of nationalism, that of liberal contractualism, or republican contractualism, conceives the nation as a free association of individuals who are not bound by any element prior to the social contract they decide to sign. The republican nation would be an exclusively human product that does not contain any pre-political elements that could imply that some kind of prior and superior instance to that of the mere human will would determine the limits and characteristics of the republic. It is normal that the pre-political elements of a religious order were expelled from the republican nation, since this model arose precisely from the crisis of the religious communities, from the questioning of the interpretative monopoly of the Bible that the Catholic Church held until the schism of 1521, to the wars of religion, as well as from the dissolution of Latin, as a sacred language, into its degraded and therefore desacralized forms, which were the Romance languages. There remained, however, other pre-political elements available to those who wanted to resacralize the political sphere. And that is what happened when the anti-Enlightenment reaction; the disappointment 1  All the translations of national anthems written in French, Spanish, Catalan, and Italian are mine. Those written in other languages are taken from the website http://nationalanthems.info/, which I have compared with those found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_national_anthems. 2  Certainly, the interpretative tradition that affirms that nationalism and religion are a political tool of domination or negotiation between social groups is perfectly articulable with that which conceives it as a symbolic or cultural tool, with which men seek to give meaning to reality. It is the attention to this double aspect that led Marx to compare religion to opium, which can be used either as a sedative drug that makes domination possible, or as a medicine that mitigates physical or spiritual pain.

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generated by the Napoleonic invasions; the new local elites in need of myths to legitimize them; the romantic aestheticization of politics; and, in general, what Nietzsche called “nihilism” and George Steiner “nostalgia for the absolute,” gave strength to another type of foundational myth, which, unlike the republican myth, was based fundamentally on pre-­ political elements, such as those of historical origin, common destiny, national spirit, or ethnic unity. From that moment—that is, from the very first moment—nationalism was traversed by a tragic split between its secularizing slope and its resacralizing slope, which lies, perhaps, in the fact that in order to replace religion, it is necessary to resemble it. What interests us now, however, is to see how this tension emerges in the genre of the national anthem. On the marble surface of national anthems we will discover a crack through which we will descend to the tragic core of nationalism. On one side of the flaw, the national anthem sings to a nation-god, which claims to be necessary, eternal, unique, and singular; on the other side, it sings to a republic-society, which, as a human reality, can only be contingent, historical, plural, and not singular. For the sake of order, we will divide this tension into four pairs, in which one element will refer to the presumably divine character of the nation, while the other will refer to its unavoidably human character. Evidently, the unresolved metaphysical tension between the attributes of the nation-god and those of the nation-republic is not only expressed in the text of national anthems, but also in their music, in their genesis, in their history, and even in their modes of performance.

1 The first metaphysical tension we are going to deal with is that which arises between the presumed necessity (that it must inevitably be or happen) of the nation, all its expressions, in general, its national anthems, in particular, and its irreducible contingency (that it could perfectly well not have been, or could have been otherwise, because it is the result of an inextricable mixture of chance, collective currents and individual decisions). On the one hand, the national anthem is not only intended to express, but also to share the attributes of the national essence, in general, and that of necessity, in particular. The tension arises from the fact that neither the nation of which the anthems speak nor the text, music, performance, or composition of the national anthems is necessary, but rather contingent,

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like all human reality. We can then speak of the clash between the rhetoric of necessity and the reality of contingency. A first strategy of the rhetorics of necessity is to present the nation as a divine reality or a godly creation. It is a motif that appears in numerous anthems, such as those of Portugal (“Brave and immortal nation”), Russia (“Russia, our sacred homeland […] protected by God”), Bulgaria (“Dear Fatherland, / you are an earthly paradise”), Burundi (where the fatherland is a “sacred inheritance,” “may God, who gave us the gift of you, / keep you in our veneration”), the United States (“the sacred flag”), or Greece (according to which the country’s freedom was born “from the sacred / bones of the Hellenes”). It is not unusual for many national anthems to have a prophetic tone, appearing to speak from a transcendent, appropriately undefined realm. The fact that the divinity mediated by the anthem can be interpreted as God, history, destiny, or the nation makes it possible for the text to elicit greater consensus among a population that may have very different intuitions about the nature of the nation. In any case, this voice addresses the people by informing them of its nature or by ordering them to listen, see, watch, fight, or die. In the oldest anthems, the exhortation to fight or die for the fatherland is constant. Such is the case of “La Marseillaise” (“Let us march, sons of the fatherland”) and the “Congolaise” (“Let us all fight as long as we live / for our old black country”). On other occasions, it is not so much an exhortation to fight, but rather to work or to make an effort to build or enlarge the country. That is the case of the anthems of Chad (“People of Chad, rise up and get to work”), the Republic of Congo (“Let us live by our motto: / Unity, work, progress”), North Korea (“We burn with labor zeal”), Ivory Coast (where the patriots, besides being “legions,” are “artisans of your greatness”), Denmark (“honor every Danish citizen / who contributes what he can!”), Ghana (where the people wish to fight “with our gifts of mind and strength of arm”), Micronesia (“we all work together, / with heart, voice and hand”), or Australia (“Forward, beautiful Australia!”). There are numerous legends about the circumstances of how national anthems were written which try to suggest the existence of a state of inspiration, rapture, or enthusiasm that confirms their divine status. Such would be the case of the anthem of Bulgaria, which would have been written and set to music by Tsvetan Tsvetkov in 1885, the day before leaving for the Serbian-Bulgarian War; or the anthem of the United States, “The

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Star-Spangled Banner,” inspired by the poem “Defense of Fort McHenry,” which Francis Scott Key would have composed at dawn the day after the attack of Fort McHenry, when he felt happy to see the American flag flying. The lapidary style, full of hyperbole and archaisms, which characterizes these types of compositions, seeks to provoke in the listeners the impression that they are in front of a work of divine origin and, therefore, untouchable and necessary. Another resource that also contributes to generating a certain appearance of necessity is the abuse of consonant rhyme, acute and in esticomitia, that is, without enjambment, which not only helps memorization, but also braids the words in such a way that their combination seems inevitable, referring us to a closed, ordered, and totalized worldview. Additionally, the linearity of the melody, the simplicity of the harmony and the reiterative character of the rhythm contribute to the synthesized appearance of necessity or inevitability that usually impregnates the national anthem. As is well known, a good portion of national anthems were originally military marches, written by musicians of little fame. The only national anthems composed by illustrious musicians are those of Germany (composed by Franz Joseph Haydn), Austria (composed by Mozart), Vatican City (composed by Charles Gounod), and those of Bangladesh and India (composed by Rabindranath Tagore, better known as a writer than as a musician). The rest are composed by all kinds of second- and third-rank musicians, when not composed by bandleaders, military personnel, or politicians. Such would be the case, for instance, of the anthem of Portugal: composed by Alfredo Kreil, a romantic painter, ruralist poet, remembered only for operas like Donna Branca (1888), Irene (1893), or Serrana (1899); or that of the United States, whose music was composed in the eighteenth century by John Stafford Smith, a collector of manuscripts by Johan Sebastian Bach, who is solely remembered for having composed this melody, originally entitled “The Anacreontic Song.” Another proof of the simplicity, or mediocrity, of these compositions is the fact that some of these anthems were originally folk songs, or even songs composed to be sung in schools. The author of the current lyrics of the Russian national anthem, who was also the author of the Soviet versions in 1943, which received Stalin’s approval, as well as the 1977 version, in which all references to Stalin were removed, is Sergey Mikhalkov, a writer best known for his work in children’s literature. As if this were not enough, every country has a law on national symbols, which aims to precisely determine the music, text, and even the way

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the anthem must be played. The Russian national anthem, for instance, is regulated by the “Decree on the State Anthem of the Russian Federation,” which stipulates that it must be played on the television and radio at the beginning and end of programming (or, if it is continuous: at 6:00 a.m. and 12:00 a.m.) (Article 2) as well as at sporting events (art. 6), and when it is played, heads must be uncovered, the Russian flag must be seen, and the salute must be performed by military personnel (art. 7). Since repetition and memorization are also important mechanisms for welding words and sounds into the minds of listeners, in order to give them the necessary character required of any expression of the national essence, anthems are learned in schools and repeated on all kinds of occasions. The problems begin, however, when the contingency that characterizes every human reality insists on being evident in the text, in the music, and in the history of every hymn. To begin with, the alleged necessity of national anthems is belied by the eventful circumstances of their composition. Indeed, the fact that many anthems have been commissioned, or have won an official competition, implies processes of negotiation, debate, interests, bribes, and other contingencies that seem to have nothing to do with the plummeting of an essence from the heaven of Platonic ideas. Consider, for instance, the Australian anthem entitled “Advance Australia Fair,” which, although composed in 1878, was not adopted as the national anthem until 1984 after it won a popular vote, in which it competed with “God Save the Queen” and “Waltzing Mathilda.” The lyrics of the current Russian anthem were also chosen through a contest, won by Sergey Mikhalkov, who had merely revised the lyrics of his own versions of the Soviet anthem, from 1943 and 1977. Not only in its genesis, but also in the incessant modifications to which the title, lyrics, music, and modes of performance are usually subjected, it becomes clear that every anthem is the result of a constant social-political negotiation in addition to other, even more insecure forms of contingency and chance. Indeed, most of the national anthems do not seem to be the exudation of an essence, but rather a process of permanent reconstruction. It is also striking that the original version of the United Kingdom’s anthem, composed in the eighteenth century, was originally entitled “God save the King,” although in the twentieth century it became entitled “God save the Queen,” for the simple reason that the country came to have a

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queen. Additionally, the lyrics of the anthem of the Socialist Republic of Belarus had to be rewritten by Klimkovich and Karyzny at the end of the twentieth century in order to erase any reference to its Sovietic past. Similarly, the anthem of Cameroon, known as the “Song of Union,” was adopted in 1957, although its lyrics had to be rewritten in 1978 to adapt it to the new political situation. In general, the lyrics written, or rewritten, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century tend to attenuate some of the main motifs of nineteenth century nationalism as they tend to eliminate the reference to enemies, give more importance to the future, and desire a certain harmony with the other countries of the world. Another characteristic of national anthems that seems to contradict their claims of necessity is the fact that they are a constant call to defend the homeland, when necessary realities, precisely because they cannot be otherwise, do not need to be defended. This contradiction is nourished by the double characterization, masculine and feminine, of the fatherland, which, as Gutiérrez Estévez points out, is “father by its etymological root and mother by its grammatical gender,” something that is perfectly summarized in a locution like madre patria, which could be translated as “mother fatherland” (2004, 348). This ambiguity allows the fatherland, in its masculine, paternal, and patriarchal characterization, which refers to the divine attributes of necessity, eternity, unity, and uniqueness, to not be defended, but simply venerated. Oppositely, in its feminine and maternal characterization, it needs to be defended by its children, who, proud of being so, are willing to die for it (363). This double characterization, paternal and maternal, of the “mother country” implies that there is a convergence in national anthems into two types of religious poetry: the religious hymn, which is, as we said, a song of exaltation or veneration of the divinity, and the Marian poetry, that expresses the cult to the virgin. There are numerous examples of hymns that present the homeland as a mother who is at the same time protective and in need of protection. Only the anthem of Andorra, entitled “The great Carlemany,” has a direct relationship with Marian poetry since it considers that the country was created by the Virgin of Meritxell (“And from heaven she gave me life, / From Meritxell, the great Mother”). The other anthems have a more indirect or veiled link with this imagery. Think, for instance, of the anthems of France (“those tigers that, without mercy, tear their mother’s breast!”), the United Kingdom (where the Queen, invocation of the motherland, is

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considered “our mother, princess, and friend”), Belgium (“Noble Belgium, O dear mother, / To thee our hearts, to thee our arms”), Portugal (“The rays of that strong dawn / Are like mother’s kisses / That guard us, sustain us, / Against the insults of fate”), or Bosnia and Herzegovina (“You are the light of the soul / The flame of eternal fire / Our mother, the land of Bosnia / I belong to you”). On other occasions, the homeland is not compared to a mother, but infinite love is expressed toward it. Think, for example, of the anthem of Burundi (“Dear Burundi, worthy object of our tenderest love”), of Finland (“From our love shall rise / Your light, your brightness, your joy, your hope”), of Morocco (“In my mouth and in my blood, / Your breezes have stirred / Both light and fire”), or the Egyptian “Bilady, bilady, bilady” (“My country, my country, my country / You have my love and my heart” and “Egypt! Noble are your children”). Just as Marian worship is not limited to exalting the Virgin, but also, in the manner of errant knights, to defending her honor, national anthems urge patriots not to allow their mother country to be subjugated. Such is the case of the Belgian anthem (“We all swear, you shall live!”). Thus, between the passivity of the mother and the intangible need of the father, a third invocation of the fatherland appears, destined to perform the defensive task that the first cannot perform and that the second does not need. This third element of the national trinity is the fatherland composed of real citizens, a sort of national incarnation, or patriotic natura naturata, composed of courageous and heroic people, ready to die for the nation. The examples are numerous: in Costa Rica, the people are “brave and virile”; in Chile, “noble, constant and courageous”; in the Dominican Republic, “indomitable” and “brave”; and in Paraguay, “invincible bastion of heroism” (Amoretti 1987). The Belgians also promise in their national anthem to give their lives for the fatherland: “To you our blood, O fatherland!” A final obstacle of the characterization of the national anthems as an expression of the necessary character of the nation is that they lack a powerful tool of sacralization: beauty. Indeed, the main argument of one of the earliest prophetological works in Islam, entitled Proofs of Prophethood by Jahiz, stated that the beauty of the Qur’an is the miracle that validates the word of Muhammad, for it was so sublime that it could not be the work of a mere human being. That beauty, or what we regard as beauty, insufflates a certain sense of necessity into the texts of which it is predicated and is manifested in

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expressions such as “not a word of this text can be changed without spoiling it.” In affirming this through some poem, for instance, we are not referring only to the demands of rhyme or rhythm, or to the mere habit brought about by repetition or to the prestige we confer on tradition, but to the fact that each of the elements that make up that text seems to us, surely by the effect of beauty, to be necessary. On the other hand, ugliness, with contingency or accidentality, contaminates the elements that make up the works considered as such. In front of a work without beauty, we feel that its elements could have been different. Even more, we feel as if all that should not have existed. This is precisely what happens with national anthems, which are characterized by their haste, mediocrity, and bad taste. I know this is a value judgment, but I think there could be some consensus about the ugliness of many of the stanzas that make up national anthems (Castany Prado 2011, 49–69). Indeed, it is difficult to think that these texts could not have been different; that is, that they are not necessary, but contingent; accidental, like the nations they pretend to represent. Something similar happens with the music of the national anthems, which, as we pointed out above, is usually composed by musicians of little talent. Let us simply add the examples of the “O Canada,” which was composed by Calixa Lavallée, a cornet player of the Civil War who spent half his life travelling with theatrical companies and being a music teacher; or the Senegalese and Central African anthems, which were composed by the French musician Herbert Pepper, of whom no other work is known.

2 The second metaphysical tension that runs through every national anthem is that between the supposed eternity of the nation and its irreducibly historical character. Virtually all the anthems explicitly insist on the eternity or immortality of the nation, in general, or of one of its attributes, in particular. That is the case of the anthems of Russia (“They are your heritage for all eternity!” / “So it was, so it is, and so it will always be!”), Afghanistan (which, in the last of the six anthems it has had in the last hundred years, it is said that “This land will shine forever, like the sun in the blue sky”), Bhutan (“Her [the motherland’s] being is eternal”), or South Korea (“Till the East Sea dries up and Mount Baekdu wastes away / God keep us, long live Korea”).

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Sometimes what is meant to be eternal is not so much the homeland as the love for it. Such would be the case of the anthem of Croatia (“Croatians will love their nation,” “as long as the sun warms,” “as long as there is a living heart that beats”), of Ghana (“To serve you, Ghana, now and forever”), or Japan, whose title “Kimi ga yo” means “May your reign last forever,” and is an eleventh century poem in which the eternity -or the desire for eternity- of the nation is expressed through hyperbole: “May your reign, sir, / last a thousand generations, eight thousand generations, / until the pebbles / become rocks / and moss springs from them.” One way of suggesting the supposed eternity of the nation is to use an archaizing style and imagery, with the aim of inserting the nation in a very ancient or even timeless time. The truth is that the archaic and stilted lexicon, the abuse of hyperbaton, and the abundance of the subjunctive and the conditional prevent most citizens from fully understanding their own national anthem. The archaism of some of these words is real, as they are very old poems, such as the Japanese “Kimi ga yo” from the eleventh century, or the Dutch “Wilhelmus” from 1568. In the latter, for instance, some important words have changed meaning, such as the word Duitsen, which in the sixteenth century meant “Dutch,” whereas today it means “Germans.” For anthems composed at a later date, their archaism is more willful. Such is the case of a large portion of the Latin American national anthems. The archaizing obscurity of national anthems contributes to an increase in citizens feeling as if they are in front of a sacred expression, situated beyond contingency and change. In the European context, nationalism transforms the language itself into a pseudo-Latin; not so much in the sense that the romance languages have been Latinized, but in the sense that, by becoming partially incomprehensible, these come to fulfill the function of all sacred languages; that is, to evoke the listeners, creating an aura of mystery and sacredness. On the other hand, the mythological references not only refer us to the neoclassicism of French or North American enlightened republicanism, which had been influential in the processes of Latin American independence, but they also contribute by inserting the nation into the non-time of mythology (Gutiérrez Estévez 2004, 352). Such would be the case of the national anthem of Italy (“Italy has awakened / with the helmet of Scipio” and “her hair / slave of Rome”) or of Canada (“your temples are girded with glorious garlands,” “Your history is an epic / of the most brilliant feats”). In the Colombian anthem we find a homeland that forms

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“Thermopylae sprouting.” Paraguay is a “new Rome,” with its “Romulus and Remus,” which has lived hidden, “like Phoebus among clouds.” Chile has its “illustrious manes,” Guatemala a “paladion that protects its soil,” Mexico “olive garlands,” Uruguay wields “the spear of Mars / of Brutus the dagger,” and, in the case of Argentina, “Mars himself seems to animate.” This type of evocation can also refer to other types of mythology, such as the Old Testament (the “Jerusalem” of the United Kingdom, or the anthem of Israel), or Nordic (Denmark: “here still dwells Freya,” in reference to the Nordic and Germanic goddess of love, beauty, and fertility). References to mythologized historical events also contribute to the generation of that aura of eternity or non-temporality in which the nation is sought to be inserted. Thus, in the first version of the anthem of Chile, there is a reference to “the heroes of April the fifth” and the battles of Chacabuco and Maipó; in the anthem of Mexico, reference is made to “the immortal warrior of Zempoala” and to “the beloved ensign of Iguala”; in the anthem of Andorra, entitled “The great Charlemagne,” the nation itself states that “the great Charlemagne, my father, freed me from the Arabs”; and in that of Israel, “the hope of two thousand years, / of being a free people, / of being a free people,” which refers us to Psalm 87:2: “the hope of two thousand years, / to be a free people / in our land: / the land of Zion and Jerusalem.” It should be added that the fact that a large part of the population ignores these references, together with the obscurity of the style and the elevated and archaic character of the lexicon, generates that level of incomprehension necessary for the text to take on sacred resonance. As with their claims to necessity, there are numerous setbacks that prevent national anthems from succeeding in their attempt to present themselves as a timeless expression of the nation’s eternity. To begin, unlike certain folk customs or dances which manage to generate a certain appearance of ancestry, despite being recent inventions for the most part, as Hobsbawm points out in The Invention of Tradition (1983), national anthems cannot hide their recent historical origin. Such is the case of most of the Latin American national anthems which cannot be passed off as medieval creations, supposedly arising from the depths of the people, because they represent very recent historical processes whose temporal location is not forgotten because it always refers to the process of constitution, unification, or independence. Proof of this is that many national anthems have a precise “premiere” date. The Italian

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anthem was premiered on December 10, 1840, in the Sanctuary of Oregina, in Genoa; that of Bolivia, on November 18, 1845; that of Chile, on August 20, 1820; that of Mexico, on September 16, 1853; and that of Peru, on September 23, 1821. Likewise, the appearance of timelessness that anthems try to generate contrasts with the haphazard, and sometimes hasty, drafting process from which they often emerge. The national anthem of Côte d’Ivoire, for instance, is known as “L’Abidjanaise,” after the city of Abidjan, which was the capital until 1960, when the capital became Yamoussoukro. It is also unclear who wrote the lyrics of South Korea’s anthem, “Aegukga,” whether it was politician Yun Chi-ho or educator and independence leader Ahn Chang-ho. It is also strange that the anthem, which is a collection of haiku, was initially sung to the music of the traditional Scottish song “Auld Lang Syne,” until it was set to music by a Spanish-based musician, Ahn Eak-­tae, in 1937, although it was not officially adopted until 1948. As for the last Afghan national anthem, the “Milli Tharana,” which has been official since 2006, we know that the lyrics were written by Abdul Bari Jahani and the music was composed by Babrak Wasa, although both live in exile because of the war. On the other hand, in 1853, the Mexican president, Santa Anna, called a contest to find a Mexican national anthem, setting a deadline of only twenty days. The music of the Costa Rican anthem was also composed with some haste in 1852 with the aim of being able to be played during the visit that two delegations from Great Britain and the United States were going to make that same year. Something similar happens with anthems that have been composed by several people, such as, for example, the Cameroonian “Chant de ralliement,” which was composed by René Djam Afame, Samuel Minkio Bamba, and Moïse Nyatte Nko’o; or the anthem of Burundi, which was composed by a group of composers and then arranged by Marc Barengayabo. The music of Israel’s anthem, the “Hatikva,” is based on “La Mantovana,” a seventeenth century Italian melody which was also used by Smetana in the set of symphonic poems entitled My Homeland, and Ali Squalli Houssaini wrote both the lyrics of the anthem of Morocco and that of Oman, which is 8000 kilometers away. Also incongruous with the claims of timelessness of national anthems is the fact that most of them are true palimpsests, composed of successive layers of reforms, additions, deletions, and retouches, proving that they do

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not float in the world of Platonic ideas, but spin, like boulders, at the bottom of the Heraclitian river of history. In the case of the United Kingdom, there is no official anthem as such, but the “God Save the Queen,” the “Land of Hope and Glory,” or the “Jerusalem” are sung depending on the occasion. On several occasions, portions of the population have been polled to find out which hymn they prefer, with “God Save the Queen” coming last, which is precisely the composition that many take as the official anthem. On the other hand, Afghanistan has had six anthems in the last hundred years; Bulgaria had five since 1885; Spain had two; and Russia has made numerous changes to the lyrics of its anthem, in line with the drastic political changes in its midst during the twentieth century. Finally, the archaism of the lexicon and style can not only be attributed, as we did above, to the desire to give the anthem a certain air of timelessness that presents the nation as an indisputable fact, but also to the fact that the language has changed over the last two centuries. Thus, not only the anthem, but also the language, which is another of the essential attributes of the nation, supposedly eternal and immutable, is presented to us as subject to change, despite the vain Parmenidean efforts to “fix” it once and for all.

3 The third metaphysical tension that runs through every national anthem is that between the supposed unity of the nation and its irreducible internal plurality. As far as national unity is concerned, we find a constant explicit reference to union. Suffice it to cite the national anthems of Belgium (“And your invincible unity”), Bolivia (“sweet hymns of peace and union”), Mexico (echoing “the voices of Union! Freedom!”), Panama (which claims to have achieved “victory at last / on the happy field of union”), Paraguay (“neither oppressors nor servants encourage / where union and equality reign”), Uruguay (“equality, patriotism and union”), Venezuela (“strength is union”), Republic of Congo (“Let us proclaim the union of our nation / Let us forget what divides us” and “one people, one soul”), Central African Republic (“you reconquer your right, your unity”), North Korea (“We support you unanimously, / Korea, as a pedestal”), Ghana (“our solemn vow: / firm to build together / A nation strong in Unity”), or Micronesia (“that the union remains”).

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The calls for unity are constant in the form of totalizing expressions such as “sons of the fatherland,” “Mexicans,” “Paraguayans,” or verbs or possessives in the first person of the plural: “let us swear,” “let us live” (Argentina), “our vows and longings” (Bolivia), “our children” (Chile). When the poetic adopts an intermediate, semi-prophetic position between the homeland and the people, it addresses the nation by speaking of “your children,” as is what happens in the anthems of Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico, as well as in those of Burundi (“Accept the homage of your children”) or the Ivory Coast (“Your children, dear Ivory Coast”); and it addresses the people in the second person plural: “Hear, mortals (Argentina), “ pull out the dagger from the tyrant“ (Chile), “Grasp the steel and the bridle” (Mexico). On the other hand, almost all national anthems follows the structure, “either X or nothing,” which is nothing more than a translation into patriotic terms of the principle of identity (or of Roland Barthes’ tautologies). There is no alternative, there is no change; you are what you are or you are nothing. Thus, the Bolivians swear to “Die rather than live as slaves,” and the Argentines, to live “crowned with glory” or “die with glory.” The Chileans, for their part, swear in the name of the homeland, that it will be “either the tomb of the free, / or the asylum against oppression”; and the Guatemalan people, that they will “rather die than be slaves.” The Paraguayans shout “republic or death!”; the Uruguayans, “the Homeland or the Tomb”; and the Colombians put “duty before life.” The anthem of Burkina Faso also says: “Fatherland or death, we will win.” Unity is also thematized as a family unit in which the homeland, and its heroes, are father and mother, and the patriots, their children—“the children of the great Bolivar” (Bolivia), “your children, simple farmers” (Costa Rica), “your brave and haughty children” (Guatemala), “Homeland, Homeland, your children swear to you” (Mexico)—who are, in turn, brothers and sisters among themselves: “brothers of Italy” (Italy); “Only brotherly love reigns” (Panama); “my brothers” (Morocco). This unity also takes the form of “pueblo,” “peuple,” or “people,” which is not so much the translation of the Greek demos as of the Herderian “national community”: “the great Argentine people” (Argentina), “your people, valiant and virile” (Costa Rica), “For your people, with heart and soul, / Would prefer death to slavery.” (Guatemala), “Arise, oh People, your splendid sword” (Paraguay), “one great principle, / The king is not sovereign” (Colombia).

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The truth is that these people are not people divided into parties of democracy and intellectual debates, but instead they are unitary people, the protagonists of the populist discourse. That is the origin of the legends about the creation of the anthems, or the spontaneous and enthusiastic adoption of them by the people. An extreme case of populism with regard to national anthems is, for instance, the fact that the Constitutional Court of Peru ruled in June 2005 that the first stanza of the Peruvian anthem is the result of popular spirit and that its insertion expresses the will of the Peruvian people, which should therefore be kept intangible. In general, the unlimited confidence that populism places in the strength and goodness of the people leads it to distrust anything that could translate, denaturalize, defer, represent, or mediatize the expression of the people—that is, intellectuals, politicians, and laws which are central to democracy. As far as national anthems are concerned, the unity of national expression is always highlighted, while any intellectual or political debate that may have existed on the subject is ignored or silenced. On the other hand, this kind of unity always feeds on an external enemy. In the “Marseillaise,” the royalist soldiers of “impure blood” come “to slit the throats of your sons and wives”; in the Italian anthem, “the Austrian eagle / has lost its feathers”; in that of Holland, the people “defeat the tyranny / that destroys my heart,” referring to the Spanish empire of Philip II; in that of Andorra, “the great Charlemagne, my father, / freed me from the Arabs”; in that of the United States, it is evoked the “glare of rockets, of thundering bombs” produced by the British attack on Fort McHenry, which defended the port of Baltimore on September 13 and 14, 1814; in that of Burkina Faso, it speaks of “the rapacity that came to subdue them a hundred years ago” and criticizes “the cynical malice metamorphosed / into neo-colonialism and its little local servants.” However, most often, references to the enemy are of a general nature. For instance, in the Portuguese national anthem, where the words “contra os Bretões marchar,” that is, to march against the English who tried to expel them from Africa with the ultimatum of 1890, are now sung “contra os cañones marchar.” This vagueness in the characterization of the enemies responds to the fact that they are a structural necessity of nationalism, so that it should not be too specific, since, over time, enemies change, and the anthem could become obsolete, when, as we saw above, its duty or vocation is to pretend its eternity. Thus, in the Chilean anthem, although it is said that “he who yesterday invaded is now a brother,” referring to Spain, it then goes on to

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warn in a general way against the “audacious despot” and “the tyrant” because the enemy must always be there. The threat becomes, in some countries, consubstantial. Think of the first verse of the Polish national anthem: “Poland has not yet disappeared.” Also in the Portuguese anthem it is said that: “Portugal has not perished.” For this reason, not only is the enemy characterized in a very imprecise way, valid for any enemy, real or imaginary, that may arise, but it is also referred to using the subjunctive and the conditional. This way, the reference to the historical enemy is transformed in a constant threat against which we must always be alert. Such would be the case of the national anthems of Bolivia (“If a foreigner may, any given day / even attempt to subjugate Bolivia,…”), Costa Rica (“If anyone should attempt to besmirch your glory…”), Guatemala (“Wretched is he who dares in madnessstain your colors”), Mexico (“But if a foreign enemy should dare / To profane your ground with his step,”), Paraguay (“Against the world, if the world opposes it, / If the world dares to insult her security,”), or Venezuela (“And if tyranny/ Raises its voice,”). A constant threat corresponds to a constant alert. In a way, national anthems also function as songs of “alarm,” in the etymological sense of the term: as songs of mobilization or permanent symbolic mobilization. Such is the case of the national anthems of France (“To arms, citizens! / Form your battalions!”), Portugal (“To arms, to arms! For the fatherland fight!”), Chile (“The sacred love / of the fatherland summons you to the fight”), Mexico (“Mexicans! Brave follow!”), Italy (“Let us join together in cohort”), or South Korea (“In joy and suffering, we will love the fatherland”). The homeland is at the same time a paradise and barracks, and the leap between the two hypostases of the nation is practically immediate. That is the case of the French anthem, “all are soldiers to fight you [the tyrants and traitors],” of the Italian, “let us join together in cohort, / we are prepared for death,” of the Irish, “A soldier’s song” (“Amhrán na bhFiann”). In the Colombian anthem, the citizens are “soldiers without armour” and in the Mexican, the homeland has “a soldier” in “every son”; militarization is total. The Ivory Coast is made up of “legions full of courage”; Colombia appears to us sprouting “Thermopylae”; if Costa Rica were threatened, the people would change “the rough tool into a weapon”; and in Guatemala, “the plow that fertilizes the soil, / and the sword that saves honor” have been forged from the same material: the iron of the old chains cast by the homeland.

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There are some exceptions, such as, for instance, the anthem of Panama, which certainly does not refer to any kind of external threat, due to the historical circumstances in which it appeared as a nation, that is, as a US protectorate. From the musical point of view, the simplicity of the melodies stands out, which allows everyone, even children, to sing the hymn in unison; the regularity of the rhythm, which makes it possible for no one to be ahead or behind, since it is the whole town and not a group of professional musicians who must sing it; the monody, which generates a sensation of sonorous unity among the performers, as opposed to polyphony, which would give the sensation of disorder and dialogue; and, finally, the musical arrangements made for wind instruments, which, being transportable and having a strong sonorous power, allow the anthem to be played anywhere and even while parading, without forgetting that they are the instruments of the military bands. On the other hand, in the performance of national anthems, strictly fixed from a gestural and postural point of view, each subject loses his individuality to become a subject “interchangeable with the others and in that virtuality of exchange is produced not only the association of all the patriots with each other, but also that of each one of them with the sung homeland” (Gutiérrez Estévez 2004, 373). This is how the national anthem generates, as Benedict Anderson states in Imagined Communities, an experience of simultaneity, co-ownership, or communion. However, as was to be expected, the irreducibly plural character of reality, even more so if it is a human reality, constantly contradicts the illusion of unity that characterizes all patriotic expression, in general, and national anthems, in particular. Indeed, national anthems make no reference to the inevitable diversity of social, cultural, and even racial groups that exist in every country. Thus, the “invincible unity” sung in the Belgian anthem has “for its immortal motto: King, Law, Freedom,” which excludes, at the very least, republicans and anarchists. In general, the addressee of national anthems is usually the supposedly neutral patriot, and I say “supposedly” because it usually corresponds to the hegemonic human standard of the country in question. In the case of Latin America, for example, it is usually a man, Spanish-speaking and white, as there is never any mention of women, Indians, or people Afro-­ American people.

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Let us also think of the anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1995 to 1998, titled “One and only one” (Jedna si jedina). The homeland that is referred to in this anthem must not have been so united because three years later the Bosnian and Croatian Serb communities lobbied for it to be changed, as they did not feel it represented them, nor so unique because the only thing in which all countries are alike is that none are really homogeneous. Let us also remember how the melody of the anthem of the United States was composed by an Englishman. On the other hand, the melody of the Finnish anthem (whose original lyrics, which were written in Swedish by the Swedish-Finnish writer Johan Ludvig Runeberg, did not explicitly refer to Finland, but were added later) was composed by a German. As we said, the last of the five national anthems that Afghanistan has had throughout the twentieth century is the “Milli Tharana” from 2006. Written in Pashto, it contains the phrase “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) as a cohesive religious element, and it attempts to list all the ethnic groups that inhabit Afghan territory. But this inclusive effort has been futile, as non-Pashto-speaking communities and those not listed have felt aggrieved, and there are groups of Muslims who believe that a sacred phrase such as “Allahu Akbar” should not appear in a national anthem, interspersed with profane music and used in secular contexts. On other occasions, it is not so much the anthem as is the use that is made of it that demonstrates the irreducible national heterogeneity. Let us think of those cases in which only one part of the social-political spectrum appropriates the national anthem. Such would be the case, for instance, of “La Marseillaise,” which the National Front of France has tried to appropriate in the last decades, provoking, as a reaction, the tradition of booing the anthem before every football match. The truth is that no national anthem regards immigrants or refugees as an important national asset. On the other hand, as the official version is always shorter, there are always debates about which stanzas should be included in the official version. The incessant debates and modifications in this regard indicate that the nation is not as united as the anthem suggests. The examples are numerous. The current Russian anthem shares music with that of the Soviet Union, albeit with modified lyrics, in which all mentions of communism (Lenin, Stalin, the “unbreakable union”) are eliminated. Although during the last decade of the twentieth century, the

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anthem had been “The Patriotic Song,” Putin recovered the old anthem, which, despite the above-mentioned changes, is still associated with Stalin. As mentioned previously, what was the national anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1995 to 1998, the “One and Only” (“Jedna si jedina”), was deposed by the Bosnian government at the request of the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat groups, neither of which were mentioned in it. It was replaced in 1998 by an “Intermezzo without lyrics” which, in turn, was replaced in 1999 by a new, more vague and inclusive anthem (“we enter the future / together”), which also failed to satisfy people. All these changes tried to account for a diverse and changing nation, which never allowed itself to be fully codified. The official version of the Chilean anthem included only the chorus and the fifth stanza (which refers to “brave soldiers / who have been Chile’s support”); however, during the Pinochet dictatorship, the third stanza was added to the official anthem. Upon the return of democracy, in 1990, this stanza ceased to be official again, but Pinochet’s supporters and some members of the military insisted on continuing to sing it. This debate, which is implicitly referred to whenever the anthem is sung, is a palpable refutation of the unitary fiction of national anthems. An extreme case is that of Puerto Rico, where there are two versions of the “national” anthem: the official one from 1903, which is a conservative rewrite of the initial anthem and is considered to be too revolutionary, and the revolutionary one from 1868, written by Lola Rodríguez de Tió. Another indication of plurality within the nation is the fact that, as we have seen, even when overlaps between nationalism and religion are common, the Church does not always agree on which are the national units that God has established. Such is the case in Spain, where a part of the Church considers Spanish unity sacred, while other sectors of the same Church consider it to be a violation of the true national units dictated by God, whose nationalist claims would do nothing more than try to reestablish that order of divine origin. On the other hand, the fact that many of those who sing the anthem do not understand it in its entirety and end up modifying the lyrics, humming nonsense syllables or simply moving their lips, shows the non-unitary character of the nation. In most cases, these deformations are made by people who, because of their poor education, do not know certain terms or historical references, which shows that the nation is not unitary, but divided at least, into an upper class, in socioeconomic and cultural terms,

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and a poor, uneducated mass. According to Gutiérrez Estévez, “the result is paradoxical: the song that ritually constructs and expresses us as a collective subject, a nation, is not, however, apprehensible by those who constitute that subject” (2004, 353). To conclude this section, let us point out that, no matter how simple the melody and how regular the rhythm are, people either fall out of tune or move forward or fall behind, which is a real counterfactual refutation of the unity to which the anthem appeals.

4 The fourth and final ontological tension that runs through every national anthem is that between the claim of singularity or uniqueness of its nation, there are enormous similarities between all nations, in general, and all national anthems, in particular. No wonder Hobsbawm spoke of a “serial” fabrication or invention of traditions, including, of course, national anthems (2002, 273–318). Indeed, despite the fact that national anthems are hymns to the uniqueness or difference of the nation (“You are one in the world! / You are one of a kind” says the Russian anthem), when read and compared, they generate a disheartening sense of homogeneity. To begin with, many national anthems repeat whole expressions and verses. The adversative “fatherland or death,” with slight variations, appears in practically all the anthems. In the Argentinian and Bolivian case we find the same verse: “liberty, liberty, liberty.” Proof of this can be found in the numerous similarities between the national anthems that we have pointed out throughout this article, as well as the similarities between the flags, the monuments to the unknown soldier, or the rituals with which national holidays are usually celebrated. Suffice it to point out that one of the main paradoxes of nationalism is that those “cultural features that appear to be unique and worthy of patriotic (self-)celebration are often also typical of other nations and even designed after foreign models” (Sommer 1984: 48). The truth is that, by virtue of these similarities, most of the anthems are interchangeable with very few modifications and, on some occasions, without the need for any, as in the case of Panama and Venezuela whose anthems would function as passe partout hymns. Cyprus is the only nation that does not have its own national anthem, since, after its independence

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in 1960, it adopted that of Greece. The melody of Micronesia’s anthem is based on a German student song entitled “Ich hab’mich ergeben” (“I have surrendered myself “), which also served as Estonia’s anthem until 2009, the same time as it was adopted by the Miskitos of Nicaragua.

Conclusion Not only national anthems, but all forms of national cultural expression, as well as nationalism itself, can be understood by means of political and cultural theories, which present the double religious and civil nature studied here. In Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), Jean Paul Sartre said that the Enlightenment had failed to draw all the consequences of “the death of God,” an expression with which Nietzsche referred, among many other things, to the secularization of modern society and culture. National anthems are a good example of how our way of conceiving our political societies is not as secular as we thought, and that we must make a new effort of enlightenment in the face of the “self-blaming minority of age” from which, according to Kant, we will always be in the process of emancipating ourselves. According to Thomas Mann, the anthem of the Nazi party was a “mixture of a rag and a song of the brook elevating an obscure rogue to the status of a mythological hero” (2004: 23). With all due respect, it seems to me that this chapter has shown that something similar can be said of all other national anthems.

References Amoretti, María. 1987. Debajo del canto: un análisis del himno nacional de Costa Rica. San José: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Castany Prado, Bernat. 2011. Una estilística de los himnos nacionales en Hispanoamérica. In Tierras prometidas: De la colonia a la independencia, 49–69. Bellaterra: Centro para la Edición de Clásicos Españoles. Crespo, José Antonio. 2003. Nacionalismo, historia e himnos nacionales. Trayectorias: revista de ciencias sociales de la Universidad Nacional de Nuevo León 11: 57–75. Gutiérrez Estévez, Manuel. 2004. El amor a la patria y a la tribu. Las retóricas de la memoria incómoda. Revista de Antropologia 47 (2): 345–377. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. Mass-Producing Traitions: Europe, 1870–1914. In The Invention of Tradition, 263–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Leoussi, Athena S., and Anthoy D.  Smith (dirs.). 2001. Encyclopaedia of Nationalism. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. Mann, Thomas. 2004. Oíd, Alemanes. Discursos radiofónicos contra Hitler. Barcelona: Península. Roger, Antoine. 2001. Les grandes théories du nationalisme. Paris: Dalloz. Sommer, Doris. 1984. Foundational Fictions. The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 6

Redemption Songs: A Comparison of the Anthems of Modern Minority Nations Xosé M. Núñez Seixas

Sub-state nationalisms, comprising both national movements and national minorities, are primarily characterized by the absence of a nation-state of their own. They develop within the borders of multi-ethnic empires and nation-states, where their purported nation is not in a majority position. Unlike state-led nationalism, nation-building is fostered by political organizations, intellectuals and leaders, and diverse representatives of civil society.1 Although most national movements strive to attain full sovereignty and the chance of fulfilling the right to self-determination sooner or later, most of them also had access to some institutional resources as a result of their negotiation with the imperial powers and/or the national and “nationalizing” states to which their territories belonged. Diverse forms of  For the definition of national movement and the attempts at establishing stages of evolution, see Hroch (2015). 1

X. M. Núñez Seixas (*) University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_6

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territorial autonomy, home-rule statutes and self-government bodies also allowed national movements to achieve some degree of institutionalization and promotion from above of their own symbols, particularly of their flags and their anthems.2 One research hypothesis would be that contrary to state-led nationalism, a high degree of fluidity and malleability distinguishes the use of symbols by national(ist) movements, at least in their early and middle stages of development, when no institutional use of symbols and no rules for ceremonies and receptions have been laid down. The fact that they represent a community that is not yet recognized as a nation-state also means that minority nationalisms are not necessarily obliged to recognize the status of official anthems and flags in a written constitution, nor to accommodate the old symbols of the ancien régime and/or the state church (wherever this applies, particularly in protestant and orthodox countries) and the ceremonial rituals of the monarchy, to the new icons shaped by liberal revolutions, new forms of modern nationalism, and the secularization of the political community. However, precisely the (temporary or enduring) absence of nation-­ state institutions and national dynasties, at least until the First World War, could be seen both as an advantage and as an inconvenience. Depending on the degree of political cohesion and social integration of national(ist) movements, their degree of success and diffusion, symbolic fluidity could easily become a synonym for the lack of political articulation, scarce social background and internal division. Creating and diffusing strong national symbols, on which every faction of the movement can agree upon in spite of the diversity of political and social agendas, constitutes one of the most visible signs of the vitality and strength of a national movement. Nevertheless, no direct correlation really exists between the strength and level of political development and/or social success of a national movement, and the consolidation of a more or less “stable” set of alternative national symbols. Different flags can compete for symbolic hegemony within the same movement, some of them being used as party or factional banners that express their degree of political radicalism and/or social 2  Abundant data concerning the national anthems of the world nations, including some references to minority nations, can be found in Sousa (1890), Nettl (1967), Bristow (2006), as well as in Hang (2003), and the website: https://nationalanthems.info. The author has collected data concerning national anthems, particularly their lyrics and dates of writing and composition, from various repositories and collections, and has used this in several ways.

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orientation in the right-wing and the left-wing spectrum. Anthems, both in their number and in the variations undergone by their lyrics and melodies, can also serve as an appropriate mirror through which to observe the relevance of political divisions, and different interpretations of the national community as well as their  determining factors, within a national(ist) movement (Zikmund 1970; Elgenius 2011). In this respect, as in other aspects of the national(ist) programme, parties and organizations that represent the interests and identity of national minorities, i.e. those ethnic and national groups which have a kin-state where their nationality constitutes the majority (from South Tiroleans in Italy to Swedish speakers in Finland), usually have an advantage. Although they can display a particular pride in harbouring their own symbols, myths and dialects, they mostly tended to import the flag, the anthem and/or particular icons from the kin states alongside their own symbols (Coakley 1980; Hroch 2000). However, this has sometimes led to further enduring conflicts with the ethnic majority of their host states, which became even more acute when a newly founded nation-state was not ethnically homogeneous. Thus, in the case of Cyprus after independence, the Greek community adopted mainland Greece’s national anthem “Ode to freedom”, while the Turkish community retained the Turkish hymn. From 2004, institutional efforts to create a new wordless anthem in order to reconcile both communities have proved to be in vain. Certainly, adopting old anthems from the kin state also meant for national minorities re-converting their own pre-modern, imperial identity as subjects of the king or the emperor to a pan-national creed, which also erased some of their symbols of distinctiveness. In other cases, minority activists ascribed new values and meanings to their old, pre-national(ist) symbols. The South-Tyrolean anti-Napoleonic leader, Andreas Hofer, who commanded the Tyrolean rebellion against the French and Bavarian occupation in 1809 and was executed one year later by French troops in Mantova, became decades after this event a kind of symbol of Germanophone identity and cultural resistance through the Alpine region. Symbols of the alleged countrymen or co-nationals living beyond the state border may also receive a new added value in the kin state, and become the icons of a particular version, which is both irredentist and (usually) radical and rightist, of the nation-state identity. This is what has happened with the flag and coats of arms of Transylvanian Magyars in twentieth-first-­ century Hungary, which have also been embraced by some factions of the Hungarian far right.

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Finally, some of the symbols of minority nationalisms that were inherited from those states and/or dynastic symbols that represented ancient forms of pre-national statehood now claimed to be authentically national in order to uphold the continuity of the nation’s glorious past. The Polish double eagle is a good example of this, as well as the Flemish, Bohemian and Bulgarian coats of arms that feature a medieval lion. However, and particularly in those cases where the national movement emerged and first developed within an old-established and composite monarchy, or a multi-­ ethnic empire, symbols tend to emphasize the Republican and emancipatory character of the territorial claims that are associated with those icons. This became particularly evident during the “spring of nations”, the blossoming of nationalist claims that followed the 1848 revolutions. While flag colours usually adapted to the model of the French tricolore, with different combinations of tones in three-colour banners, the national anthems of the new nations sometimes attempted to vaguely emulate the “Marseillaise”, the song written to be used for the first time by French revolutionary soldiers in 1792. Since France was almost the sole Republic in Europe before 1910, the “Marseillaise” became the Republican and later the revolutionary anthem par excellence, which endured until the Russian revolution of 1917. However, younger national monarchies also took as a model the ceremonial march devoted to the British monarchy, “God save the King/ Queen”, whose first performance dates back to 1745, although it was not until the decade of 1870 when it became a venerated patriotic hymn.3 Apart from other examples, from Switzerland to Liechtenstein, the Icelandic unofficial hymn “Eldgamla Ísafold” (Ancient Iceland), which was written by the Romantic and nationalist poet Bjarni Vigfússon Thórarensen, adopted the tunes of the British anthem, while its anti-­ Danish lyrics made it a protest song against the imperial power of Copenhagen. It was very often the case that nationalist composers and writers adapted popular songs to the lyrics and tunes of consolidated anthems of old-established nation-states and empires, in order to make them more “respectable” and appropriate for solemn ceremonies and rituals. A good example is the Bulgarian anthem written in 1886 by a nationalist schoolteacher, “Schumi Maritza” (The River Maritza Roars), which was based upon the tunes of a folk song that was very popular among university students. 3

 On the vicissitudes of the British anthem during the nineteenth century, see Scholes (1954).

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From Regional to National Anthems The evolution of anthems and national songs of minority nationalisms is no substantially different from the general patterns of development of national anthems as a whole. According to some authors (Cerulo 1993), core nation-states have tended to adopt more “basic” anthems than their semi-periphery and periphery counterparts. However, there are many exceptions to this rule, which tends to overlook the fact that some “core” countries, such as Italy, Germany or the United States, emerged first as national movements or during the course of anticolonial revolts from the late eighteenth century, and had to choose from among a number of competing flags, anthems and symbols. Nevertheless, compared to old-established nation-states based on the evolution and/or transformation of ancient monarchies and empires, a main difference emerges between “minority” and “state-led” nationalisms. No dynastic anthems, no ceremonial marches or royal hymns were available. From the early nineteenth century, the anthems of minority nations crafted by composers and writers engaged with emerging national movements display a threefold origin. First, poems penned by Romantic or nineteenth-century writers in the minority language, which became the lyrics of a new national anthem after being arranged by composers who also identified with the cultural dynamics of the national (and/or regional) movement. If composers were not available, as was sometimes the case with exiled activists, lyrics could be borrowed from other anthems. Second, popular songs and melodies, whose tunes were often re-signified and transformed into national anthems. Third, in some cases compositions were recovered from the repertory of ancient monarchies or ancien régime territorial bodies, but many of them had purely religious origins, linked to a particular advocation (of a patron saint, a local cult of the virgin Mary, etc.), which was later secularized and re-signified. Some examples, which paradoxically correspond to islands, highlight this secularization of local religious hymns. Thus, the de facto national anthem for Corsican nationalists, the folk song “Dio vi salvi Regina”, can be traced back to an earlier period and was first written by a monk, Francis de Geronimo, in 1675. The song later became the symbol for the short-lived Corsican republic of 1735 and spread over the whole island as a popular hymn, which was invested in the second half of the twentieth century with a new meaning to strengthen the claim for Corsican nationhood. Similarly, the Maltese national anthem,

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“L-Innu Malti” (The Hymn of Malta), whose tunes date back to 1850, adopted new lyrics in 1922, when the poet Dun Karm wrote a religious hymn that portrays the island as a gift from God and His favourite land on earth. The anthem spread all over the island and throughout the Maltese diaspora and was first declared the colony’s anthem by the British governor in 1941. However, it increasingly became a symbol for emancipation from British rule. After Malta’s independence in 1964, “L-Innu Malti” was proclaimed as the official anthem of the new Republic. A third example is that of Iceland, where the lyrics of the first anthem (“Lofsöngur” or “Song of Praise”, also called “Ó, Guo vors Lands”, O God of Our Land), were written by Reverend Matthías Jochumsson at the request of the local bishop. The reverend found inspiration in a biblical text (Psalm 90) to commemorate the one thousandth anniversary of the first Viking settlement of the island, and basically adapted the verses of that psalm. As a national movement developed and gained social and political strength, as well as some form of institutional recognition and self-­ government territorial bodies, it was not unusual for the hitherto informal national anthems or revolutionary songs to acquire a new dimension. Now they could accompany or flank the state or imperial anthem, and therefore were required to be used in official ceremonies, thus conferring upon them a more formal dimension. This also meant that the previous fluidity and uncertainty that characterized the coexistence of variegated songs and anthems of redemption, which very often competed with each other, had to be steadily replaced with a dichotomy between, on the one hand, a pseudo-national anthem destined for official rites and ceremonies, and, on the other, the more vindictive songs that insisted on the maximum goals of the movement, or simply expressed the deepest feelings of many of its supporters. Moreover, there also were musical pieces (with or without lyrics) that were adopted by the followers of a national movement alongside many other members of the purported nation who did not necessarily share the newly shaped national identity, and which were given a broader meaning of territorial identification. Regional(ist) symbols, and regional anthems, were often more popular than national(ist) symbols and anthems, because they were able to encompass a greater diversity of sentiments of territorial belonging, from the local to the regional and the national (Núñez Seixas and Storm 2018). Therefore, the Catalan sardana song “La Santa Espina”, based on a poem written by Angel Guimerà (music by Enric Morera, 1907), as well as the bagpipe prelude “Alborada” (Pascual Veiga, 1880) in

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the Galician case, operated as symbols that were particularly popular among overseas migrants from the late nineteenth century, as well as among Catalans or Galicians who did not see themselves as members of a different nation, but simply as people sharing a distinctive regional, ethnic or linguistic sentiment of belonging within Spain.4 The same could be observed in the long endurance in the Spanish Basque Country of the regional song “Gernikako Arbola” (Gernika’s Tree), written by the Basque poet and composer José M. Iparraguirre in 1853, which represented the fueros or territorial privileges enjoyed by the Basque provinces within the Spanish monarchy, whose symbol was the tree that stood outside the Provincial Assembly House in the Biscayan town of Gernika. The anthem was respected and shared by almost all political factions, regionalist and nationalist alike, while the new hymn crafted by Sabino Arana, the founding father of the Basque nationalist movement, “Eusko Abendaren Ereserkia” (literally, Anthem of the Basque Race) in 1902, appealed to both traditional liberties and God, and used the new name coined for the seven  Basque territories, Euzkadi. Although the “Gernikako Arbola” remained the most popular patriotic song, Arana’s hymn became in 1936, and again in 1983, the official anthem of the Basque autonomous region. However, its popularity remains quite limited, as the radical faction of the movement gives priority to the alternative hymn “Eusko Gudariak” (Basque soldiers), and other factions stick to the “Gernikako Arbola” (Arrieta Alberdi 2012). Regionalized state-nationalism also added more complexity to the whole picture. There are even some examples of minority languages being used for anthems that were made official by ancient kingdoms, and even by modern nation-states that claimed to be the successor states or pre-­ modern monarchies. This was the case with the “Hymnu sardu nationale” (the Sardinian national anthem), written in 1842, which served as the ancient anthem of the Kingdom of Sardinia under Savoyard rule, and often played in the ceremonies of the kings of Italy until 1946. However, the anthem “Su patriotu sardu a sos feudatarios” (The Sardinian Patriot to His Lords), which was an anti-feudal folk song that recalled “La Marseillaise”, written on the occasion of the mass revolts of 1793–1796 4  See for a general overview on Spain’s sub-state anthems and patriotic songs the collection edited by Collado Seidel (2016), as well as Villares (2015). For the Basque case, see De Pablo et al. (2012). For the Galician case, see Ferreiro and López Acuña (2006), as well as Ferreiro (2007).

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against the Savoyard monarchy, incited resistance against landlords and absolutism. The anthem became much more popular among the twentieth-­ century Sardinian autonomists and later ethnonationalists, and has even been proclaimed as the island’s official anthem, being adopted by the Regional Council of Sardinia in 2018. A relatively similar case was that of the Flemish anthem “De Vlaamse Leeuw” (The Flemish Lion), whose two first stanzas were made the official hymn of the Flemish language community in 1973. The anthem was penned in 1847 by the writer Hippoliet Van Peene and the musician Karel Miry, who were active members of a theatre group in Flemish that was based in Gent. Their creation consciously took the name of a known romance of the same title written nine years before by the Flemish novelist Hendrik Conscience, one of the most prominent founders of modern Flemish literature. The hymn, whose stanzas clearly recall the style of “La Marseillaise”, evoked the past victory on the battlefield by the Flemish noblemen against the French king in 1302 (the battle of the Golden Spurs, in Kortrijk/Courtrai). Although written in Flemish as a vindication of the use of the vernacular, the anthem was first inspired by Belgian patriotic sentiment as a rejection of France’s purported desire to assimilate Belgium. The song spread from Gent all over Flanders. Later on, from the commemoration of the 700 years of the battle of the Golden Spurs onwards (1902), the “De Vlaamse Leeuw” increasingly became a national hymn solely of Flanders. It was now regarded as a symbol of Flemish cultural and political resistance against the predominance of the French language and the Walloons in the Belgian state. In spite of the concurrence of two more popular songs that had acquired symbolic connotation (“Schelde vloeien, Groeninge”, by Jef van Hoof, and “Lied van mijn Land”, by A. van Wolderode and I. de Sutter), “The Lion of Flanders” finally imposed itself as the most representative anthem of the Flemish movement, regardless of political currents and parties (Deprez n.d.). Similarly, the lyrics of the official anthems could also vary enormously, often as a reflection of political splits and agreements within the national movement itself. The official and institutional version could be replaced with informal texts that expressed a somewhat breezy vision of life, society and politics, which made it usable in informal contexts, from gatherings to banquets. Thus, the Slovenian national anthem “Zdravljica” (Toast), whose lyrics can be traced back to a poem penned by the Slovenian romantic writer France Preseren in the mid-nineteenth century, consists of a toast to the Motherland, its mountains and natural beauties, as well as to

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its unity and solidarity with other nations. Its seventh stanza was adopted by the Republic of Slovenia as its official anthem in 1991 (Kaser and Prochazka 2006, 344–346).

Transnational(ist) Anthems Adapting popular songs was not restricted to a given homeland; the invention of musical symbols could also entail a process of transnational circulation and cultural transfer. In several cases, also anthems were a result of the imitation by one nationality of another, through a process of hybridization that was frequently facilitated by cultural, historical and geographic proximity (Leerssen 2007). Thus, the lyrics and the tunes of the Flemish anthem “De Vlaamse Leeuw” were heavily influenced by contemporary German models, the “Rheinlied” written by Nikolaus Becker (1840, translated in Dutch the year after), and the similarly contemporary piece “Sonntags am Rhein” (1840) by the prominent German composer Robert Schumann. Moreover, the Frisian anthem “De Alde Friezen” (The Frisians of Old Times) was taken down by the writer and regionalist activist Eeltsje Halbertsma in 1875, while the lyrics were added one year later by Jacobus van Loon. The tunes had been clearly inspired by a popular German student song, “Vom hohen Olymp herab”, whose lyrics were written by the poet H.C. Schnoor. Nevertheless, “De Alde Friezen”, which praises the past glories of Frisia and its upcoming re-awakening, was adopted as a de facto regional anthem by the cultural association Selskip foar Fryske taal- en skriftekennisse, which contributed to its subsequent diffusion. “De Alde Friezen” is usually performed today in official ceremonies as the regional anthem of the institutionalized province of Frisia, within the monarchy of the Low Countries. Something similar occurred on both sides of the Pyrenees: the Occitan unofficial anthem “Se canta” has also been the provincial anthem of the Aran Valley in Catalonia since 1993, with the title “Aran Mountains”, and was also performed in Upper Aragon as a folk song, with Aragonese and Castilian lyrics. The Baltic region offered a further example of circulation and transfer of national symbols. Thus, the Estonian anthem “Mu isamaa” (My Motherland) was written in 1869 for the Estonian Music Festival (an equivalent to the Floral Games in Western Europe), adapting the melody of the song written by a German exiled composer that was destinated to be the new anthem of Finland. The anthem became official in the new Republic of Estonia in 1920 and was then banned during the Soviet

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period. However, with the “singing revolution” that started in 1987, up to 300,000 people sang the forbidden anthem together in a crowded demonstration, before the Soviet tanks. Another relevant example was the Pan-Slav movement, which influenced the development of the symbols of several national movements in East-Central Europe and the Balkans from the mid-nineteenth century, partly inspired by Russian nationalism. This was first expressed in the adoption of the Slav colours white, blue and red by the flags of several national movements, such as the Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes and the Serbs. However, it also had a further expression in the imitation and hybridization dynamics that developed in the field of patriotic songs and national anthems. The most influential source of inspiration was the Polish anthem “Mazurek Da ̨browskiego” (Dabrowski’s Mazurka), also known as “Poland Is Not Yet Lost”, was written in Italian exile along the lines of a mazurka by the Polish nobleman and writer Józef Wybicki in July 1797, two years after the Third Partition of Poland. It was originally a march for the Polish Legions that fought under the banner of the Napoleon’s Army. In 1918, the song became a de facto national anthem, though was not officially proclaimed as such until 1926 after other competing songs that had also become unofficial anthems were discarded. The tunes and lyrics of the Polish anthem served as a model for other stateless national movements, much in the same way as Polish nationalism was also regarded as a mirror, particularly by those that saw the Russian empire as an enemy. Thus, it was a source of direct inspiration for the Ukrainian national anthem, “Ще не вмерла Україна” (Ukraine Has Not Yet Died), whose lyrics were written in 1862 by the ethnographer and folklorist Pavlo Chubinsky, and set to music composed by the Greek-­ Catholic priest Mykhailo Verbytsky. The new anthem spread quickly over the Ukrainian lands scattered across the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian Empire and was later adopted by the short-lived Ukrainian Republic of 1917–1920, while a modified version became the official anthem of the independent state of Ukraine in 1992. Moreover, according to some accounts, Chubynsky apparently came up with the idea of writing the Ukrainian national anthem after listening to a group of Serbian students sing the hymn “Hey Slavs”, also influenced by the Polish national anthem, during a gathering of Serbian and Ukrainian young men. Some stanzas of the lyrics refer to the glorious Cossack past, appeal to the unity of the Ukrainians and their rejection of Moscow’s rule and contain some references to the “Slavic brothers” belonging to other nations, who also “took

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up arms”. However, the new, shorter lyrics proposed in 2003 erased problematic references to neighbouring nations, particularly Russia. Furthermore, the hymn “Hey, Slavs” also spread southwards. It was adopted in different versions as a national anthem by different Slavic countries during the twentieth century. Its lyrics were first written in 1834 as “Hey, Slovaks” in Czech language by the Slovak romantic poet Samuel Tomášik, during a visit to Prague, and were intended to praise Slavic pride in face of German cultural hegemony in Central Europe. The anthem, with different tempos and variations in its lyrics, was successively adopted by the gymnastics patriotic movement Sokol (Falcon) founded in 1862, the ruling fascist party of the first Slovak Republic (1939–1945), Tito’s Yugoslavia and the successor Republic of Serbia and Montenegro between 1991 and 2006.5 Today, “Hey Slavs” (“Hey Slovaci”) also serves as a second, unofficial anthem for Slovaks in and outside their homeland, particularly amongst their most nationalistic and right-wing factions. The certainly much weaker Pan-Celtic movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century serves as a parallel mirror to Pan-Slav dynamics, though on a more reduced scale. The Welsh national anthem, “Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau” (Land of My Fathers), goes back to 1856, when the poet Evan James wrote its lyrics, while his son, the musician and harpist James Nahda, composed the tune. The song, initially known as “Glan Rhondda” (The Banks of the Rhondda River) became increasingly popular through its performance at the regular celebration of festivals or Eisteddfods, since its inclusion in 1858 in a collection of patriotic songs at the great national Eisteddfod of Llangollen. From 1905 it was also played at sport events, such as rugby games, alongside the more “official” hymn related to the monarchy, “God Bless the Prince of Wales”, written in 1863 on the occasion of the marriage of Edward Prince of Wales, and the British anthem “God Save the King/Queen”. However, since 1975 the anthem “Land of my Fathers” has become established as the unofficial national hymn played at national and local events in Wales. Interestingly, the same tunes were adapted in two cases where cultural proximity and pan-nationalism were considered to be more relevant than geographic proximity. Thus, the tunes of “Land of my Fathers” were adopted by the national anthem of Cornwall (“Bro Goth agan Tasow”, Old Land of Fathers), which was used 5  Extensively on this, though particularly centred upon the former Yugoslav Republics, see Pavkovic and Kelen (2016), as well as Ristelski and Hysa (2016). See also some insights in Brock (1992).

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as an informal anthem alongside “The Song of the Western Men or Trelawny”. The latter’s lyrics were written by a local Anglican vicar in 1824, and deal with the imprisonment and death of the protestant bishop Trelawny in 1688, subsequently regarded as a kind of Cornish national hero (Jobbins 2014). They also crossed the channel and were exported to Brittany, whose national anthem, Bro Gozh ma Zadoù, adopted too the tunes of the Welsh hymn, while its lyrics were penned by the Breton-­ language writer, publisher, ethnonationalist activist and neo-druid bard, François-Taldir Jaffrennou, after visiting an Eisteddfod in Cardiff in 1899. From 1897 on, some Irish, Welsh and Breton activists launched the project of setting up a Pan-Celtic movement. Jaffrennou’s aim was to emphasize Celtic solidarity within the framework of the imitation dynamics that the bardic ceremonies and festivals in Wales and Ireland had also unleashed in Brittany from the late nineteenth century (Le Stum 2017, 40–43; Chartier 2010, 205–212, 253–255). A more complex example is that of the Macedonian anthem, which has also been used at times by some political factions in Bulgaria. The Macedonian national movement was overwhelmingly dominated by its most violent faction, represented by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) founded in Salonica in 1893 and aimed at attaining Macedonia’s self-government from the Ottoman Empire, and since 1919 from Yugoslavia and Greece, through armed struggle. In 1923, the organization was given its official anthem, the “March of the Macedonian Revolutionaries” (Марш на македонските революционери), which was also seen by some Macedonians as a pro-Bulgarian song. After the victory of Tito’s partisans in 1944–1945, a new official anthem for Macedonia as a part of socialist Yugoslavia was written by the communist writer Vlado Maleski, “Today Over Macedonia” (Денес над Македонија), with music composed by Todor Skalovski, while the IMRO’s former anthem was rejected and banned as a “Fascist song”. The new anthem, based on typically Soviet motifs and clearly resembling a military marching song, referred to the Homeland as a mother who mourns her sons fallen in battle, and also referenced some patriotic leaders of the anti-Ottoman revolutionary movement in 1903. After Macedonia’s independence in 1991, “Today Over Macedonia” was proclaimed the official anthem of the new Republic of Northern Macedonia, whose existence as a national entity was denied by some of its neighbouring states. However, the former IMRO’s march has continued to be sung since the early 1990s by some far-right Bulgarian political groups that claim to be the heirs of the

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Macedonian revolutionaries, as well as by the main political group (Macedonian Patriotic Organization, founded in 1922  in the United States) of North Americans and Canadians of Macedonian descent (Dimova 2013; Kolstø 2014, 186–188; Brown 2018, 211–233). In fact, the case of the Macedonian Americans is not unique. Migration to the Americas also contributed to the diffusion of symbolic anthems of stateless nations. Very often, migrant communities embraced enthusiastically distinctive symbols from the homeland, and sometimes, as with the Galician case, the first performance of the new anthem took place overseas. The Galician anthem, based on a poem written by the late-­nineteenth-­ century poet Eduardo Pondal, with its numerous references to the country’s natural beauties and its glorious past, was first performed with the tunes composed by Pascual Veiga at the National Theatre of Havana in December 1907. Due to the influence of migrant communities on their host societies, national anthems were often adopted by American institutions, police departments and army regiments. Thus, “Scotland the Brave” is often performed by the bagpipes’ band of the New  York and Boston Police Departments, among other North American and Canadian institutions.6

Do Lyrics Matter? Writing appropriate lyrics that synthetized patriotic fervour was a substantial ingredient for the making of a successful national anthem. The singing of an anthem is an event conditioned by a context. Therefore, although the act of asserting themselves to be national subjects has a subjective fundament, the meaning and persistence of an anthem can only be explained through contextual reading. However, no emotion can be evoked without a proper melody, which needs to be solemn but familiar, and as catchy as possible. National tunes are usually associated with moments of strong mobilization, with battlefields and mass demonstrations of joy and mourning. They also accompany the dynamics of reproduction of soft or banal nationalism: anthems and patriotic tunes usually become the muzak of a nation; the tunes that, like light background music, score everyday forms of popular nationalism. These dynamics certainly were of the utmost importance when a national anthem was not transmitted through the school system and the 6

 See several examples in Glick Schiller and Fouron (2001).

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state institutions, but had to endure and spread over the purported nationals through mass rallies, commemorations, political meetings and informal networks, above all family and friendships. In all these cases, the choice of a memorable, catchy piece of music was as important as lyrics, since melodies tend to be more recognizable by everyone than lyrics, which are often difficult to remember. It can even be sustained that most people ignore lyrics (or at least all stanzas), but must be able to reproduce and hum the anthem. In most minority nations, anthems were derived from musical pieces that had popular origins, as songs purportedly emanated from the nation’s soul (Cerulo 1995). The social efficiency of national anthems, and their success in motivating nationals to proactively identify with their homeland, mostly depends on the context, which attributes meaning and emotion to their lyrics and melodies. Their quality derives from their capacity of expressing in a particular way a number of life-and-death topics as authority, religion, love and devotion, using alternative rules of symbolic expression that usually transcend national codes and cultures (Kelen 2014; Mead 1980). Minority nationalisms aim by definition at attaining a form of institutional recognition that serves to compensate for the absence of statehood, or to fulfil a recent status of cultural and political decadence, annexation by an external power, or forced assimilation. The promise of a glorious future, to be achieved through national agitation, runs parallel to the appeal to all fellow countrymen to discover the truth, the soul of the nation, and join the cause of national liberation. In these circumstances, anthems do not restrict themselves to reasserting national belonging and the nationals’ eagerness to uphold independence and loyalty to the state and its embodying institutions (the Republic, the king, the Constitution, etc.). They often represent the desire to convert compatriots unaware of their national identity into true believers. They also express the wish to awaken a “dormant” nation, whose identity needs to be re-activated through the remembrance of the examples in the past of heroes, kings, battles and glorious deeds (also of a peaceful nature), but also of glorious defeats that are pending due reparation in the upcoming future. The re-awakening of (invented or reconstructed) tradition often constituted a first step. The interest in (and the construction of) national folklore by nineteenth-century musicologists and ethnologists contributed to select which instruments, rhythms and pieces should be considered as the most genuine, discarding all those which were considered external interferences that were provoked by the state’s influence, or by undesired

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contact with alien populations (Hopkin 2018; Baycroft and Hopkin 2012). Therefore, purportedly popular instruments were (re)discovered and transformed into the real symbols of the subjugated nation. This came alongside the alleged “recovery” of true popular dances, very often from a given county or area, which were very often categorized as “national dances” and extended all over the territory of the minority nations. The case of the sardana in Catalonia serves as a case-in-point, as does the typification of the muiñeira (mill dance) in the Galician case and its transformation into a pseudo-national dance (Marfany 1995; Costa Vázquez 2001). Something similar happened with musical instruments such as the bagpipes in Ireland, Scotland, Brittany and Galicia under the pretext of the recovery of the purportedly Celtic tradition of these lands, as well as the txistu (Basque flute) in the Basque Country. Choirs were also a matter of typification and mythification, from Wales and Corsica to Galicia and Catalonia. Not unsurprisingly, the specific nature of choral singing was interpreted as an ideal representation of the collective and solidaric character of the nation, as a harmonious ensemble of (mostly male) voices that represented the national community united in its diversity, particularly when this tradition was conveniently secularized over the course of the nineteenth century (Morgan 2012; Costa Vázquez and López Silva 2019; Muntané 2016; Narváez Ferri 2005). Nevertheless, beyond the selection of purportedly genuine musical instruments, the resignification of choral singing, and the intellectual construction of what was really popular and what was not, a basic feature of national anthems are their lyrics. Their message condenses the most symbolic elements of the nationalist project. As in the case of state nationalisms’ anthems of liberal-revolutionary origin, which in part followed the pattern established by “La Marseillaise”, some minority nations’ anthems tend to emphasize slogans such as the idea of the nation in arms and its sacralization, the defence of the motherland against an invader, and the hope of attaining victory by overcoming all difficulties and sufferings. However, most national anthems refer to fallen heroes and past victories against the main national other or the “oppressor”, the golden age of the past usually dated back to the Middle Ages, examples of resistance against invader, and very often the defeat against the national “oppressor”.7 7  A good example for this are two of Scotland’s unofficial anthems, “Scots Wha Hae and Flower of Scotland”, which deal with the medieval battle of Bannockburn in 1314, where the king Edward II of England was defeated by the Scots led by Robert I (Robert Bruce).

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Sometimes, patriotic songs also refer to popular revolts that united social claims with ethnic/national vindication, such as the anthem “Els Segadors” (The Reapers) in Catalonia, which evokes the peasants’ revolt of 1640–1652 (the war of the reapers) against their own landlords, but within the context of the Catalan rebellion against the king of Spain Philip IV. The current lyrics, which appeal to the necessity of resurrecting the reapers’ rebellious attitude in modern times, even by using violence (“Let us swing the sickle!/ Let us swing the sickle, defenders of our land!), were written in 1899, using some elements that had origins in oral tradition and which had been previously collected by the Catalanist writer Manuel Milà i Fontanals some years before. The tunes were composed in 1892 and adapted the melody of a previously existing popular song (Anguera 2010). A further argument frequently developed in these anthems is the admiration of the homeland’s natural beauties, from its mountains and rivers to its coasts and forests, in poetic tones that owed no little part of their naturalist character to the romantic literature of the second third of the nineteenth century. This is the case with the Czech national anthem, “Kde domov muj” (Where is my Motherland?), which relies on a fragment of a play written in 1834 by the writer Josef K. Tyl, to which a melody was later added. The hymn mostly praises the images evoked by the spring, the rivers and mountains of Bohemia. Similarly, the Occitan unofficial anthem and very popular folk song “Se canta”, whose origins purportedly trace back to the late-medieval count of Béarn and Foix Gaston Fébus, also deals with the collective contemplation of mountains, in this case the Pyrenees. Certainly, appeal to the quiet contemplation of forests, ecstasy before the unsurmountable beauty of mountains and rivers, may be considered as a romantic act of bourgeois perception of the natural environment, which sees in it not only God’s hand, but a privilege to be observed and enjoyed by sensitive human beings. However, this is not only a solipsistic contemplation by individuals, but a collective one: the imagined community of compatriots lives in the best land of the world. This is not a “conquered” nature as a result of material progress, a landscape made of cities, factories or navigation channels, but a wild, eternal nature that also serves as a metaphor for the immanent and enduring essence of the nation’s soul, also related to the glorious past: “Old mountainous Wales, paradise of bards,/ Each cliff and each valley to my sight is fair,/With patriotic sentiment, magic is the sound/ Of her rivers and brooks to me”, runs the second verse of the Welsh anthem (Meyer 2018).

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Sometimes, the wild and rough character of snowy mountains, troubled rivers and impenetrable forests inhabited by wild beasts was not only expected to raise patriotic emotions and national pride of one’s homeland, but also functioned as a metaphor for the process of national reawakening. The lyrics of the Bulgarian hymn deal with the beautiful character of the country’s nature, but they also stress the eagerness of the nation’s sons to go to battle and defend their homeland’s freedom, following the call of the roaring of the troubled water of the River Maritza. Similarly, the stanzas of the Slovak patriotic song “Nad Tatrou sa blyska” (Lightning over the Tatras), written in 1844, extensively referred to a storm over the Tatra mountains, which was supposed to bring danger and unrest to the nation, and the need to counteract the threat; the thunders would help awaken the Slovaks (“the thunders lightnings/ are rousing the land/ to wake it up”). A similar example was that of the Croatian national anthem “Lijepa nasa domovino” (Our Beautiful Homeland), which dates back to 1835 and has been used since then with little variations in its lyrics, both as an ethnic hymn of the Croats living in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and other lands, and later as an official state anthem. Parts of this song were incorporated to the official anthem of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between 1918 and 1941, then it served as official anthem of the Fascist-ruled Independent State of Croatia and, later on, of the Republic of Croatia, which became independent in 1991 (Mratinić 2011). Nevertheless, even harmless lyrics that do not explicitly refer to the national other, battles or golden ages, but which contain plenty of references to nature and blue skies, may become subversive for state authorities when their underground transmission and collective singing are interpreted as an expression of conscious resistance. Once again, the contextual reading of apparently innocent lyrics determines their interpretation by the actors involved. The Latvian national anthem “Dievs, svētı ̄ Latviju!” (God Bless Latvia), whose music and lyrics were written by a nationalist activist in 1873, became the official anthem of the Republic in Latvia between 1920 and 1940, and again in 1990. During the Soviet period, the hymn was banned, and was fiercely repressed by the Communist regime. However, the lyrics of the anthem are far from any solemnity. Based on a popular folk song, it stresses the beauty of the land, its landscapes and the inherently goodwill of the Latvian people. The same could be affirmed about the South Tyrolean song “Bozner Bergsteigerlied”, written in 1926 and transmitted as a symbol of resistance to Italian enforced assimilation.

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One or Several Anthems? Once some of those sub-state national movements succeed in attaining the desired statehood, from Norwegians in 1905 to Slovaks in 1939 and 1993—the Czechoslovak Republic between 1918 and 1939, and 1946 and 1992, maintained two co-official anthems, those which had been already consecrated by the respective national movements—Poles in 1918, Latvians in 1918 and again in 1990–1991, and Croats and Slovenes in 1991, they usually did not substantially change their anthems, which had been used as unofficial patriotic songs for decades. In the case of Norway, following independence by plebiscite in 1905, no official national anthem was proclaimed by the new state authorities until December 2019. To that date, a number of songs and popular hymns, such as “Sonner av Norge” (Sons of Norway) and “Ja, vi elsker dette Landet” (Yes, We Love This Land), which traced back their origins to the mid-nineteenth century, were used indistinctively as de facto national anthems. However, only the first was commonly used in official ceremonies. This was partly related to the fact that two co-official standard versions of the national language coexisted, but also with the creation of a monarchy, for which no ceremonial march or anthem was subsequently crafted. There is no general pattern that suggests that successful national movements tend to have more symbolic “stability” than unsuccessful or less developed ones. Even when an anthem is proclaimed the official symbol of a regional government or the newly achieved national state, this does not always put an end to previous discussion about the pre-eminence of symbols. Apart from the Basque case, another good example of this is Scotland. The Scottish national movement has not yet proclaimed an official anthem, but three unofficial hymns coexist. First, “Scots Wha Hae” (Scots Who Have), whose tunes purportedly originated in the old traditional song “Hey Tuttie Tatie”, to which lyrics were added in 1793 by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, which supposedly reproduce a speech given by King Robert Bruce (Robert I) to the Scots before winning the battle of Bannockburn (1314) against the invading English army. However, this anthem was steadily replaced in the Scottish public sphere from the late nineteenth century with a second piece, “Scotland the Brave”, whose tunes trace back to 1878 and are usually performed by bagpipe bands, while the lyrics were added in the 1950s. Finally, the more modern “Flower of Scotland”, written in the mid-1960s by a folk group, has been commonly performed at sport events and some mass rallies since the early 1990s.

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A third example is that of the South-Tyrolean movement, where to date no official anthem has been adopted, not even by the autonomous province of Südtirol/Alto Adige, which is the Germanophone part of the Trentino-Alto Adige region. This is partly due to the traditional coexistence of two patriotic songs among South Tyroleans. The first one, the so-called Andreas-Hofer Lied or Zu Mantua in Banden, is a folk song whose lyrics were put down in 1831 by the German writer Julius Mosen, and whose tunes were composed thirteen years later by Leopold Knebelsberger. The lyrics deal with the tragic death of Andreas Hofer, who also became a symbol of the twentieth-century Pan-German movement and, since 1919, of Tyrolean resistance to Italian policies of forced cultural assimilation. However, the fact that the song was proclaimed the regional anthem of the Austrian Land of Tyrol (the Northern and Eastern parts of the former county of Tyrol in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy) in 1948 made it difficult for South Tyroleans, who were subjects of the Italian Republic, to adopt it as national anthem. Singing the hymn of a neighbouring region belonging to another state could be interpreted by Italian authorities as a public expression of Austrian irredentism, something that the South-Tyrol autonomists have tended to avoid since 1946. A second hymn, the “Bozner Bergsteigerlied” (Bozen mountaineer song), written by the cultural activist Karl Felderer in 1926 and based on the tunes of a German folk song (“Der vergnügte Schreiner”), became a popular protest song against the italianization campaign set in motion by the Fascist state, which aimed at totally erasing the German language south of the Alps. In order to avoid Italian censorship, the lyrics of this hymn extensively deal with the geographic extension of the Tyrolean lands and mountains, by naming them. By way of response, Italian fascists performed an alternative song by using different lyrics with the same tunes, with the title “Il Brennero è italiano”. This version claimed South Tyrol to be in turn inherently Italian, whose last stanza insisted: “Up there, up there, we will stay/Yes, yes, we will stay”. Since 1948, the song was readapted and increasingly became an unofficial anthem of the Germanophone province of Alto Adige/Südtirol, which aimed at reminding German-speakers of their loyalty towards their native land and culture. Also, in Occitania, there is the case of the popular anthem “Se canta”, of which there are different versions in the several Occitan dialects; it has coexisted since the mid-nineteenth century with two alternative hymns. The first was the exclusively Provençal song “Coupo Santo” (The Holy Cup), which is sung in Provençal with lyrics written by the Occitan Nobel

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Prize writer Frédéric Mistral to commemorate the fraternal link that united Occitania and Catalonia, on the occasion of a banquet held in July 1867 by the cultural association Félibrige in Avignon, where a silver chalice was offered by the Catalan félibres to their Provençal counterparts as an acknowledgement for having given shelter to the Catalan liberal Victor Balaguer during his recent exile in France. The second song, “De cap tà l’immortèla” (To the Edelweiss), is a folk song composed in 1978 by an Occitan-speaking band, Nadau, which became so popular all across Occitania that it enjoyed equal popularity with “Coupo Santo” and “Se Canta”. Thus, “De cap tà immortèla” became an unofficial anthem for a stateless nation whose territorial extension remains the subject of debate among Occitan activists themselves (Rafanell 2006, 51–134). Similarly, political splits within the national movement may also have as a consequence the emergence of different symbols, either invented or simply constructed through a process of selective appropriation of the past. Older national symbols constructed by a faction can be later adopted by a more radical party or organization of the national movement. A good example is the path followed by the song “Eusko Gudariak”, whose lyrics were written at the beginning of the 1930s by a nationalist activist close to the youth section of the mainstream Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), and whose tune is taken from a Northern Navarrese folk song. Since the 1970s, it has been a symbolic hymn for the most violent and radical faction of Basque nationalism, first as an anti-Francoist icon and later as a song performed at mass rallies, funerals and demonstrations of Basque radical nationalism, while the original promoters of the song, aligned with the moderate faction of the movement, tend to discard it (Casquete 2012).

Some Conclusions As Anne-Marie Thiesse has affirmed, rien de plus international que le nationalisme: there is nothing more international than nationalism itself (2001, 11). National movements, nationalizing states and state-led nationalisms tend to regard themselves as unique pieces of a world mosaic comprising nations. However, the transnational circulation of models of mobilization, political vocabularies and theoretical designs of the nation is as old as the emergence of modern nationalism in the late eighteenth century. Cultural transfer and selective appropriation were key ingredients for imagining one’s own nation (Leerssen 2007; Núñez Seixas 2019).

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This also affected national symbols, from flags and coats of arms to anthems. On the one hand, the upholders of the liberal-revolutionary model of the nation usually looked to France and the United States. On the other hand, those who wanted to reconcile the principles inherited from the ancien régime with the new vocabulary of the modern nation, and therefore aimed at a survival of monarchy under the form of national(izing) monarchies, had a certain preference for Great Britain as a model of steady political evolution. While “La Marseillaise” as a national anthem evoked for many liberal nationalists in Europe and the Americas the idea of the nation in arms marching towards liberty, “God save the King/Queen” was regarded as a model that awarded some kind of respectability and honourable virtues of the emergent nation. Within this general framework, the impact of Romanticism and the “spring of nations” unleashed by the liberal revolutions of 1820 and particularly 1848 also meant a re-discovery of smaller folk cultures, the resurrection of hitherto minority languages, and the crafting of national histories, traditions and folklore, as part of the supposedly immanent soul of the people, a Volksgeist. However, even Johann-Gottfried Herder, who coined the concept, admitted that external influences were also a distinctive ingredient of that soul (Meinecke 1936/2023, 527–530). This also meant the purported recovery of folk songs, whose tunes were often re-­ signified as unofficial national anthems through their musical adaptation and, more importantly, the addition of lyrics that emphasized their new patriotic character. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, the interpretation of the lyrics can only be contextual. Socio-political and cultural environment alone ascribed real meaning to apparently innocuous lyrics and tunes, both by true believers and by those who opposed singing the hymn. While some of those lyrics expressed nostalgia for the golden ages of the invoked nation, its victories and defeats against the national other, some other lyrics were imbued with religious character and stressed God’s hand in creating a particular nation. But the reappropriation and re-­ semanticization of folk songs was just one side of the coin. The other consisted of cultural transfers and appropriations, as can be seen in the examples of Pan-Slav and Pan-Celtic hymns. Overseas migration and exile also played a certain role in encouraging the circulation of anthems and patriotic songs, which were easily re-adapted to national circumstances and political interests. To what extent is it possible to refer to the anthems of minority nationalisms as a specific variant of the comparative study of national symbols

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and anthems? Most nation-states in present-day Europe have emerged from sub-state nationalisms opposed to multi-ethnic monarchies and empires, from Norway and Finland to Bulgaria, Croatia, Malta and Cyprus. Usually, national movements were characterized by the malleability and coexistence of different anthems, which sometimes corresponded to the preferences of particular factions and ideological splits. The fact that protocolary functions reserved for an official anthem were not yet required, such as state ceremonies, international sport events and the receiving of foreign representatives, also had a temporary advantage: no decision had to be taken in order to legally establish what the national symbols were. However, when minority nations were embodied with territorial self-­ government institutions, from Catalonia to Wales and Flanders, some initial choices had to be made. In spite of this, no general pattern can be easily identified. The United Kingdom lacks today a legally defined national anthem, and the United States took 150 years to establish which one of the different patriotic songs that coexisted for generations was the official one. Minority movements such as those of Brittany and Corsica display greater unanimity regarding the choice of the national anthem than more successful movements, such as the Scottish one. In the end, national leaders and nationalist actors are those who decide which symbols are more suited to represent their imagined communities, and what is more important. The most relevant aspect remains undoubtedly the mobilizing nature of anthems, their ability to arouse emotions and feelings of belonging, as well as their capacity to condense the main attributes ascribed to a nation, above political rivalries and social splits.

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Hopkin, David. 2018. Regionalism and Folklore. In Regionalism and Modern Europe. Identity Constructions and Movements from 1890 to the Present Day, ed. X.M. Núñez Seixas and E. Storm, 43–64. London: Bloomsbury. Hroch, Miroslav. 2000. In the National Interest. Demands and Goals of European National Movements of the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Perspective. Prague: Charles University. ———. 2015. European Nations: Explaining Their Formation. London: Verso. Jobbins, Sian. 2014. The Welsh National Anthem: Its story, Its meaning. Aberystwyth: Y. Lolfa. Kelen, Chistopher. 2014. Anthem Quality: National Songs: A Theoretical Survey. London: Intellect Books. Kolstø, Pål. 2014. Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe. London: Ashgate. Le Stum, Philippe. 2017. Le Néo-druidisme en Bretagne. 2nd ed. Rennes: Éditions Ouest-France. Leerssen, Joep. 2007. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Marfany, Joan-Lluís. 1995. La cultura del catalanisme: el nacionalisme català en els seus inicis. Barcelona: Empúries. Mead, R. 1980. The National Anthem. In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 46–75. London: Macmillan. Meinecke, Friedrich. 1936/2023. Die Enstehung des Historismus / A xénese do historicismo. Munich, Oldenburg, Santiago de Compostela: USC/ Fundación BBVA. Meyer, Jan-Henrik. 2018. Nature: From Protecting Regional Landscape to Regionalist Self-Assertion in the Age of the Global Environment. In Regionalism and Modern Europe, ed. X.M.  Núñez Seixas and E.  Storm, 65–82. London: Bloomsbury. Morgan, Prys. 2012. From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period. In The Invention of Tradition, ed. E.J.  Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, 43–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ̵ Mratinić, Berislav. 2011. Sto dvadeset godina od prvog izvodenja ‘Lijepe nase domovine’ kao himne. Arhivski Vjesnik, Zagreb 54 (1): 277–281. Muntané, Miquel-Lluís. 2016. El moviment coral dins el teixit social català. Barcelona: Dalmau. Narváez Ferri, Manuela. 2005. Orfeó Català, cant coral i catalanisme (1891–1951). PhD thesis, University of Barcelona. Nettl, Paul. 1967. National Anthems. 2nd ed. New York: Frederick Ungar. Núñez Seixas, Xosé M. 2019. Patriotas transnacionales. Ensayos sobre nacionalismos y transferencias culturales en la Europa del siglo XX. Madrid: Cátedra.

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PART II

Case Studies

CHAPTER 7

(Re)Sounding Nations: Anthems and the Politics of Performing and Listening in Wartime Europe (1936–1945) Iván Iglesias

In wartime, music is unavoidable in the construction and maintenance of nationhood, with anthems as its most ubiquitous expression.1 However, sound and listening have not been major concerns of studies on patriotic songs. Even the most exhaustive and brilliant analyses of anthems are exclusively focused on lyrics. If Brian Murdoch sees music as a mere vehicle for poetry (Murdoch 1990), F. Gunther Eyck classifies national songs 1  This chapter was written within the framework of the research project ‘Música popular y cultura urbana en el franquismo (1936–1975): sonidos cotidianos, dinámicas locales, procesos transnacionales” (PID2021-128307OB-I00), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

I. Iglesias (*) University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_7

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only according to their lyrics (Eyck 1995). Although the most common theme of an anthem’s lyrics is courage or bravery (Pavković and Kelen 2016, 28), no words are necessary to hear heroism after centuries of fanfares and marches that combined timpani and brass instruments, of rising fifths, sixths, and eights, of dialectical forms that end in triumphant major modes.2 Christopher Kelen recognizes that anthems’ texts do not differ much from nation to nation, which he calls the paradox of the “uniformity of differences” (Kelen 2014). Probably, the most memorable component of anthems is their music, not their lyrics. If anthems distinguish nations abroad, it is largely through its sound. Few would recognize the lyrics of the Russian or the German anthems in Southern Europe, but many could identify the tunes. In fact, history shows us that it is easier to change the text than the music to an anthem. Moreover, lyrics are sound, too: we know that how words are sung is crucial to their meaning. This chapter seeks to integrate anthems and its effects into the cultural history of Europe during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Second World War (1939–1945). It is therefore an attempt to see the 1936–1945 period from a transnational perspective, avoiding Spanish exceptionality. As Enzo Traverso has claimed, the armed conflicts that devastated Europe from 1914 to 1945 had both national and transnational components, which cannot be understood independently. This is radicalized from 1936, with the war in Spain, to continue later in a large part of the continent, perhaps more noticeably in France, Italy, Greece, or the Balkans (Traverso 2016, 53–58). Furthermore, as a study of war as an acoustic environment, a “sonic warscape”, this is also a contribution to sound studies and aural history. In that sense, its aim is to examine anthems not only as music, but in relation to the control of sound and listening. I will focus on three different, but interconnected, domains: composition, performance, and violence. Limiting the study to Europe allows me to go transnational, but staying aware of Western notions of sound and listening without positioning them as universal through a seemingly neutral ontology (Sykes 2018).

2  As Scott Burnham (1995) has analyzed, a dialectic narrative, underpinned by Ludwig van Beethoven’s heroic music, its influence, and its diverse appropriations since the early nineteenth century, has at the same time adapted and dictated the ways of listening in Western modernity. It is not by coincidence that the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has been elected as the anthem of the European Union.

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Composing the Nation: Old and New Anthems for Wartime Most national anthems of Europe played and sung during the 1936–1945 period predated this era. In fact, many of these songs had actually been used in the nation-building process of diverse countries. However, they acquired new meanings in wartime. “La Marseillaise”, a battle song originally titled Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin and written in 1792, was declared national song by the French Republic in 1795, disdained by the rulers during the Empire, and adopted as the national anthem of France in 1879 (Vovelle 1998). From 1936, as a revolutionary march against tyranny that calls for fighting against foreign invaders, it was sung in every country where Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy got involved, such as Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Russia. In Spain, it was frequently programmed in official acts of the Republican side, both at the front and in the rearguard, to represent the fascist attack against the legitimate government. When the Vichy regime unofficially replaced “La Marseillaise” with “Maréchal, nous voilà”, based on the glorification of Philippe Pétain as an experienced soldier, the former gained in patriotic emotion.3 The well-­ known scene of the battle of anthems in Michael Curtiz’s film Casablanca (1942), where the fugitive Victor Laszlo performs “La Marseillaise” with the Rick’s Cafe band against the group of Nazi officers singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” with piano accompaniment, underpinned the antifascist connotations of the French national anthem during World War II. The words of another French song, “The Internationale”, were written in 1871 by the Communard Eugène Pottier to be sung to the tune of “La Marseillaise” after the fall of the Paris Commune that year. In 1888, the Belgian woodcarver and composer Pierre De Geyter added different music for a workers’ choir from Lille, La Lyre des Travailleurs, and this version became the official Socialist anthem in the International Congress of Copenhagen in 1910 (Cull et al. 2003, 181). From 1922 to 1944, and somewhat paradoxically for its universalist ideal, “The Internationale” served as the official anthem of the Soviet Union, which entailed some particularities in its uses across Europe. It was often sung and played by Republican soldiers at the front, as well as by citizens and orchestras in 3  The Pétain regime preferred “Maréchal, nous voilà” but never replaced officially “La Marseillaise”, because it was a too powerful symbol in France, accepted as its own even by the far right during the Great War (Sweeney 2001, 33).

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Spanish loyalist cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia, during the war in Spain. However, the situation was quite different in the United Kingdom. From 1939 to 1941, the BBC broadcast the national anthems of the countries invaded by Nazi Germany. When Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941, however, a direct order of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a fierce anti-communist, clearly stated that “the Internationale is on no account to be played by the BBC” (Miner 2003, 205–206). Churchill revoked the prohibition in 1942, the year when Stalin personally commissioned a new and strongly nationalistic anthem in response to the ultrapatriotic atmosphere of wartime, performed in public for the first time on Soviet radio on New Year’s Eve, 1943, and officially adopted on March 15, 1944 (Brooke 2007). Stalin contributed to the song when it was already finished, suggesting some changes in the chorus and a line about the defeat of the fascist invaders (Montefiore 2003, 469) strategically situated at the rising crescendo passage of the third verse. Of course, as in the Soviet case, the war fostered new music and reappropriations of old songs in many countries, but their nature and connotations varied, even in states directly involved in the conflict. New marches and songs composed in Nazi Germany during World War II had a more explicitly militaristic sound than in the Weimar Republic (Frey 2020). The Hitler regime maintained the previous national anthem, the “Deutschlandlied”, but also made official the march “Die Fahne Hoch” (Raise de Flag) with the lyrics added by the “Brownshirt” Horst Wessel, turned into a Nazi martyr by Joseph Goebbels. Furthermore, public performances of the national anthem added a martial character to Joseph Haydn’s original tune through percussion and rhythmic emphasis.4 In this form, “often played as a bombastic marche militaire”, it was also assumed as the Austrian national anthem when the country became part of the Third Reich in 1938 (Barker 2009). With the new delivery, the first stanza, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”, criticized by the foreign press and some German leftists during the Weimar period, acquired “ever-stronger imperialistic and racist overtones” between 1939 and 1945 (Hermand 2002, 260). The “Lied der Deutschen”, as it was better known during World War II, often preceded by the Nazi anthem “Horst Wessel Lied”, was part of every important event or radio program of the Third Reich. In contrast to this growing emphasis on martial and patriotic music in Russia 4   A decree signed by Hitler himself established precise metronome speeds for the “Deutschlandlied” and the “Horst Wessel Lied” in 1939 (Levi 1994, 35).

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and Germany, the initial jingoism of BBC musical broadcasts in the United Kingdom yielded ground to songs of “longing, escapism, and sentimentality” after the winter of 1940 (Baade 2012, 58). In the same way, the early attempt of the Fascist Party in Italy to encourage mobilization and patriotism through new warlike national music, allocated to a prime-time radio program called Canzoni del tempo di guerra, gradually lost the listeners’ interest and ran out of steam in 1942, giving way to romantic and nostalgic songs (Lanotte 2016, 152–165). The Spanish Civil War was a good example of the importance of tradition in the social relevance of national anthems. Although many were composed during the strife or to celebrate the new Franco regime, most of the sociologically relevant songs had already been composed before 1936  (Ossa 2011; Giner and Porcile 2015). In the tense political climate of the Second Republic, from 1931, music was used to convey diverse narratives, to legitimize ideologies, and to mobilize popular support. With the coup d’état, anthems and songs acquired new affects and revealed the complex conglomerate of political cultures involved in the conflict. On the Republican side frequently sounded the “Himno de Riego”, as the national anthem of the Second Republic, but also transnational symbols of the left such as “La Marseillaise” and “The Internationale”. The song “La joven guardia”, a translation of the French “Le chant des jeunes gardes”, served as the official song for the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (Unified Socialist Youth), and the anarchists sung “A las barricadas”, a translation of the Polish revolutionary song “Warszawianka” (Whirlwinds of Danger) and a slightly altered version of “Hijos del pueblo” (Sons of the People). Moreover, because nationalism was a key part of wartime ideology and mobilization (Núñez Seixas 2006), these pieces were combined with the anthems of the substate nationalisms of Catalonia (“Els Segadors”), the Basque Country (“Gernikako Arbola”), and Galicia (“Os pinos”). The situation was no less complex in the territories where the coup was successful, but the establishment of the official songs and anthems was belated and at the same time more authoritative. The institution of the rebels’ new musical symbols was a process of several months. After the success of the coup in Seville, for example, General Queipo de Llano’s first radio broadcast still ended with the Republican anthem (Balfour 2002, 283). With the passage of time, however, because one of the main aims of the self-proclaimed “Nationalist” side was to destroy Republican and “separatist” symbols, the “Himno de Riego” and the national anthems of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia were banned. At the

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beginning of the war, the best-known pieces by the rebels were the “Canción del legionario” (Song of the Legionnaire) and the Carlist march “Oriamendi”. Beginning in November 1936, when the Axis powers officially recognized the Franco government, musical ensembles also started to play the national anthems of the “friendly nations”, Germany, Italy, and Portugal, the Nazi “Horst Wessel Lied”, and the fascist “Giovinezza”. The anthems that would become more representative of the “Nationalist” side were not widely known before the war (Díaz Viana 1985). The tune of the Falangist song “Cara al sol” (Facing the Sun) had been composed by Juan Tellería before the leader of the fascist political organization, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and some poets of his reliable circle, namely Agustín de Foxá, Dionisio Ridruejo, Pedro Mourlane Michelena, Jacinto Miquelarena, and Rafael Sánchez Mazas, added the lyrics in December 1935.5 Although it was first sung at a rally held in Madrid’s Cine Europa on February 2, 1936, the “Cara al sol” remained, just as Falange itself, on the sidelines of the public sphere until the military uprising. Nevertheless, the violence and the political radicalization created by the conflict served as the perfect atmosphere for the growing visibility of fascist proclamations and symbols. The dissemination of the “Cara al sol” was the product of one of the more meticulous campaigns of musical propaganda of the Spanish Civil War. Its lyrics were published in the press at the end of July 1936, Falange local leaders hastened to print diverse versions of the music score, and a recording of the anthem could be purchased in Valladolid at the beginning of August (Álvarez 2021, 188–189). From then on, the radio and the increasing presence of the Falange in public events made the rest. It took time to popularize the tune, but in November it was already considered the most distinctive song of the rebel side (Suárez-Pajares 2016). In contrast, the piece that would become the national anthem of Spain until today, the “Royal March” or “Grenadier March”, went practically unnoticed during the first months of the war. This piece, a march without lyrics used in the events linked to the royal family and to some religious events from the eighteenth century, had gained public prominence during the reign of Isabel II (1833–1868), the Sexenio Democrático (1868–1874), and the Restoration (1874–1931) as a traditionalist emblem and official march (Lolo 2000; Nagore Ferrer 2011). With the advent of the Second Republic in 1931, the “Himno de Riego”, a symbol during the Trienio 5

 About the circumstances of composition of Cara al sol, see Suárez-Pajares (2016).

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Liberal (1820–1823), unofficially replaced the “Grenadier March” in state events. On February 28, 1937, the Head of the State established the “Royal March” as the only Spanish national anthem and “Cara al sol”, “Canción del legionario”, and “Oriamendi” as “national songs”, which caused a deep discontent among Falangists (Rodríguez Jiménez 2000, 270–271; Box 2010, 302–306; Box 2014). To legitimize their election of the “Royal March”, the rebels carried out a careful invention of tradition. In the decree of February, they exclusively mentioned it as the “Marcha granadera”, avoiding its royal connotations, and presented it as the piece that had been the national anthem until the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931, which simplified the changing identity of that Spanish national symbol in the last century.6 Furthermore, although some authors wrote lyrics for the anthem, and Franco himself approved the text created by the traditionalist poet José María Pemán in 1928 with some modifications to include symbols of the Falange, the tune was regularly performed without lyrics during and after the civil war. This arose in part from technical difficulties because the “Marcha granadera”, as a military march and in contrast to the aforementioned national anthems, emphasizes every beat in the measure, which complicates the adaption of lyrics in a strongly polysyllabic language like Spanish. Eventually, the decision not to fit a new text served to link the rebel cause to the pre-Republican past, as well as to avoid contestation and the potential refusal to sing. Adopting a music-only anthem has been a strategy followed by countries with irreconcilable political cultures, several official languages, or even ethnic conflicts such as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Kosovo. It has also been the approach of the European Community to choose an anthem beyond its unequivocal diversity.7 Crucially, the relative triviality of lyrics in the “Royal March” avoided its unequivocal identification with a concrete ideology, which contributed to the survival of the tune after World War II as a sonic symbol not of fascism, but of anti-Communism. In contrast, “Cara al sol” progressively vanished from official events with the gradual  About the complex history of the Spanish national anthem, see Nagore Ferrer (2011).  The European Community adopted a part of the “Finale” of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the arrangement made by the then chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan, in 1973 (Buch 2003, 239–242). Actually, the arrangement is almost identical to the second and third instrumental variations of the “Joy Theme”, bars 140–191. 6 7

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“de-­fascistization” of the regime beginning in 1943, when the Falange power diminished in favor of the military and the Catholic church, due both to internal tensions and to the changes in the international order. In the end, the tradition of the “Marcha granadera” as a tune without lyrics and the little success of Pemán’s poem facilitated Spaniards assuming in democracy, not without controversy and renaming it again as “Royal March”, a national anthem officially adopted for the first time by the elites of a dictatorship.

Performing the Nation: Rituals and Narratives Benedict Anderson famously stated that nation as an imagined community is grounded not only in common ethnicity, tradition, language, or territory, but also in an “experience of simultaneity”, particularly materialized during the singing of anthems. For him, the ritual component of national songs enables the group to share the same temporality: “at precisely such moments, people wholly unknown to each other utter the same verses to the same melody”. This “unisonance”, as he called it, represents “the echoed physical realization of the imagined community” (Anderson 2006, 145). This idea is critical to understand the centrality of anthems and their sound in national rituals, with some complementary nuances. First, Anderson placed too much emphasis on singing, but his appreciation can be applied to listening in general: on the one hand, most renditions of anthems are instrumental; on the other, singing is also a particular way of hearing (Schulze 2018, 231). Second, it is time and rhythm, rather than melody, that afford synchronization. Temporal and rhythmical coordination or entrainment “is a ubiquitous phenomenon related to music’s social functions of promoting group bonding and cohesion” (Clayton et  al. 2020, 136). Third, I believe that “unisonance” does not represent selflessness and abnegation, as Anderson argued, but presence and involvement. In any case, it is difficult to disagree with Anderson’s final claim: “nothing connects us all but imagined sound” (Anderson 2006, 145). Certainly, anthems are an inherent part of official events as ways of imagining the nation, uniting the singers, players, or listeners, creating identification, and differentiating people from similar or antithetical groups. In fact, this political and ritual character is what distinguishes them as a music genre (Pavković and Kelen 2016, 2). Singing or listening to them requires a proper and solemn behavior. What people know is not only melody and lyrics, but also attitudes, gestures, and emotions

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associated with that music. The mere adoption of a song as a national anthem implies differences in its uses and in the listening attitudes compared with other songs. That the Spanish “Grenadier march” had to be listened in silence, as the press spread in 1937 and a Francoist complementary order stated in 1938,8 contributed to its solemnity and respect. In contrast, “Cara al sol” and “Oriamendi” were sung in more popular, festive, and spontaneous milieus during the Spanish Civil War (Álvarez 2021, 204). After the outbreak of hostilities between Germany and Poland, in August 1939, the Nazi regime arranged for the two official anthems, “Horst Wessel Lied” and “Deutschlandlied”, to end every Sondermeldungen or special radio announcement, as well as every broadcasting day (Hermand 2002, 260). This power of anthems to perform the nation led to their omnipresence in wartime. To gain in “solidarity, loyalty, and motivation”, the three desired outcomes for anthems during armed conflicts (Pavković and Kelen 2016, 7), their repetition is decisive to bind people together and to mobilize for a political cause. George Orwell famously portrayed Barcelona at war as a soundful city where “the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night” (Orwell 1938, 5). In a certain way, the battle of anthems in Spanish loyalist cities reproduced the struggle of various collectives to gain weight in the new political situation that began in July 1936 (Cortès and Esteve 2012, 272–273). The anarchist, socialist, and communist unions situated at the forefront during this radical first phase of the war, many of which had been secondary in Spanish politics until then, had to disseminate their anthems to show the weight of their respective political cultures in the city. The CNT-FAI also inserted the music (without the lyrics) of at least one of the two anthems that represented anarchism in Spain, “A las barricadas” and “Hijos del pueblo”, into its propaganda films (López 2021, 330). On the other hand, official events had to include the anthems of all these collectives as part of the legitimate side and to assert unity against the enemy, which led to odd situations. The composer Pablo Sorozábal, who conducted the Banda Municipal de Madrid during the civil war, complained in his memoirs about the number of anthems that the ensemble had to play at every concert, which compelled him to considerably reduce the number of works. Furthermore, he

8  Archivo Histórico Provincial de Valladolid, Gobierno Civil, Relaciones Interministeriales, Coordinación Provincial, box 100/79.

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describes in his memories the “incomprehensible” behavior of people during the performance of the anthems: When we played “The Internationale”, socialists and communists stood up and saluted very seriously with clenched fists. Most members of the FAI and the CNT were still sitting and looking scornful. On the contrary, when we performed “A las barricadas”, all the anarchists and cenetistas stood up, raised their arms above their heads, joined their two hands interlocking them with their fingers and listened with true devotion, while the socialists and communists disdainfully sat down. At the end, when we played the National Anthem, the “Himno de Riego”, only a few Republicans reacted. During my expedition to Catalonia, I had to add “Els Segadors” and [the sardana] “La Santa Espina” to all these anthems.9 (Sorozábal 2019 [1986], 148–149)

The rebels also inserted anthems as mandatory in commemorations, festivals, political rallies, street parades, masses, bullfighting, sport competitions, and music shows, performed by an ensemble or played from a device, to remind the audience of the exceptional situation and foster patriotism. The audience had to listen to the “Marcha granadera” on their feet, with an arm frontally raised and extended in the fascist salute, and in complete silence (Moreno Luzón and Núñez Seixas 2017, 263). In some of these events, particularly in theaters, the anthem was accompanied by projections of Franco’s portraits (Zenobi 2011, 141). It was also structurally and strategically included in radio schedules. As Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi notes, the fascist anthem “Giovinezza”, composed by Giuseppe Blanc in 1909 and sung by the Arditi during the Great War, was placed within a narrative of fascism as a symbol of youth, especially during the war. To incarnate Italian virility and a young spirit, Mussolini publicized his sporting activities and forbade journalists from mentioning his birthday and illnesses (Falasca-Zamponi 1997, 72–73). 9  Cuando tocaban “La Internacional”, los socialistas y los comunistas se ponían en pie y saludaban muy serios con el puño cerrado. La mayoría de los de la FAI y la CNT seguían sentados y con cara de desprecio. Por el contrario, al interpretar “A las barricadas”, todos los anarquistas y cenetistas se levantaban, elevaban los brazos sobre sus cabezas, juntaban sus dos manos enlazándolas con los dedos y oían con verdadera devoción mientras los socialistas y comunistas se sentaban desdeñosamente. Al final, cuando tocábamos el Himno Nacional, el Himno de Riego, eran unos cuantos republicanos solamente los que reaccionaban. Durante mi excursión a Cataluña, a todos estos himnos tuve que sumar “Els Segadors” y “La Santa Espina”.

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For its part, the Third Reich could easily appropriate the official conservative symbols of the Weimar era, which facilitated people’s identification. However, within a process of festivalization of everyday life, preexisting anthems were carefully placed in new and radically masculine narratives about the nation. Nazi events followed a careful program that alternated between songs, instrumental music, and spoken texts. They were commemorative rituals that provided a means of “performing group participation in the nation’s rebirth by means of organized sound” (Birdsall 2012, 42). From 1936, the dissemination of new technologies reduced the distance between the battlefield and home. One of the main novelties of the 1930s conflicts was the regularization of broadcasting. According to Simon Potter, global radio made the 1936–1939 conflict in Spain the first time in history in which listeners in other countries were “able to have direct contact with the very nerve centers of the rival parties of a serious civil war”. Music broadcast by Spanish stations offered a means to identify sonically the different sides, in a way that required no words (Potter 2020, 108–109). Mediated sound also changed the ways of experiencing the war because listeners could imagine themselves hearing the same sounds as other people. As David Morley argues, national broadcasting can “create a sense of unity—and of corresponding boundaries around the nation; it can link the peripheral to the center; turn previously exclusive social events into mass experiences; and, above all, it penetrates the domestic sphere, linking the national public into the private lives of its citizens” (Morley 2000, 107). Beginning in 1939, nationally syndicated radio was employed by the Third Reich on a large scale to bridge public and private experiences of the war, as a live and simultaneous gathering of listeners as earwitnesses. Sondermeldungen, established as major moments on Nazi radio from the first months of the war, began with a fanfare of trumpets and drum rolls that interrupted any other program, followed by a victory notification, a song related to a recent campaign, the two German national anthems, or some religious hymns (Birdsall 2012, 113–119). However, the omnipresence and repetition of anthems brought about a major risk: their trivialization. Anthems differ from other songs in that they “signal that an occasion is of national significance and is thus serious and not frivolous” (Pavković and Kelen 2016, 8). They mark the pass from entertainment to solemn patriotism. Because the rhetoric of war revolved around heroism, levity was not allowed. However, the abundance and repetition of anthems in the streets and at every show during could blur the

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line between recreation and seriousness. An editorial in the official newspaper of the anarchist CNT-AIT union, Solidaridad Obrera, made this clear at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War: “The fight against fascism is too serious a thing for anyone to frivol with. It is necessary to end the silly parades through the streets of the city. […] The noise of timpani and trumpets is a derision for those who fight on the front lines” (“La guerra es una cosa más seria” 1936). This statement has parallels with many others on the rebel side, which also tried to temper fun and frivolity (Pérez Zalduondo 2018). Against them, Víctor de la Serna wrote his famous “Praise of the cheerful rearguard”, which complained about that “psychosis of sadness—dark melancholy—among some people from our rearguard, who find the atmosphere of San Sebastián and Seville frivolous and almost nefarious” (Serna 1937). As soon as the end of October 1936, the Economic Committee of Theater asked the music bands “to refrain from playing popular anthems, since their daily repetition in intermissions and at the end of the works makes them lose the emotional solemnity that they have. Anthems in theaters should only be played at official performances” (“Himnos populares” 1936).10 Francoist authorities did not implement this measure during the war, but in February 1940 the National Propaganda Service ordered that bands not play the national anthem at the end of the performances that did not correspond “with the appropriate artistic milieu” such as cabaret, dances, and frivolous shows (Álvarez 2021, 197). In May 1943, the General Director of Prisons in Franco’s Spain warned that a disproportionate use of anthems could lead prisoners to “routine habits without emotion or sentiment”, precisely the opposite of what authorities intended (Pérez Castillo 2021, 383).

Imposing the Nation: Violence and Resistance Conceptions of music tend to idealize it as pleasant, therapeutic, or emancipative. However, music can be offensive, incite rage, promote subjugation, accompany aggression, and cause pain. It is violent when it is imposed and the listener perceives it as undesirable sound. As Suzanne Cusick 10  El Comité Económico del Teatro (CNT) ha suplicado a las orquestas y orquestinas de los coliseos que se abstengan de ejecutar himnos populares, ya que su repetición diaria en los entreactos y finales de las obras les hace perder la solemnidad emocional que aquellos tienen. Los himnos en los teatros deberán ejecutarse solamente en las funciones con carácter oficial.

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remarks, music turned into unwanted noise can release a person “into a paradoxical condition that is both highly embodied and almost disembodied in the intensity with which one forgets important elements of one’s identity, and loses track of time’s passing” (Cusick 2006, 12). Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan have urged us to “go well beyond music aesthetics” to understand this relationship between music and violence, which they find “mundane and ubiquitous” (Johnson and Cloonan 2009, 4 and 73). Certainly, if this link is not exceptional in everyday life, it became normalized in wartime. In fact, the traditional opposition of music and noise can complicate the comprehension not only of sound violence, but also of how armed conflicts change listening practices. Anthems were part of the arsenal of acoustic violence during the Second World War, primarily in those places that represented pain par excellence: the battlefield, prisons, and concentration camps. National songs were employed to mobilize soldiers, intensify emotions, and incite violence. The Third Reich was the first government to use loudspeakers to create immersive musical atmospheres and sound effects that affected the body and mind simultaneously, both on the battlefield and in propaganda ceremonies, where anthems played a prominent role (Volcler 2013, 45–46). Moreover, except Chelmno, all the Nazi death camps had musical activity. In particular, its use in Auschwitz responded to a careful sound policy of the SS to employ music in the process of extermination, in different ways: the ensemble or Lagerkapelle could help to calm down prisoners when they arrived at the camp, but also facilitated discipline and order in work, marches, and countings, and assisted in demoralizing the captives during tortures and executions (Gilbert 2005, 194). The violinist and conductor Simon Laks, interned in Birkenau for more than two years, affirmed that music, far from being a medium of relief and resistance, was an additional instrument of domination and torture that worked on the inmates “in a depressing way and provoked that the state of physical prostration was even deeper” (Laks 2018, 368). Music functions as violence when one cannot choose and is forced to play, sing, or listen to what they do not like. That sound, in Cusick’s words, “blasts away all sense of privacy, leaving in its place a feeling of paradoxically unprivate isolation” (Cusick 2013, 276). In wartime, being forced to sing the enemy’s songs is a detrimental punishment because it destroys subjectivity by compelling the victim to embody an unwanted or even hateful political identity. The contradiction between the singer’s identification and sound can be particularly demoralizing. In Francoist

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prisons, the main musical repertoire consisted of the national anthem, the “Grenadier March”, and the official songs of the Falange, the Carlist Requetés, and the Spanish Legion. Because the objective was not only to perform the songs, but also for them to sound good, prison governors divided the internees into groups to conveniently teach them and ensure that everyone was singing (Pérez Castillo 2021, 382). In 1943, the General Directorate of Prisons exhorted the directors to put a lot of effort into giving the “Grenadier March” “the character of highest seriousness and emotion as the expression of respect to the Fatherland and its institutions” (Calero Carramolino 2021, 111). Anthems could also serve as a means of acoustic surveillance and accusation. In Spain, their singing was often alluded to in reports and trials of both sides as proof of adhesion or treachery. The Falangist writer Jacinto Miquelarena mentioned that Juan Tellería, who lived in Republican Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, was reported and incarcerated as the composer of “Cara al sol”, but survived by pretending to be insane and swearing that the rebels had stolen his music (Miquelarena 1939, 23). Anthems could condemn but also save lives. In the court case of Covadonga Martín Gutiérrez, who had been secretary of the International Red Aid in Almería, a witness declared that she had never participated in left-wing propaganda and that she had even sung the anthem of the Falange on some occasions. The court-martial, held on June 7, 1941, found Covadonga not guilty (Ruiz Expósito 2008, 331). In order to turn anthems into instruments of political control, totalitarian regimes had to distinguish between listening, which entailed actively attending to the music, and hearing, which revealed disinterest or disdain for the represented nation.11 The same process that turned anthems into a form of violence made it possible for them to be a means of individual and collective resistance. Depriving people of singing or listening to their former national anthems in invaded areas was a common form of sonic violence in Europe from 1936 to 1945. After the Allied victory in World War II, for example, the measures imposed by every country that took control of Germany were different. Whereas the United States forbade military music, and the Soviet Union banned the German national anthem, Britain allowed the 11  A similar distinction can be observed in the most conservative Islamic circles of the Persianate world, where merely hearing the Qur’an without listening to it is regarded as sinful and, conversely, hearing most popular music is permitted but listening to it is considered “lascivious” (Beeman 2010, 143–145).

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playing of “Deutschlandlied” (Potter 2016, 112). In these situations, a frequent practice of defiance was singing one’s own national or political songs. In the Amsterdam occupied by the Nazis, there was no permission to be out after midnight, so people could not celebrate the 1942 New Year. As a display of pride and rebellion, they started to sing the Dutch national anthem loudly from their windows (Jacobs 2014, 317). Tom Rice (2016) argues that prisoners can play a limited, but active, role in shaping their sonic environment through diverse ways of listening and sound-making, and the Europe at war was not an exception. Thus, captives reframed their space and eluded the subjugation of their bodies to the enemy. Lin Jaldati remembered one particularly emotional evening in Birkenau, when Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, French, and German prisoners began to sing their national anthems and folk songs from their countries, creating a fraternal feeling beyond linguistic differences (Jaldati and Rebling 1966, 409–410; cited in Gilbert 2005, 154). This resistance through the display of personal national identity through singing was especially intense for inmates and disturbing for executioners during the killings. The captive anarchist Juan Manuel Molina recalled that, during an execution in Castellón, Francoist authorities compelled the other prisoners to sing the Falangist anthems aloud to drown out the revolutionary songs of those who were going to be shot (Molina 1958, 139–140). Similarly, Filip Müller, a Sonderkommando member in Birkenau, depicted a poignant scene of Czech Jews about to be gassed in July 1944: Most of the people now began to undress, but some were still hesitating… Suddenly a voice began to sing. Others joined in, and the sound swelled into a mighty choir. They sang first the Czechoslovak national anthem and then the Hebrew song ‘Hatikvah’. And all this time the SS men never stopped their brutal beatings. It was as if they regarded the singing as a last kind of protest which they were determined to stifle if they could. To be allowed to die together was the only comfort left to these people. Singing their national anthem they were saying a last farewell to their brief but flourishing past, a past which had enabled them to live for twenty years in a democratic state, a respected minority enjoying equal rights. And when they sang ‘Hatikvah’, now the national anthem of the state of Israel, they were glancing into the future, but it was a future which they would not be allowed to see. (Müller 1979, 110–111)

Another common strategy was contrafactum, the substitution of the original lyrics without changing the music. In Francoist prisons, some

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internees altered the words of the national anthem and the official songs during collective singing, a severely punished practice if they were discovered (Calero Carramolino 2021; Pérez Castillo 2021). One of the best-­ known songs of occupied France was “Dans le cul” (Up the Arse), whose words were fitted to the German national anthem (Murdoch 1990, 190). Mocking was not infrequent even between allies: a parody of the fascist anthem “Giovinezza” that ridiculed the failed Italian imperialism was quite popular in Germany during the war (Henderson 1948, 36). Sometimes, contrafactum was not strict and could include variations of the original melody. The song “London Pride” was written by the playwright, composer, and actor Noël Coward in 1941 during the Nazi bombing of London. Although the music seems to be based on the traditional English song “Won’t You Buy My Sweet-Blooming Lavender”, Coward also conceived and described it as a variation of “Deutschlandlied”, which turned “London Pride” into a symbol of anti-German resistance under the Blitz (Murdoch 1990, 190). Condemnation of the enemy could also be achieved through a parody of the original anthem, as in the Polish filmmaker Eugeniusz Cękalski’s Utwory Chopina w kolorze (1944), a denunciation of the Holocaust that used a distorted version of the Nazi “Horst Wessel Lied” (Boczkowska 2020, 271). Due to the elusive nature and difficult control of music, a national anthem can be a powerful means of subversion even without lyrics. After the Nazi occupation of Czech lands, in March 1939, Christian churches were tolerated in the proclaimed Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, but also strictly controlled due to its social influence. Initially, Nazi rulers permitted the hymn in honor of martyr Saint Wenceslas, Duke of Bohemia in the tenth century and political symbol of peace and mercy who had introduced German priests in churches and favored the Latin rite over the old Slavic one, on the assumption that it symbolized the belonging of the Czech lands to Germany. Nevertheless, the Saint Wenceslas chorale became an unofficial national anthem that replaced “Kde domov můj” (Where My Home Is), only allowed in combination with “Deutschlandlied”, and encouraged people to resist the invaders. In the late phase of the occupation, when singing the hymn was banned, organists used its melodies and motifs in their preludes and improvisations (Seibt 1974, 351). Moreover, many Czech composers such as Otakar Jeremiaš, Lubomír Peduzzi, Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Vladimír Štědroň, Ladislav Svěceny, Josef Plavec, Jaroslav Doubrava, Iša Krejči, Vitězslav Novak, and the Jewish Pavel Haas, who died in Auschwitz in October 1944, defiantly

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quoted the Saint Wenceslas chorale in their wartime works, sometimes in combination with the Hussite war song “Ktož jsú boží bojovníci” (Ye Who Are Warriors of God), considered anti-German, or opposing it to the “Horst Wessel Lied” (Velek 2015).

Conclusion From 1936 to 1945, old and new European anthems displayed national belonging and solidarity, encouraged patriotism and mobilization, conveyed narratives of antagonism and victory, forged and symbolized different political cultures, but also adapted their sound to new technologies and ways of listening, were recorded and broadcast, became ubiquitous, connected public and private spaces, and served as means of acoustic surveillance and violence. However, not all these questions are evident without paying attention to sound and listening, a perspective that challenges both the “visualism” that has dominated our thinking about history (Smith 2004) and the reduction of anthems’ affects to verbal meanings. Assuming that “it is the anthem lyrics that function as primary national or cultural marker” (Pavković and Kelen 2016, 15) led to lexico-semantic analyses that are necessary but, in isolation, can impoverish our comprehension of the power of patriotic songs. Anthems acquire more significance when analyzed not only as poetry nor as the mere sum of words and music, but also as embodied and embedded sound. Thus, they reveal that aurality has been a central issue of nationalist policies and the experience of war.

References Álvarez, Nelly. 2021. Anthems, Identity, and Mobilization in the Francoist Rearguard: Valladolid, 1936–1939. In Music and the Spanish Civil War, ed. Gemma Pérez Zalduondo and Iván Iglesias, 189–218. Berlin: Peter Lang. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London and New York: Verso. Baade, Christina L. 2012. Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Balfour, Sebastian. 2002. Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Barker, Andrew. 2009. Setting the Tone: Austria’s National Anthems from Haydn to Haider. Austrian Studies 17: 12–28.

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Beeman, William O. 2010. Music at the Margins: Performance and Ideology in the Persianate World. In Music and Conflict, ed. John Morgan O’Connell and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, 141–154. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Birdsall, Carolyn. 2012. Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Boczkowska, Ewelina. 2020. ‘Chopin Meant Everything to Us Then’: Chopin Nostalgia in Polish Cinema, 1944–91. In Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War, ed. Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska, 253–275. New  York and London: Routledge. Box, Zira. 2010. España, año cero. La construcción simbólica del franquismo. Madrid: Alianza. ———. 2014. Símbolos eternos de España: El proceso de institucionalización de la bandera y el himno durante el franquismo. In Imaginarios y representaciones de España durante el franquismo, ed. Stéphane Michonneau and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, 7–23. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. Brooke, Caroline. 2007. Changing Identities: The Russian and Soviet National Anthems. Slavonica 13 (1): 27–38. Buch, Esteban. 2003. Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Burnham, Scott. 1995. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Calero Carramolino, Elsa. 2021. Prácticas musicales en el ecosistema sonoro penitenciario franquista (1938–1948): propaganda, contrapropaganda y clandestinidad. PhD, University of Granada. Clayton, Martin, et al. 2020. Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance: Theory, Method, and Model. Music Perception 38 (2): 136–194. Cortès, Francesc, and Josep-Joachim Esteve. 2012. Músicas en tiempos de guerra: Cancionero (1503–1939). Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Cull, Nicholas J., David Culbert, and David Welch. 2003. Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present. Santa Barbara, Denver and London: ABC-CLIO. Cusick, Suzanne G. 2006. Music as Torture / Music as Weapon. TRANS. Revista Transcultural de Música 10. https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/152/ music-­as-­torture-­music-­as-­weapon. ———. 2013. Towards an Acoustemology of Detention in the ‘Global War on Terror’. In Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born, 275–291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Díaz Viana, Luis. 1985. Canciones populares de la guerra civil. Madrid: Taurus. Eyck, F.  Gunther. 1995. The Voice of Nations: European National Anthems and their Authors. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. 1997. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Frey, Heike. 2020. Lili Marleen hatt’ einen Kameraden: Musik in der Wehrmacht-­ Truppenbetreuung, 1939–1945. Münster and New York: Waxmann. Gilbert, Shili. 2005. Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Giner, Bruno, and François Porcile. 2015. Les musiques pendant la guerre d’Espagne. Paris: Berg International. Henderson, Hamish. 1948. Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica. London: Lehmann. Hermand, Jost. 2002. On the History of the Deutschlandlied. In Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 251–268. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Himnos populares (Popular Anthems). 1936. El Noticiero Universal, October 30: 6. Jacobs, Annelies. 2014. The Silence of Amsterdam before and during World War II: Ecology, Semiotics, and Politics of Urban Sound. In Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe, ed. Daniel Morat, 305–323. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Jaldati, Lin, and Eberhard Rebling. 1966. Es brennt, Brüder, es brennt: Jiddische Lieder. Berlin: Rütten & Loening. Johnson, Bruce, and Martin Cloonan. 2009. Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence. Farnham: Ashgate. Kelen, Christopher. 2014. Anthem Quality. National Songs: A Theoretical Survey. Bristol: Intellect. La guerra es una cosa más seria (War Is a More Serious Thing). 1936. Solidaridad Obrera, October 1: 10. Laks, Simon. 2018 [1978]. Música en Auschwitz. Ciudad de México: Herder. Lanotte, Gioachino. 2016. Mussolini e la sua “Orchestra”: Radio e musica nell’Italia fascista. Roma: Prospettiva. Levi, Erik. 1994. Music in the Third Reich. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lolo, Begoña. 2000. El himno. In Símbolos de España, 381–463. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. López, Lidia. 2021. Music for the Screen during the Spanish Civil War. In Music and the Spanish Civil War, ed. Gemma Pérez Zalduondo and Iván Iglesias, 321–341. Berlin: Peter Lang. Miner, Steven Merritt. 2003. Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. Miquelarena, Jacinto. 1939. El himno de la Falange: Juan Tellería, músico de la victoria. ABC (Madrid), April 4: 23–24. Molina, Juan M. 1958. Noche sobre España. Siete años en las prisiones de Franco. Mexico: Libro Mex.

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Montefiore, Simon Sebag. 2003. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Moreno Luzón, Javier, and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas. 2017. Los colores de la patria. Símbolos nacionales en la España contemporánea. Madrid: Tecnos. Morley, David. 2000. Home Territories Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Müller, Filip. 1979. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. New York: Stein and Day. Murdoch, Brian. 1990. Fighting Songs and Warring Words: Popular Lyrics of Two World Wars. London: Routledge. Nagore Ferrer, María. 2011. Historia de un fracaso: el ‘Himno Nacional’ en la España del siglo XIX. Arbor 187 (751): 827–845. Núñez Seixas, Xosé Manoel. 2006. ¡Fuera el invasor!: Nacionalismo y movilización bélica en la Guerra Civil española. Madrid: Marcial Pons. Orwell, George. 1938. Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker and Warburg. Ossa, Marco Antonio de la. 2011. La música en la Guerra Civil española. Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología. Pavković, Aleksandar, and Christopher Kelen. 2016. Anthems and the Making of Nation States. Identity and Nationalism in the Balkans. London: I. B. Tauris. Pérez Castillo, Belén. 2021. Repression and Redemption: Music in the Prisons of the Early Francoist Period. In Music and the Spanish Civil War, ed. Gemma Pérez Zalduondo and Iván Iglesias, 373–403. Berlin: Peter Lang. Pérez Zalduondo, Gemma. 2018. ‘Elogio de la alegre retaguardia’: La música en la España de los sublevados durante la guerra civil. Acta Musicologica 90 (1): 78–94. Potter, Pamela M. 2016. Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts. Oakland: University of California Press. Potter, Simon. 2020. Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920–1939. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Rice, Tom. 2016. Sounds Inside: Prison, Prisoners, and Acoustical Agency. Sound Studies 2 (1): 1–15. Rodríguez Jiménez, José Luis. 2000. Historia de Falange Española de las JONS. Madrid: Alianza. Ruiz Expósito, María Dolores. 2008. Mujeres represaliadas en la posguerra española (1939–1950). PhD, University of Almería. Schulze, Holger. 2018. The Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Seibt, Ferdinand. 1974. Bohemia Sacra: Das Christentum in Bohmen 973–1973. Düsseldorf: Schwann. Serna, Víctor de la. 1937. Elogio de la alegre retaguardia. Vértice 3: 143.

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CHAPTER 8

The Moment of National Song Philip V. Bohlman

Avant propos: At the Colonial Borderlands1 My country ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing.

Solemnly, reverently, and respectful of the symbolism of colonial power, the chorus of Samoans in the South Sea Village of the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition intoned the patriotic American hymn, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” on the wax cylinders used to record the musical performances in four of the many villages, theaters, and entertainment venues that spread across the lands of one of the great world fairs. Listening to the recording, one of the forty-one recordings at the South Sea Village made by an ethnographic team led by Benjamin Ives Gilman, and

1

 Parts of the present chapter previously appeared in a different version in Bohlman (2004).

P. V. Bohlman (*) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_8

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including Franz Boas, one recognizes a choral style that mixes both the Indigenous and the colonial. Most of the recorded performances, captured by recording even at this earliest moment in the history of recorded sound technology, incorporated movement and dance, both of which also produced accompanying sound. Singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” however, the chorus seems frozen in place, the hymn itself stripped of dynamism. The staid choral sound that the recordings reveal, however, does not seem entirely foreign, but rather it clearly reveals familiarity with the singing of hymns that missionaries had previously brought to Samoa. Yankee Doodle, Went to Town, A-ridin’ on a pony.

Elsewhere on the fairgrounds of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the Sundanese players of the gamelan in the Java Village performed a different song with American patriotic overtones when recorded by the ethnographic team. A secular popular song with a long history of variants in oral and print folk traditions, the Sundanese/Javanese “Yankee Doodle” contrasted considerably with the Samoan “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” even as both clearly exhibited the function of displaying American national sentiment in the final decade of the nineteenth century, when the impetus to expand US American colonialism was rapidly accelerating. “Yankee Doodle” was more explicitly American, and it circulated more widely in the American public sphere. “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” in contrast, was more widespread globally because of the melody it shared with, that is, borrowed from the hymn of the British Empire, “God Save the Queen.” Much of the American identity of “Yankee Doodle” might seem to blur when played on a gamelan, but at the Columbian Exposition’s Java Village, the gamelan had been retuned to allow for diatonic melody, entirely unlike central Javanese pathet, or mode. The Samoan and Sundanese/Javanese recordings from the 1893 world’s fair were by no means isolated instances of the encounter between colonialism and nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. There are other instances of American patriotic and popular song in the 101 wax cylinder recordings that survive from the Columbian Exposition. Accounts of the fair made frequent reference to musical performance that drew the American visitors toward familiar sounds. Its foundations built on gathering colonized people, culture, and performance from throughout the

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world notwithstanding, the Columbian Exposition was a celebration of intense American nationalism in the name of settler colonialism, the 400 years since Columbus had reached American shores in 1492 (famously, the world fair’s dimensions were so vast that an extra year was required before it could open). Reflecting nostalgically on the past and zealously realigning its political ambitions toward the future, the United States had arrived at a historical moment in which the encounter between colonialism and nationalism was extreme. It was along such borders of encounter that the moment of national song would materialize and do so in counterpoint with the historical moment determined by the accelerating search for an American empire. By referring to the intersecting moments formed by the search for empire as counterpoint I do not simply employ metaphor, for music, above all song, was materially and militarily mobilized to realize the aims of settler colonialism.2 The most striking example of such counterpoint at the earliest moment of American empire is a remarkable volume of National, Patriotic and Typical Airs of All Lands, published under the editorship of John Philip Sousa, Band Master of the United States Marine Corps, only three years before the Columbian Exposition (Sousa 1890; see Fig. 8.1). The colonialist and expansionist aims of Sousa’s project permeate every aspect of the anthology, both in the contexts of its preparation and in the song texts that unfold across its 283 pages. The title itself makes the global girth of the collection clear from the start, for Sousa claims here to include songs from “all lands.” The volume begins with five patriotic airs from the United States, among them both “Yankee Doodle” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” Upon affording national and imperial authority to the United States, Sousa then places the remaining songs in alphabetical order, beginning with “Abyssinia” and concluding with “Zanzibar.” Befitting his role as the founder of the American military band tradition, Sousa (1852–1932) arranged all the airs in the volume, usually for four voices that could be played at the piano in the style of a hymnbook, but often with more expanded arrangements already gesturing for performance by military band. The songs from lands with languages known in the West include lyrics, always in English and frequently with verses in what is presumed to be the national language. When languages were not known to Sousa and others working on the edition, lyrics are absent; the patriotic airs for the 2  David Irving has convincingly expanded the historical dimensions of colonial counterpoint in his studies of the encounter between Spain and the Philippines (Irving 2010).

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Fig. 8.1  John Philip Sousa, National, Patriotic and Typical Airs of All Lands (1890)

last four nations in the volume—Wallachia, Yap Island, Zamboanga Island, and Zanzibar—include no lyrics, though Zanzibar’s “The Sultan’s or National Air” is arranged for a six-voice instrumental ensemble. The limits of colonial appropriation are clearly unencumbered by the national borders that run through the airs of all lands, many such borders apparently imagined or drawn by the editor in service to the larger

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colonial project of the volume. On the eve of the expansion of the American empire, the colonial counterpoint of the volume of national airs reveals very clear military functions. Sousa, who was in the US military at the time, dedicates the volume to “the Honorable Benjamin H.  Tracy, Secretary of the Navy.” Tracy reciprocates by offering an epigraph proclaiming the volume a “Special Order. John Philip Sousa, Bandmaster of the Band of the United States Marine Corps, is hereby directed to compile for the use of the Department [of Navy] the National and Patriotic Airs of all Nations.” The ends to which the US Navy actually used these “airs of all nations” are largely impossible to trace. Some find their way into later arrangements by US military bands, among them that of the Marine Corps, which Sousa initially conducted. Most important for the present history of the moment of national song, however, are the many forms of counterpoint whose confluence came to define that moment at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn to the twentieth century, in the United States, as well as increasingly for nations around the world. The moment of national song whose dimensions I trace in this chapter was at once historically global and culturally, politically, and ideologically local. The national dimensions themselves fill the space between the global and the local, sonically and symbolically charting the appearance of the new era of nations and nationalism that followed the age of empire and its practices of settler colonialism. The moment of national song whose sonic landscapes I explore here exhibited the widely contrastive and contradictory chronotopes of in-betweenness, within which the colonial counterpoint of empire unfolded as the dense stretto of song representing a new and modern nation and nationalism in the twentieth century. The occasions at which national song was sounded multiplied in the twentieth century, ranging from world’s fairs and global athletic events such as the Olympics to the conflagration of world wars that undermined the reach of empire. National song, too, proliferated. After a century in which “national song” in many languages was synonymous with “folk song,” and repertories emerged almost passively in the pages of academically and officially sanctioned anthologies—Sousa’s National, Patriotic and Typical Airs of All Lands was one example from thousands of imperial projects—the building of repertories of politically charged national songs acquired activist motivations in the twentieth century, most often the result of clear

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political agendas.3 As national song increasingly came to form specific genres and repertories, the most important of which was the national anthem, the colonial counterpoint of empire gave way to the chronotope matrix of the nation. In search of this transition from empire to nation in song that sounds the moment of national song, I examine here the formation of one exemplary history of the emergence of national song and the anthem that emerged from it. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Levant, the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, including Palestine/Israel, remained under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and they would remain so until the First World War, when they would fall under British control, and after the Second World War, when they would achieve independence, Israel in 1948. On the eve of the moment of national song, there was no single song, or even repertory, that sufficiently qualified as national song. Even a national language—modern in literary and political function—remained inchoate. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, all that changed. The systematic development and reform of the modern Hebrew language was underway, and the political movements seeking release from settler colonialism had begun to institutionalize as Zionism. Modern national song had advanced considerably along a process of invention. The search for song capable of symbolizing and mobilizing an Israeli state-in-­ formation had accelerated to be concentrated in a new matrix of sounds and meanings, the individual parts rapidly coalescing as a national whole. When entering the historical moment of national song, the emergence of Hebrew song as national song for Israel in the twentieth century leads us to a fuller understanding of both the parts and whole of the nation.

Before Hebrew Song The poet of the modern ghetto will become the singer of modern Zionism, of the powerful liberation movement of a vital Jewishness, which will lead the Jews out of the imprisonment of the present into the ancient homeland, into their peace and their freedom.4 (Feiwel 1902)

3  The transformation from passive to active pursuit of national song in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian history is the subject of Adalyat Issiyeva’s Representing Russia’s Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song (2021). 4  All translations in this chapter are those of the author.

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As the imperative for a Jewish nation coalesced in the organizational activities of the modern Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century, the search for Jewish song that could symbolize a once-and-future nation-­ state grew to be of critical importance. Before the Zionist ideologues and activists realized what kind of national song they had, they felt as if they were in danger of losing it. Jewish intellectuals and political figures aspiring to establish the foundations of a Jewish state were well acquainted with the power of song itself. It had accompanied them as they found their way through European universities and attempted to make their way into European society. Song had signaled the emergence of new traditions as the liturgy of a modern synagogue had been arranged for four-part men’s chorus, even for mixed-gender choruses, and then the synagogue chorus had been mapped onto nineteenth-century nationalism by undergoing a transformation to the Jewish Gesangverein, or singing society. The early Zionists realized that song could empower them to lay claim to Romantic nationalism and to give voice to an emerging Jewish nationalism. As they searched for song they could claim as their own, as Jewish both ancient and modern, they embraced it as one of the voices giving meaning to the modern history of Israel. The nationalist Jewish movements, especially Zionism, embraced song from their beginnings.5 Even before the institutionalization of modern political Zionism in 1897 at its first congress in Basel, song had been there. Proto-Zionist student organizations had edited songbooks. Sources and repertories had been identified, and editorial procedures were in place that channeled the transition of oral tradition to print collections. At Basel in 1897, congress organizers had gathered the songs in a booklet as significant evidence for the formation of a moment of national song. From the First Zionist Congress onward, song would be inseparable from the communal culture and political ideology of a future nation of modern Israel. At the Second Zionist Congress, a year after the first but also in Basel, the organizers adopted and distributed a songbook, Lieder zum Fest-­ Commers des II. Zionisten Kongresses (Verein “Jung Juda” 1898), not only for use at the congress itself, but also for distribution to the Diaspora 5  Historically, numerous movements are grouped under the name “Zionism,” though each was distinctive in its projects and ultimate goals, indeed even to the location and organization of a Jewish state. The song traditions I discuss in this chapter often found their origins in cultural and religious Zionism, but were also mobilized with nationalist purposes by political Zionism.

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communities afterward.6 The songs in the earliest Zionist anthologies were choral and communal, and they were arranged and edited so that performances by Jewish social organizations would again embody the collective experience of the movement at the moment of its most palpable performances at the congresses. Song-made-Jewish thus acquired the potential to instantiate a social collective, for example, with songs such as “Gaudeamus igitur,” which circulated in Hebrew translation from the Latin in the earliest Zionist songbooks.7 As crucial as song was to the early Zionists, recognition of its potential for a national movement had almost come too late. Song that might serve a common nationalism was endangered and it needed to be salvaged. Other nations and other nationalisms had distinct advantages, for the repertories they had rescued from Romanticism showed that they knew whereof they were singing (for comprehensive studies of German and Russian national song in the nineteenth century, see, among others, Kurzke 1990; Taruskin 1997). For early Zionists song was proving more slippery. What kind of Jewishness did it or could it signify? The Jewishness implicit in religious community? The disparate Jewishness of diaspora? A Jewishness that paralleled other European nationalisms? A Jewishness that could mobilize a distinctively modern identity? For the Zionists who embraced song, the answers to these questions were anything but clear. What was clear was that at the historical moment at which they had arrived song had an extraordinary power to mobilize Zionism from within and without. Prior to the modern moment, music had been one of the most powerful agents for the mobilization of Jewish ethnic identity and for the articulation of nascent national identity. Paradoxically, the role and function of song in early Zionism, however, remained uncertain, even troubling to those turning to it in search of its agency. By and large, early Zionist song was not Hebrew song, and yet by the early and mid-­twentieth century, when nationalism had consolidated in the settlements and cities of mandatory Palestine and then in Israel after independence in 1948, it was Hebrew song that was firmly established as national song. 6  The title “Fest-Commers” deliberately established a link to Central European student organizations, whose standard collection of songs, published since the mid-nineteenth century, bore the title Deutsches Commersbuch. 7  “Gaudeaumus igitur” is best known as the theme of Johannes Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture. For a history of the expanding use of song by social organizations in the nineteenth century, often with nationalist overtones, see Schwab (1973).

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The historical path I trace in this chapter follows the transformation of song that was not in Hebrew to a national and nationalist repertory that was defined by its use of Hebrew. In so doing, I attempt to sketch an aurality or acoustics of Jewish culture, a soundscape of the modern nation emerging from the polyphonic voices of its past. Song played a powerful role in the shaping of Israeli nationalism not because it leveled the differences and dissonances among the polyphonic voices of a putative past, but rather because the sounding of song in performance reified a moment at which the unity of the nation takes precedence over its differences. On the one hand, this acoustical moment of the nation-through-performance is temporally bounded, if not fleeting. On the other, it accrues power and added meaning through the reproducibility that musical performance affords. It is that acoustic moment, when the modern nation-state most powerfully comes into being through voices its citizens together raise in song, that Benedict Anderson calls unisonance (2006, 145). In the music history of modern Israel, there was no moment more profoundly significant than that through which the diverse streams of Jewish song flowed to form the confluence that became modern Hebrew song.

The Chronotope of National Song The moment of national song forms through the intersections of multiple histories, those of song no less than colonialism and nation-building. As they flow toward the moment of national song, these histories express the differences that characterized their origins, languages, genres, and cultural and political functions. As they coalesce at the moment itself, such differences undergo processes of resolution in which the time/space, or chronotope, of an emerging national song coheres around the historical moment and acquires the agency to express the common purpose of the national endeavor. Songs with ancient origins are imbued with modern meaning; local events and individuals come to signify the universal; to song believed to be authentic accrues the agency of the synthetic. Critically, it is the chronotope of national song itself that these diverse song histories find a common time and place (Fig. 8.2). The transformation afforded by the moment of national song is one of extensive action and change, through which song itself enters a sonic chronotope of common language and purpose. In the Baltic nations of the late twentieth century, for instance, such common language and purpose mobilized the mass choral gatherings that would be called “singing

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Ancient

Local

Synthetic

The Moment of National Song Universal

Authentic

Modern

Fig. 8.2  The chronotope matrix of national song

revolutions.” National song, as in the case of Israel in the twentieth century, could even precede the formation of the nation-state itself. As abundant and diverse as the histories of transformation converging in the moment of national song are, certain paths of transformation are critical for the formation of new and meaningful repertories. At the beginning of the transformation, for example, many songs circulate primarily in oral tradition with multiple variants. The myths that surround a song’s origins accumulate the specificity of history as they appear in print versions, with attributions of various kinds. The addition of lyrics to songs circulating largely in instrumental variants expands performance from individuals to collectives across the public sphere, shifting melodic fragments from the periphery to the center of the nation-building cause. It is these processes of transformation together, as represented in Table  8.1, that open the time and space of a nation’s historical moment for song that will represent it.

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Table 8.1 Transformational processes engendering national song

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Myth → History Oral tradition → Literate representation Imagination → Materiality Periphery → Center Individual → Collective Folk authorship → Composer authorship

Paradox and Parody in Jewish Song The counterpoint of music historical songs whose growing stretto formed the chronotope matrix for Jewish song at the end of the nineteenth century did not unfold independently of the historical moment, but rather it resulted from the concerted efforts of cultural agents and, in the case of the Zionist movement, activists. The ideologues and aestheticians searching for Jewish song had to confront more than a few paradoxes. Folk song, the vehicle for Romantic nationalism, was broadly held to be a form of expression that was ancient and transmitted orally; in contrast, cultural Zionism was progressive and employed a radical vocabulary for change in the present and future. Folk song, moreover, connected the present to a distant past, indeed, a timeless past, but—and this was the dilemma for the cultural Zionists—it did so through a history of practice and oral tradition that survived to the present through the transformation of sacred texts into vernacular languages and styles, for example, when biblical narratives were transmitted as Yiddish, Ladino, or Judeo-Arabic variants. The paradox was all too obvious. In the modern imagination, the song of the distant past was Hebrew song, but the song of the present was not. The paucity of Hebrew texts in vernacular, contemporary song also created another set of paradoxes, several of them quite mundane, if also pragmatic. Hebrew texts did not lend themselves easily to text underlay, in other words to setting folk songs in arrangements and to printing them. The music ran in one direction (left to right), the Hebrew texts in the opposite direction. Whereas this difference might sound like a paradox that could easily be solved by an editorial committee with the appropriate authority, it was not. In fact, it vexed those involved with establishing printing conventions in mandatory Palestine and Israel into the 1920s and in some instances beyond (for attempts to standardize the text underlay of Hebrew vocal music, see Hirshberg 1995, 78–92).

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The possibility of determining a pan-Ashkenazic core repertory for the Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe also presented an early paradox. Ashkenazic Jews historically maintained several vernacular languages, most of them, like Yiddish, related to Germanic languages. There were song collectors and editors for whom such a core repertory, with German, Yiddish, and a continuum of dialects, would serve as the mother lode of Jewish folk song. For others, such a core repertory could only serve as evidence for the ultimate dissipation and disappearance of Jewish song.8 The poison of popularity, in other words popular song itself, was also a dilemma for the ideologues searching for Jewish song. Jewish popular song throve in the nineteenth century, ranging from broadsides to stage music, but it throve because it was formed of hybridity rather than authenticity, thus making it impure, even more so because it depended on parodies of traditional Jewish culture and because it traded in stereotypes of Jews and by Jews, such as those used in Jewish cabaret (see Bohlman 2019, 249–292). Confronted with this paradox, the early Zionist ideologues and aesthetic activists chose to address it creatively and synthetically. They sought a new calculus for determining what song could be, and in the spirit of the historical moment at the end of the nineteenth century they did so systematically. That calculus would increasingly reflect the matrix of national song while forming around six different domains and repertories of Jewish musical activity, which I represent symbolically in Fig.  8.3 as genres of Jewish song present in the Diaspora music cultures during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Inventing Jewish Song Collecting, identifying, editing, and arranging Jewish songs all preceded the Zionist congresses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the social and organizational gatherings of all kinds that led to the institutionalization of the Zionist movement. These were the steps of fabricating, indeed, of inventing Jewish song. These steps compressed the history of oral transmission, and they transformed the songs from the past into metonyms for the present and future. The very process of creating a 8  A continuum of Jewish song repertories stretching between vernacular Yiddish and German versions appears in the critical edition The Folk Songs of Ashkenaz (Bohlman and Holzapfel 2001).

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Folk Song: Yiddish, German, Dialect Popular Song: Urban Song & Yiddish Stage

Hazzanut: Cantors & Sacred Composers

The Historical Moment of Jewish Song

Political Song: Labor & Workers' Songs

Mystical Song: Hassidic Nigun and Dance

Synagogue Song: Paraliturgical Song

Fig. 8.3  The historical moment of Jewish song

song, therefore, served as a vivid witness to the agency of early Zionism, in other words, to the mobilization of power early Zionist ideologues and cultural activists employed to script their own history. The invention of Jewish song formed at the confluence of several song histories. The tributaries constituting those histories at times moved quickly and at other times stagnated, but ultimately they intersected to form a powerful set of symbols that specified an unequivocal iconicity of Jewishness. Song was the ideal medium for conveying the message of Jewish solidarity, and the early Zionists knew this. Song possessed all the attributes of specific identity and remained semiotically open-ended, thus capable of signifying whatever one might choose for it. Such qualities of song reflect the themes that permeate the early history of Zionism, thereby transforming nineteenth-century topoi of Romantic nationalism and German idealism into specific subjectivities of twentieth-century Zionism.

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Song provided a template for both formation of ethnic identity and the national expression thereof, even when—or especially when—these were not isomorphic. Song, in other words, had the power to speak to all identifying with the national goals of Zionists in a common language, becoming the metonym for Jewish identity and political unity they were seeking. I should even go so far as to suggest that there was Zionist song before the Zionist movement had politically consolidated itself. At the very least, there was a proto-Zionist songbook, whose publication in 1894 preceded the first Zionist Congress in Basel by three years. The small volume Lieder-­ Buch für Jüdische Vereine [Songbook for Jewish Social Organizations], edited by the early Zionist and librarian at the University of Berlin, Heinrich Loewe (1867–1950), appeared in a practical chapbook format, clearly recalling the functions of a student songbook for the Jewish university organizations that adopted it (Fig. 8.4) (for an assessment of Loewe’s life as an early Zionist, writer, and scholar in Germany, Weinberg 1946). On the one hand, Loewe’s songbook reflected the trend of social and professional organizations of all kinds to gather songs and publish them as a means of stimulating group solidarity. On the other, Loewe undertook a project with the specific dimensions of the late nineteenth-century moment of song. He really did mean that the songbook would serve “Jewish social organizations” in the plural, among them the student group he founded in 1892, “Jung Juda,” as well as later student organizations, such as the “Vereinigung für jüdische Studierenden” (also founded by Loewe) and the “Kartell jüdischer Verbindungen.” Loewe meant his song book to lay the groundwork for a new social agency for Jewish song, and he asserted in his Foreword that the songbook was breaking radically with existing traditions. The attempt to edit a songbook for Jewish organizations is such an entirely new undertaking—one without any precedent whatsoever—that it would appear necessary to offer a few words of introduction… This Jewish songbook does not pretend to offer an intellectual lesson, but rather it can keep only a single task in mind. Indeed, the synagogue is not the only place we learn about ourselves, nor do we learn only from the struggles against our enemies. Instead, it is in our lives, our total existence, and for that we raise our voice in celebration, joy, and song: “Juden sind wir, wollen es bleiben, bis in alle Ewigkeit” [We are Jews, and we’ll remain that way forever]. (Loewe 1894, Vorwort)

The songs in Loewe’s songbooks weave “Volk” and “Nation” together, explicitly constructing an image of the nation as the product of a

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Fig. 8.4  Heinrich Loewe, Lieder-Buch für Jüdische Vereine (1894), title page

religio-­ethnic group that song mobilizes. The interplay of vocal images and metaphors for the nation in individual songs is extensive, ranging from intimate images of the nation as a “beloved” [Liebling], evoking the Friday-evening arrival of the Sabbath bride, or shechina, in the synagogue, to symbols of revolution in European history to ancient Israel in military conflict. Loewe was both right and wrong when he claimed that there was no real precedent for the Lieder-Buch für Jüdische Vereine. The songbook

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was, in fact, a synthetic product of the editor’s imagination. No single element—text or melody—is truly new, but virtually every combination thereof is. In one clear example of synthetic song, for example, Loewe uses a well-known melody by Friedrich Silcher (1789–1860) to set a text from Heinrich Heine’s novel fragment, Der Rabbi von Bacharach [The Rabbi of Bacharach]. Rather than the Silcher-Heine collaboration, “Die Lorelei,” a nineteenth-century popular song that anyone singing from the book would know, Silcher’s melody provided the context for one of Heine’s relatively unknown texts, which was, however, clearly Jewish. The songbook contains only two songs in Hebrew, and these appear in an appendix. The first was a song for the holiday of Hanukah, and as such the only song with any overtly religious connotations. The second was the most canonic of all student songs, “Gaudeamus igitur,” translated from Latin into Hebrew, effectively canonizing it for inclusion in future Zionist songbooks. Loewe’s Lieder-Buch für Jüdische Vereine became the basis for most subsequent Jewish songbooks in the Wilhelmine and Habsburg empires, Zionist or with other ideological leanings, for the next two decades, until the First World War. The organization of its contents—e.g., into genres such as Heimatlieder [Songs of the homeland], whose lyrics explicitly represented the Land of Israel as the homeland—was embraced by virtually all songbooks appearing in the German-speaking Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe (for a cross-section of these gathered as an anthology, see Bohlman 2004, 44–59). Similarly, it served the early Zionist leaders, for the Jewishness it projected by its texts on the choral traditions of cosmopolitan, turn-of-the-­ century Jews, was embraced at Zionist congresses and in offshoot Zionist songbooks as an embodiment of a new, modern Jewish nationalism. The songs functioned this way, however, not only because they were historically old, but because they expressed a modernity that emerged from the matrix of song in the historical moment. At this early stage of their modern history, it was their difference that endowed them with the potential to invent national song. Song not only arose from a common culture, but it was malleable enough to lend itself to the molding of a new common culture. The common experience of song exposed a shared past, real or imagined or both, and provided the language for a shared future. Language, indeed, was the crucial metaphor, for language not only afforded song pride of place in the aesthetic domains of Zionism, but opened that domain for Jews throughout the world, regardless of previous nationality, degree of religiosity, or socio-economic background, to enter and to share.

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With the implementation of language reforms in the 1880s, designed to create a modern Hebrew language from biblical and classical predecessors, language also acquired power as a field for action in the invention of Hebrew song. It is important to realize that song, as I prize open its meaning here to reflect its ontology in cultural Zionism, acquired new and distinctive meanings. Song with an ontological meaning reflecting Zionist thought would not best be translated into German or Yiddish as Lied or lid, but rather as Gesang, with its clear active reference to singing and the song of the collective. Both Lied and Gesang, nonetheless, translate into English as “song.” In German usage there is a very subtle sense that Lied is more neutral, whereas Gesang is the product of artifice and craftsmanship, but even this distinction is blurred by the frequent occurrence of Lied in its plural, Lieder, to refer to art song, a usage that carries over into English. The term Gesang could be applied across the borders separating genres and languages, and even more important, separating the sacred from the secular. Just as one could refer to folk song as Volksgesang instead of as Volkslied, so too could one create an umbrella category for song in the synagogue called Synagogengesang. And this is precisely what the collectors and theoreticians of Zionist songs did. The term Gesang emphasized commonality and processes of exchange. Synagogengesang, for example, had absorbed elements of style and repertory from adjacent cultural and religious groups. To sing Synagogengesang meant stepping outside the liturgy and potentially embracing as Jewish the non-sacred and non-Jewish. Even more important, Gesang resulted from creative processes that had taken traditional musical materials and transformed them into something new, if not modern. The commonality and communality of song are also etymologically immanent in Gesang. In principle, Gesang has no singular usage. One does not sing “einen Gesang” [“a song”]. The singular is a collective category: “the song of a community,” not “a song from a repertory.” In its plural form, Gesänge, it represents “the songs that collectively fulfill certain criteria or functions.” The final three volumes of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn’s (1882–1938) ten-volume musical monument and canon of all Jewish song from the early twentieth century, known in English as the Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies, thus bear the titles: Der Synagogengesang der osteuropäischen Juden [The synagogue song of the Eastern European Jews] (1932a), Der Volksgesang der osteuropäischen Juden [The folk song of the Eastern European Jews] (1932b), and Gesänge der Chassidim [Songs of the Chassidim] (1932c). The first comparative

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musicologist to establish the Archives of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the mid-1930s, Robert Lachmann (1892–1939), also used Gesänge to designate Jewish song, for example, in his seminal monograph on Jewish song on Djerba, an island off the coast of modern Tunisia, Gesänge der Juden auf der Insel Djerba (1976). It is from this discourse history about song that the modern usage of shir and shirim also came to represent the collective force of national Hebrew song. What was the common culture that song came to evoke in the matrix of its national moment? It would be possible to answer this question in various ways, depending on the processes of change afforded by the matrix. During the early decades of Zionism, however, that common culture was in almost every way unexpected. Above all, it was a common culture with deep fissures, and it was precisely for that reason that song had the potential and power to resuture the parts to form a common whole. The common culture of Jewish song cut across the fissures between East and West. It encompassed repertories in Yiddish, German, and Hebrew. Other languages also appear, but with less frequency. By the 1920s English, Hungarian, and Russian were beginning to play visible roles. Jewish song also encompassed the dialects and hybrid forms of these languages. The common culture of Jewish song, thus, did not begin with common language, but rather it aspired toward it, and music—the melos spanning a continuum from regional folk styles to the modes of the liturgy and beyond to the popular repertories—music paved the way for reaching the common language (see Bohlman and Holzapfel 2001).

“HaTikva”: The Biography of a National Anthem It is one of the tenets of nationalism that one’s nation—our nation if one is laying claim to a nation as one’s own—is somehow different, indeed, unique in some crucial way. The sound of nationalism in music, so it follows, should reflect that uniqueness, so powerfully, in fact, that it is recognizable to those who listen as nationalist music (e.g., a national anthem), regardless of whether one is an insider or an outsider. If this is the case, we might have expected the early Zionists to invest a fair amount of cultural energy in locating, gathering, and encoding musical materials to identify the acoustic signifiers for specific musical markers that were uniquely Jewish, eventually capable of distinguishing the sonic semiotics of an Israeli nation. This they did, and the ways in which they discovered Israeli song have long captured the attention of cultural historians concerned with the iconicity of modern Israeli music.

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The privileging of aesthetic distinctiveness to produce the acoustic emblems of nationalism is not, however, universally espoused. Rather than difference, it is often similarity that strikes us when listening through the iconic surface of nationalist music. The national anthems that accompany victorious Olympic athletes on the podium or precede the football matches of the European or World Cup are leveled through similar orchestration, tempi, and character to the degree they are almost interchangeable. The different nations they represent notwithstanding, they sound alike. In such instances, the markers of difference are almost not there at all, but instead sonic nationalism is constructed to reproduce multiple sonic nationalism, rather than to distinguish themselves in salient ways. To illustrate better how song came to signify an acoustics of a Jewish nation, I turn now to some empirical musical evidence, indeed to a song whose multiple tales narrate the many distinctive paths charted by the aesthetics of Israel’s moment of national song. “HaTikva” [Hope], the Zionist and later Israeli anthem (Fig. 8.5), is the most iconic of all Israeli songs. My tale focuses on the melody of “HaTikva,” a melody that was firmly established in the oral tradition of early Zionism during its late-nineteenth-century moment of national song. From that moment onward, the melody would appear in virtually every Jewish songbook until the independence of Israel in 1948. Even today, no song and melody appears more often in anthologies of all kinds to represent Israel—as a folk song, as a piece for the beginning pianist, as

Fig. 8.5  “HaTikva,” first line of melody and lyrics

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a sonic symbol—than does “HaTikva.” My focus here is on the melody, and by choosing this focus I am making an ontological point about song and the nation: meaning and identity do not lie only in the lyrics. Even listeners possessing only the vaguest familiarity with the melody of “HaTikva” have a sense of how its sound represented a Jewish aurality sought by the early cultural activists, who ensured that it would be sung collectively at the First Zionist Congress of 1897 in Basel, establishing an official position for the song in modern Israeli history.9 Above all, it was portrayed as a “folk melody” in minor mode, and that melody, attributed to Samuel Cohen, sets a poem published in 1886 by Naphtali Herz Imber (1856–1909). As a song, “HaTikva” appeared first in a collection of Vier Lieder, arranged by one S.  T. Friedland, which appeared in Leipzig in 1895 and claimed to be based on “Syrian melodies.” Despite musicological evidence to the contrary, assertions of melodic kinship of the melody with that of the “Moldau” movement in Bedr ̌ich Smetana’s tone poem, Ma Vlast, persist, even though Smetana’s melody emphasizes major rather than minor mode. The melody of “HaTikva” and its history are even more complex than such possible sources would suggest. Since entering and, to some degree, defining the canon of Israeli national song in the late nineteenth century, the origin stories that account for predecessors and influences have proliferated almost unchecked. Melodic traces have generated myth upon myth, presumptive similarities yielding assurances for vastly contradictory and paradoxical claims to authenticity. The histories of “HaTikva’s” melody fulfill all the conditions of the processes in Fig.  8.4. The history of the song is one of possibilities not probabilities. A few examples must suffice here. In part because of the putative Smetana connection, the melody is imagined by to be that of a Bohemian folk song, some would say Moravian, others Romanian or Moldavian, or simply Eastern European. The melody, moreover, bears close resemblance to a family of Swedish folk songs, among them a composed “national” song by Anders Fryxell from 1822, “Ack, Värmeland, du Sköna.” The Swedish songs, moreover, seem to have been influenced by a folk melody, a bergerette, that appeared in a 1761 collection, whose editor/composer, a “Monsieur Bouin,” calls it “Ah! Vous dirai-je, maman,” known today as the prototype for “Twinkle, 9  One of the most musicologically detailed histories of “HaTikva” appears as the liner notes for a recording by the Barcelona Symphony–National Orchestra of Catalonia in an orchestral arrangement by Kurt Weill (Levin 2000).

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Twinkle, Little Star,” that is, after it was introduced to the popular history of European music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a set of variations (cf. Gradenwitz 1949, 302–303, and List 1978, 46–47). Students in my own classes at the University of Chicago often cite another similarity, to one of the most widely circulating songs in multiple languages across southeastern Europe and Turkey, “Üsküdara gider iken” [On the way to Üsküdar (cf. Buchanan 2007; Peeva 2005). The melodic skeleton of the song emphasizes the melodic articulation of common-practice harmony, notably the rise from the tonic at the beginning of the song, to the dominant, with a subsequent descent to the tonic. The scale degrees of the melody also mark the accompanying harmonies for minor mode, thus creating a strong feeling of accompaniment, whether or not accompanying instruments are used. The melodic skeleton, thus, displays the basic characteristics of the most widely distributed of all European tune-types (for computer analysis of a vast corpus of songs from Central Europe, see Stief 1983). What do such peregrinations of “HaTikva” throughout European song history reveal? First, they make clear that there is very little about the melody that would make it distinctive as a song. Second, histories of melodic distribution and the skeletons produced by computer analysis notwithstanding, “HaTikva’s” impact on the early nationalist movement of Zionism was indeed very special and distinctive. Third, it is because the melody is so quintessentially quotidian and unexceptional that it could become such a powerful emblem of nationalism. In essence, “HaTikva” fitted the six-part diagram for the “Historical Moment of Jewish Song” in Fig. 8.3 so well, that the diagram transforms to the six-parts of Fig. 8.6, modified to represent the moments in the history of the songs journey as the iconic symbol of modern Israeli nationalism.

Echoes in the Present: Before and After National Song As we encounter the songs of early Zionism from the turn of the twentieth century, they may at best be echoes of Jewish song that had preceded the moment of national song. In recent years, many of these songs have found their way into the practices of historically informed performance, where they complement other repertories juxtaposed in postmodern fashion through the revival of klezmer music and Yiddish song. History and historicism blur together as the past is reconfigured to fulfill new functions

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Folk Song, Pan-European / Diaspora Signifier "Folk" Smetana's Ma Vlast

Minor Mode / East European & Jewish

Zionist Song / National Anthem Signifier "Zion" / Hebrew Prosody

Major Mode / Central European (Re)Composed Song / "M. Bounin / Naphtali Herz Imber

Fig. 8.6  The matrix for “HaTikva” as national anthem

and evoke a new aesthetics of nationalism. In their different ways, the Jewish proto-nationalism and nationalist songs discussed in this chapter provide us with traces that resonate in their own colonial counterpoint and coalesce through resolution in the moment of national song from which “HaTikva” arose. It is crucial that we recognize that they do this also for musical reasons, for their histories pose ontological questions about Jewish song itself. They pose questions about the many different songs that converged to represent and articulate the specific historical moment of rising nationalism. They may be mere echoes and may not fully sound living traditions, but they also possess the narrative symbolism of echo in the Jewish exegetical and interpretive practices of midrash, the stories that emanate outward from other stories. We would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a single acoustics of nationalism in modern Israel. There have been more than a few attempts to do so, not

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least among them the claims that Hebrew song was the only possible sonic metonym for a nationalism forged first by Zionism and then fixed in a modernist aesthetics by the founders of the nation. As modern as Hebrew song seemed when it was first sounded in the repertories of settler colonialism, for example, by the choruses of collective kibbutz settlements, the modernist aesthetic of an Israeli acoustics was fragile and artificial in its attempt to sound a single, teleological history of the nation. I do not mean to suggest that what survived was somehow postmodern in its juxtaposition of fragments from multiple pasts. Quite the contrary, it was the remarkable insight of the early Zionist and other nationalist ideologues and aestheticians that they recognized that song provided them with the ideal medium to uncover multiple pasts. The song they recovered could not be fitted to an existing nationalist model, and thus they used it to imagine a nationalism whose resonance filled the acoustic spaces of a chronotope matrix, in which they could mobilize Jews throughout the Diaspora as their own nation, still inchoate. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, just as at the turn of the twentieth century, we can hear the resonance of that nationalism, but to do so, we perforce must listen to history in different ways in order to perceive a nationalism that resonated to fill the moment of national song.

References Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. Rev. ed. London: Verso. Bohlman, Philip V. 2004. Before Hebrew Song. In Nationalism, Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond, ed. Michael Berkowitz, 25–59. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2019. Wie sängen wir Seinen Gesang auf dem Boden der Fremde! Jüdische Musik des Aschkenas zwischen Tradition und Moderne. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Bohlman, Philip V., and Otto Holzapfel. 2001. The Folk Songs of Ashkenaz. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions. Buchanan, Donna A. 2007. ‘Oh, Those Turks!’: Music, Politics, and Interculturality in the Balkans and Beyond. In Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse, ed. Donna Buchanan, 3–54. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Feiwel, Berthold. 1902. Vorrede. In Lieder des Ghetto, ed. Morris Rosenfeld, 6th ed. Berlin: Hermann Seemann. Gradenwitz, Peter. 1949. The Music of Israel: Its Rise and Growth through 5000 Years. New York: W. W. Norton.

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Hirshberg, Jehoash. 1995. Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine, 1889–1945: A Social History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Idelsohn, A.Z. 1932a. Der Synagogengesang der osteuropäischen Juden. Vol. 8: Hebräisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz. Leipzig: Friedrich Hofmeister. ———. 1932b. Der Volksgesang der osteuropäischen Juden. Vol. 9: Hebräisch-­ orientalischer Melodienschatz. Leipzig: Friedrich Hofmeister. ———. 1932c. Gesänge der Chassidim. Vol. 10: Hebräisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz. Leipzig: Friedrich Hofmeister. Irving, D.R.M. 2010. Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila. New York: Oxford University Press. Issiyeva, Adalyat. 2021. Representing Russia’s Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song. New York: Oxford University Press. Kurzke, Hermann. 1990. Hymnen und Lieder der Deutschen. Mainz: Dietrich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Lachmann, Robert. 1976. Gesänge der Juden auf der Insel Djerba. Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University; 1st publ. 1940. Levin, Neil W. 2000. Liner Notes. In In Celebration of Israel. Vol. 8: Milken Archive of American Jewish Music. New  York: European American Music; recorded on track 1; https://www.milkenarchive.org/music/volumes/view/ sing-­unto-­zion/work/hatikva/. List, George. 1978. The Distribution of a Melodic Formula: Diffusion or Polygenesis? Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 10: 46–47. Loewe, Heinrich. 1894. Lieder-Buch für Jüdische Vereine. Berlin: Hugo Schildberger. Peeva, Adela. 2005. Whose Is This Song? Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Schwab, Heinrich W. 1973. Das Vereinslied des 19. Jahrhunderts. In Handbuch des Volksliedes, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Lutz Röhrich, and Wolfgang Suppan, vol. 1, 863–898. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Sousa, John Philip. 1890. National, Patriotic and Typical Airs of All Lands, with Copious Notes. Philadelphia: H. Coleman. Stief, Wiegand, ed. 1983. Melodientypen des deutschen Volksgesanges. Vol. 4: Register und Variantennachweis. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. Taruskin, Richard. 1997. Defining Russian Musically. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Verein “Jung Juda”, ed. 1898. Lieder zum Fest-Commers des II.  Zionisten Kongresses. Basel: Verein “Jung Juda.” Weinberg, Jehuda Louis. 1946. Aus der Frührzeit des Zionismus: Heinrich Loewe. Jerusalem: Rubin Mass.

CHAPTER 9

“Kimigayo”: Japan’s National Anthem from a Global Historical Perspective Asahiko Hanzawa

It is commonly held that the concept of the national anthem originated in early modern Europe. It thereafter spread to the rest of the world as the modern nation-state system gained international prominence across the ensuing centuries. This study does not refute this basic premise; instead, it tries to demonstrate that the process of the seemingly evident trend of the national anthem’s globalization was not as straightforward and one-sided as might be assumed. This study focuses on the development of the curiously grave-sounding national anthem of Japan, “Kimigayo”, and highlights its surprising hybridity. The anthem’s chronicled narrative reveals a fascinating case of global history in which complicated transnational politico-­cultural interactions took place. When the concept of the national anthem was introduced to East Asia in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was understood as merely a diplomatic and ceremonial necessity by a small number of government elites. They hastily commissioned a makeshift tune to act as the façade of

A. Hanzawa (*) Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_9

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an independent country. The banal Western-style melody of the first version of “Kimigayo” (1869) was composed by a visiting British military bandmaster, although the lyrics were derived from a traditional Japanese poem. How and why was “Kimigayo” transformed into an imposing symbol of the first successfully Westernized Asian country, and later of the vast Japanese empire before its final catastrophe at the end of the Second World War? After the war, “Kimigayo” remained Japan’s de facto national anthem and was finally legalized in the form of the Act of National Flag and Anthem of 1999. In this long process, the conflict between Westernization and Japan’s national identity was complex. The second version of “Kimigayo” (1880), which survives to the present day, was a masterstroke that struck an intriguing balance between Western and Japanese/Asian musical traditions. “Kimigayo” was taught in the primary school shoka programme to promote nationalism and loyalty toward the emperor. Paradoxically, such a national project was part of the government’s efforts to modernize the country in a highly Westernized fashion. As the Japanese empire expanded, “Kimigayo” became an important nationalistic symbol despite its performance being under the heavy influence of German romanticism. In Europe, “Kimigayo” was cited within the Western classical music paradigm as part of the orientalist image of Japan. Literature on the history of “Kimigayo”, written almost exclusively in Japanese, is abundant.1 However, much of it is understandably influenced by contemporary political opinions. Throughout the post–Second World War years, the anthem’s obvious connections to pre-war militarism and “emperor worship” caused repeated political and legal wrangles.2 However, in recent decades, a more detached and expansive approach has appeared

1  As of 1991, there were 62 books, 734 journal articles, and 1260 newspaper and magazine commentaries on “Kimigayo” published in Japanese, according to the five-volume comprehensive collection of primary documents and secondary publications on “Kimigayo” Shigeshita and Sato (1991). As the heated debate on legalization occurred in the late 1990s, it is assumed that the present total would be substantially larger. 2  A sharp divide lies in whether to make it compulsory (meaning the imposition of a certain penalty in case of disobedience) for teachers in state and local government-run schools to stand up and sing/play the anthem at important school ceremonies. See Tanaka (2000), Tanaka (2012), Tokoro (2000), Marshall (2015, 97–126).

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that clearly delineates “Kimigayo’s” historical resilience and transnational connections.3 This study owes much to this recent scholarship.

The Global Expansion of the National Anthem The history of the national anthem began with the rise of nationalism. As such, it is only natural that the two typical anthems emerged in Britain and France where the formation of the modern nation-state began earlier and was most successful. “God Save the King (Queen)” and “La Marseillaise” proved to be so influential worldwide that it would not be an overstatement to note that most of today’s national anthems in the world are modelled after them. “God Save the King (Queen)” can be seen as the prototype of national anthems that express a sense of admiration for a monarch. It was officially sung on an important public occasion for the first time in the first half of the eighteenth century during the Georgian period. The origins of the melody can be traced back to old Christian hymns, chorales, and plainsongs from previous centuries (Cummings 1902). The mood of “God Save the King (Queen)” is calm and composed with the melody line progressing mostly sequentially, rendering it easy to sing even for large public gatherings. The stately melody became so well-known and popular that it was used with different lyrics for the royal and national anthems of Norway, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Imperial Russia and the First German Empire. Joseph Haydn, the celebrated classical composer, was so impressed by the role played by “God Save the King (Queen)” in bringing the British public together when he visited London that, on his return to Vienna, he composed the royal anthem of the Austrian Empire. Haydn’s melody is used in the present-day German national anthem (Riley and Smith 2016). In contrast, “La Marseillaise” is a more dramatic piece of music with a strong orientation towards revolution and republicanism. It was famously composed in 1792 during the French Revolution. Musically, it is a march with typical triplets and a dotted rhythm, with its roots found more in dance than in song. Compared to hymn-type anthems, it is more suitably accompanied by a brass band, the instrumentation of which having undergone extensive technological development at the time of the melody’s composition. Together with its combative lyrics, the piece is energetic, 3  See Naito (1997), Yamada (2019), Tsujita (2015), Mori (2015), Oda (2018), and Oyama (2020), among others.

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forward-moving and even aggressive. “La Marseillaise” was widely sung not only in France but also in many parts of Europe, not least at the time of the revolutionary upheavals of 1830 and 1848 in the protest against the suppression of nationalism under the Concert of Europe (Yoshida 1994; Kolb 2005). Throughout the history of imperialism, revolution, and anti-­colonialism, the influence of British and French national anthems spread across the world. Generally, countries that retained a monarchy in some form tended to adopt the British hymn style. In white minority-run settler colonies, such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, “God Save the King (Queen)” was naturally adopted as the national anthem. The small number of states in the non-European world that managed to remain independent, such as Japan, Qing (China), Siam (Thailand from 1939 onwards), Afghanistan and Ethiopia, were all more or less successfully centralized monarchies that opted for the British-style anthem (Hanzawa 2016). As for the United States, which fought for its independence from Britain at about the same time as the French Revolution, the French-style “Star-Spangled Banner”, with its dotted upbeat at the beginning and impressive leap upwards, came to be used as the state’s virtual national anthem. It was composed during the Anglo-American War of 1812. Following the numerous waves of decolonization in the twentieth century, a great number of newly independent states sprang up, mostly becoming republics and generally preferring a French-style march. It must be noted that the global proliferation of “La Marseillaise”-style marches did not proceed as straightforwardly as the hymns in the vein of “God Save the King (Queen)”.4 The perception of “La Marseillaise” was unstable, particularly during the nineteenth century, owing to the vicissitudes of republicanism in France. The two Napoleons naturally did not favour the piece. When “La Marseillaise” was reaffirmed as the official French national anthem in 1879, it became a symbol of French nationalism and was disliked by liberals and socialists, who instead upheld “The Internationale”, which came into being between the Paris Commune of 1871 and the turn of the century. This new piece, musically similar to “La Marseillaise”, was accorded official status by the socialist Second International (1889–1916) and was to be sung by socialists, communists 4  The proliferation of marches signified more than the spread of revolutionary, anti-­colonial and republican thought. As will be mentioned later in this chapter regarding Japan, this particular style of music had strong affinity with militarism.

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and often anti-colonial independence activists in many parts of the world. “The Internationale” became the first national anthem of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. Some may argue that there is indeed a third category in world national anthems that can be dubbed “the Italian operatic type”. The national anthems of Latin American states mostly fall into this category. Their distinct operatic character should have been due to the rise of Italian opera throughout the Western world in the first half of the nineteenth century, when many of these anthems were born. When we examine European music history, it is clear that the predominance of Italian music and musicians was overwhelming since well before the age of nationalism. It is not recognized, however, that the global proliferation of Italian-style music owed much to Britain’s economic strength and expanding world hegemony. About the same time that “God save the King (Queen)” was effectively accorded the status of Britain’s national anthem, George Frederic Handel’s Messiah, along with its famous “Hallelujah Chorus”, was composed. The piece came to be recognized as Britain’s “second national anthem”, culminating in its Crystal Palace performance in 1857 with a chorus of 2000 singers and an orchestra of 500 players. It was no secret that Handel’s popular and even political success in England depended on his early training and triumphs in Italy (McGeary 2016). At the time, England may have been considered “the Land without Music” but it did become the lifelong home for prominent Italian musicians such as Francesco Geminiani and Muzio Clementi. Hundreds of talented Italian musicians worked in or immigrated to Britain—particularly London and other large cities— because the country was the biggest promoter of music consumption. It must be noted that Britain’s historically significant position in the globalization of national anthems was not limited to the prototypical role of “God Save the King (Queen)”. Britain’s global hegemony provided talented European musicians—not only Italian but also German, Irish, Scottish, Jewish and others—with opportunities to travel around the world and proliferate Western music and, in some cases, European-style national anthems. Here, it is worthwhile noting what some historians of the British Empire refer to as an “informal empire”. Historians Gallagher and Robinson argue that Britain expanded its influence by means of an “informal empire”, particularly in the nineteenth century (Gallagher and Robinson 1953). Britain’s world power did not depend so much on

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formal colonies painted red on the map as it did on the following three informal spheres of influence: (1) East and Southeast Asia, (2) the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and (3) Latin America. In these regions, Britain did not endeavour for the formal annexation of territory at any cost; instead, it preferred to hold an overall superior position by tactfully managing diplomatic, economic and cultural relations with local political powers. Although it did not have these territories directly under their control, the British concentrated on maintaining good relations with client or friendly states and protecting important trading ports, strategic outposts and major sea lanes, making the most of the global predominance of its naval power (Porter 1999). This strategy meant that in the vast spheres of its influence, Britain brought about the essentially European-born framework of the international law system with its peculiar diplomatic rituals, including national symbols such as flags and anthems. In contrast to the generally held view, the British Empire should not be understood as the sum of directly controlled colonies but rather as the collection of vast spheres of influence where “independent states” existed. In the latter view, each state needed its own visual and auditory national signifier. Typical examples include the “independent” Latin American states. Once liberated from their old Iberian masters in the early nineteenth century, they claimed sovereignty and developed national symbols; in reality, however, they now fell under the strong financial control of London (Go 2011). In the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire, which was forced to conclude unequal treaties with Britain in the 1830s, adopted its own official national anthem. It was composed in 1844 during the Tanzimat reforms by Giuseppe Donizetti, the younger brother of the famous Italian opera composer Gaetano Donizetti. In Egypt, hitherto under the Ottoman Empire but increasingly under British influence, Isma’il Pasha of the Muhammad Ali dynasty invited the Italian opera master Giuseppe Verdi to compose a grand opera for the opening of the Opera House in Cairo. Isma’il Pasha treated the “Grand March” from the opera Aida as the virtual national anthem of his country at various official and diplomatic ceremonies. In Southeast Asia, a clear example of British influence was in the case of the kingdom of Siam. Although Siam managed to remain independent, the kingdom conceded considerable territory to Britain and France, concluded a series of unequal treaties with various Western powers and hired British military officers to train the Thai royal army in the middle of the

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nineteenth century. It was during this time, under the reign of the modernizer King Rama IV, that the melody of “God Save the King (Queen)” was adopted as the official royal anthem, replete with Thai lyrics meaning “Long live the great king”. As will become evident in the following sections, East Asian nations such as Japan, China and Korea all struggled with “the Western Impact”. The introduction of the Western diplomatic style was part of this process. “Kimigayo”, an anthem that expresses admiration for the monarch, evidently followed the British pattern. However, the French-type march was also influential in the region. Japan’s victory over China in 1894 and Russia in 1905 stimulated the production of numerous popular military marches, including the famous Gunkan Koshin-kyoku or Warship March (1900) and Aikoku Koshin-kyoku or Patriotic March (1937), which almost acquired official music status towards the beginning of the Second World War. China, in the throes of revolution, adopted as its de facto national anthem, the “March of the Volunteers”, which was musically almost completely Western.5

The First “Kimigayo” Japan abandoned its policy of international isolation in the 1850s. For more than two centuries, the country had closed itself off from the rest of the world except for limited trade with China, Korea and the Netherlands through strictly controlled and narrow channels. A diplomatic mission led by Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy was the first attempt by an international power to open Japan’s borders.6 Upon their first landing in 1853, the US Navy brass band performed the “Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail, Columbia” at ceremonies with the Tokugawa Shogunate. They also played “Yankee Doodle” and Steven Foster’s light music in the minstrel show, which, in those days, had been popular at home. Western music was almost entirely novel and alien to the Japanese audience7 but they apparently enjoyed the performance (Kasahara 2001). 5  The piece virtually became communist China’s national anthem from 1949 but the formal adoption was in 2004. 6  For those unfamiliar with East Asian international history, standard accounts on state-­ making in the region include Boyd (2009). 7  Renaissance religious and worldly music had, in fact, been introduced to Japan in the sixteenth century by Christian missionaries; however, as Christianity was strictly outlawed soon afterwards, there remained almost no trace of Western music in the following centuries.

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It was the British who imparted a more lasting impact on Japan’s policy of adopting Western diplomatic and military practices, which included music performances. Japan’s encounter with the West proceeded mostly peacefully but it was not entirely without conflict. During the Anglo-­ Satsuma War of 1863, dead British sailors were buried in the bay of Kagoshima and the solemn funeral music of the brass band impressed the Japanese. This was perhaps an important juncture at which the Japanese started to recognize the fact that music acted as a signifier of life and death for Westerners. The leadership of the Satsuma domain, who would soon take the lead in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, approached the British after the war, asking them to send experts who could teach young Satsuma samurais how to play Western brass instruments. British bandmaster John William Fenton, an Irish-born musician of Scottish descent who served in British India, Gibraltar, Malta and the Cape Colony, arrived in Japan in due course and became the first instructor of the fledgling Japanese Navy band. Fenton was to compose the melody of the first version of “Kimigayo”. Japan in the nineteenth century was certainly part of Britain’s East Asian informal empire. It had just concluded unequal treaties with Britain and other Western powers in 1859. More than 80% of Japan’s international trade was conducted with either Britain or areas under British economic influence. The largest industrial investment and contingent of o-yatoi gaikokujin (professional foreign instructors who helped Japan modernize in all aspects) came from Britain. Further, Japanese waters were practically protected from Russian pressure by the British Royal Navy. Above all, the newly founded Japanese Navy was almost entirely under the tutelage of the British (Best 2020). Fenton’s presence in Japan thus came as no surprise. He had initially served in the British regiment protecting the foreign community in Yokohama near Tokyo but was soon hired by the Japanese Navy and stayed in the country for nearly ten years until 1877. A British journalist recorded as early as 1870 that Fenton gave two lessons a day to a group of enthusiastic navy cadets who quickly learned to read basic Western musical notation and played simple pieces on domestically fabricated instruments. In due course, they ordered proper wind instruments from London (Black 1870). Among the variety of cultural activities introduced to Japan by visiting Westerners, brass band performances were particularly conspicuous and popular among the Japanese. It had also been recognized for decades that fife and drum corps were a necessary part of Western military training.

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At the start of the Meiji era (1868–1912),8 the new Japanese government hosted a series of high-ranking foreign guests. In 1869, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, the second son of Queen Victoria, visited Japan. This was followed in 1872 by the state visit of Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia and in 1873 by that of Italian Royal Prince, Prince Tommaso, Duke of Genoa. For the first time, the Japanese government apparently recognized the need for a national anthem for these occasions. Documentary evidence, mainly in the form of memoirs and documented hearsay produced decades later by involved individuals, suggests several different accounts of how exactly the first version of “Kimigayo” came into being in relation to these particular state events. Nevertheless, the bottom line was that the political leadership at that time did not have a clear conception of what the national anthem should be like. Although the need for an official piece of music was recognized, such matters were casually left to the discretion of a small group of subordinates. An official later recalled that, upon asking his superior for more instructions, he was simply told, “Do not bother me with such trifles!” (Tsujita 2015, 34–41). In this context, Fenton was asked or perhaps volunteered to provide a melody for the popular traditional Japanese poem “Kimigayo”, which had almost unanimously been chosen by his Japanese pupils. The auspicious lyrics from Kokin Wakashu, an ancient anthology of the waka form of Japanese poetry compiled in the early tenth century, had already acquired nationwide popularity in the Edo period (1603–1868) as a standard verse typically read at the start of the New Year, wedding ceremonies and other festive occasions. The word “kimi” had come to specifically refer to the emperor once “Kimigayo” became the national anthem; however, until the end of the Edo period, it had referred to any second person who was respected or loved.9 The choice of the lyrics proved to be so appropriate and successful that they have remained unchanged until today. Fenton’s melody, however, survived less than a decade. This was a result of the quality of his music as well as a growing sense of national consciousness on the part of the Japanese people. Fenton had little formal education in music composition and what he offered was a simple Christian hymn-­ like tune with little correspondence to the syllables of the Japanese lyrics.10

 The period under the reign of Emperor Meiji.  “Kimigayo” as a whole means “your reign/life”. 10  Fenton’s version may have sounded like a fanfare when played by a brass band. 8 9

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During the first half of the 1870s, Fenton’s version was regularly played at important ceremonial occasions, often in the presence of the emperor. Around 1876, however, Nakamura Suketsune,11 Fenton’s top pupil and now the leader of Japan’s new navy band, who had been uneasy with the tune from the outset, formally proposed to his superior in the navy ministry that the melody ought to be replaced with a more appropriate one. Nakamura contended that Fenton’s melody did not fit the voice of the Japanese people and did not inspire a Japanese sentiment; it thus did not serve as a piece of music that should display the utmost reverence towards the emperor (Naito 1997, 68–70). To do him justice, Fenton had seemingly enquired of his navy band pupils if there were any Japanese songs that he may refer to. A recorded episode suggests that he was invited to listen to a traditional song called “Horaisan”, which included the “Kimigayo” verse accompanied by Satsuma biwa lute (Tsujita 2015, 36). Another episode suggests that he tried to take inspiration from a piece entitled “Mononofu no Uta”, a popular song sung in the Kyushu district (Yamada 2019, 135). Our modern-­ day Westernized ears, however, would unfortunately be unable to detect almost any resemblance between these songs and Fenton’s “Kimigayo”. He may nevertheless have tried to transplant the recitativo-like character to his version of “Kimigayo”. At any rate, Fenton’s “Kimigayo” sounded completely Western. It certainly fell within the same category as other Western-style national anthems in the Asia Pacific region. This included the Thai royal anthem—which used the melody of “God Save the King (Queen)”—and that of the Hawaiian kingdom, “Hawai’i Pono’I”, both of which came into existence during the same period under similar circumstances in which Western diplomatic rituals spread across the region. The Hawaiian kingdom had come under the influence of the British Empire from the early nineteenth century. The kingdom hired a number of Western instructors including the Prussian musician, Henry Berger, who had studied with the famous waltz composer Johan Strauss. He composed the music of “Hawai’i Pono’I” based on the verse written by King David Kalākaua and the piece was thereafter adopted as the official anthem of the kingdom of Hawaii in 1876. It survived as the national anthem of the short-lived Hawaiian Republic between 1894 and 1898 and as the 11  In Japanese, Korean and Chinese, the family name (“Nakamura” in this case) precedes the given name.

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anthem of the State of Hawaii even after the islands were annexed to the United States. The Japanese Navy brass band performed “Hawai’i Pono’i” when King Kalākaua sailed to Tokyo in 1881 as the first head of an independent state to visit Japan.

The Origins of the Hybrid “Kimigayo” The second “Kimigayo”, which emerged in 1880 and was to remain the official anthem of Japan to this day, proved to be a highly transcultural composition. When the Japanese Navy bandleader Nakamura asked that the Fenton version be replaced or at least revised, it was the imperial court musicians who responded. The court musicians had by then eagerly started to learn Western instruments such as the flute, violin and cello; however, these musicians were the hereditary successors of traditional Gagaku music. Gagaku (or “elegant music”), whose origins can be found in many parts of southeast and continental Asia, had more than 1200 years of history as the official court music of Japan. When the Shogunate military government was in power during the Edo period, the Gagaku tradition was preserved in the poorly funded imperial court in Kyoto. In the Meiji Era, when the imperial court returned to the centre of Japanese politics, it was again time that the court musicians came to the frontline.12 One may wonder why the Meiji government chose Gagaku in their efforts to revise the national anthem. To be sure, using popular music/ performance arts such as Kabuki, Nagauta, Shamisen and Shakuhachi was out of the question as they were commonly considered to be vulgar, often associated with red light districts, and, in any case, belonged to the lower social classes. In contrast, Nogaku, a form of high culture, seemed a more suitable choice. For centuries, it had been the official music/performance art form of the ruling warrior class. Certainly, the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate somewhat undermined its status and patronage. However, both the Duke of Edinburgh and Grand Duke Alexandrovich attended 12  The official authorship of this Gagaku version of “Kimigayo” has customarily been designated to the court musician Hayashi Hiromori, the most senior of the group of musicians of the project. However, studies on “Kimigayo” history suggest that the most substantial contributor was actually Oku Yoshiisa, who was not much older than twenty at the time. Oku later became a respected musician and composed songs sung not only in Japan but also in Korea and China. Court musicians and military musicians in the early Meiji period worked closely together and Gottschewski argues that a part of the new Gagaku melody was indeed recycled from the Fenton melody (Gottschewski 2003).

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Nogaku performances while in Japan. In 1879, retired former US president Ulysses Grant stayed for two months in Japan and requested that Iwakura Tomomi, an important courtier and statesman, invite him to a Nogaku performance. The performance impressed him so much that he strongly urged Iwakura to preserve and promote the genre as high art. Indeed, a Noh chant—possibly the auspicious and popular Takasago song—may have been arranged for the national anthem. As it turned out, Gagaku proved to be the most appropriate choice because of its “universality”. Although Gagaku had in many respects largely been localized through its long history in the imperial court, Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, its scale/mode systems were inherited from ancient Chinese chromatic scale theory, which coincidentally had much in common with the Pythagorean tuning. The new “Kimigayo” melody devised in 1880 was in the Ichikotsu mode of Gagaku, which was, in practice, rather similar to the Dorian mode of Western music.13 Nogaku and other Japanese forms of music were generally unable or unsuitable to fit into such rational scale structures. Japanese traditional music mostly involved the human voice and did not favour a strictly defined pitch or intonation. Typical instruments used for accompaniment, such as the koto, biwa and shamisen, were mostly plucked stringed instruments that did not produce a sustained sound with stable intonation (Ishida 1997). This may have been why Fenton had failed to imitate the intonation and other musical elements of the local songs he heard. Instead of being a natural manifestation of popular national sentiment, the national anthem of early Meiji Japan was merely a diplomatic necessity sponsored by the political leadership. Japan was not traditionally a choral society, had no custom of group singing and even lacked the tradition of gathering in public places and voicing opinions. While flags and family crests were common, a musical signifier of a group of people was a fairly alien concept for the Japanese. Furthermore, from a practical point of view, national anthems in that era had to be playable instrumentally (particularly by a brass band) not only by Japanese musicians but also by those of foreign nations. In this sense, the fact that Gagaku was to a great extent instrumental ensemble music was vital; similarly, its degree of transnationality enabled such prominent composers as Olivier Messiaen and Benjamin 13  This chapter does not go into a detailed discussion on modes or scales. A well-known example of a piece of music using the Dorian mode is the quaint English folk song “Greensleeves”.

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Britten to later incorporate elements of Gagaku in their orchestral compositions. Another interesting fact about the revised “Kimigayo” was that the new melody proposed by the Gagaku musicians was given a Western-style harmony by the newly arrived professional German musician Franz Eckert. After Fenton left Japan in 1877, the Japanese government had looked for a more qualified music instructor. Eckert had studied composition, music theory, the oboe etc. in music schools in Breslau and Dresden before coming to Japan in 1879 as the musical director of the Japanese Navy band. He was such an able musician that his activities extended beyond the military band and he even composed ceremonial music for Emperor Meiji. He lived in Japan for twenty years until 1899 and served in both the navy and army bands as well as in the imperial court music bureau and the newly set up Ongaku Torishirabe-gakari, which in 1887 had been converted into the Tokyo Music School, the predecessor of the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. The harmonization of the new “Kimigayo” melody was one of his first achievements. Of course, Gagaku, an oriental art form, had an entirely unique conception of harmony. The attempt to transplant Western-style functional harmony to a Gagaku melody could easily result in failure. Eckert carried out this difficult task in the most ingenious way. Although he gave a rich German romantic accompaniment to the main part of the melody, he deliberately left the first two bars and the last one and a half bars entirely without any harmony. These unison bars curiously stood out and created a very unusual mood; more specifically, they engendered a distinctly “oriental” impression. Unison or monophony was typically used in musical orientalism, expressing not only archaic simplicity but also a certain kind of mysterious power. Examples include many famous works such as The Mikado overture by Gilbert and Sullivan, the beginnings of which is impressively monophonic with an abundance of primitive energy. Furthermore, the beginnings of the above examples make effective use of the fifth interval, one of the most characteristic intervals of European medieval music, thereby further suggesting a sense of antiquity to the modern ear. It must be noted that the first two bars of the new “Kimigayo” melody move between the notes C and G, evoking the fifth. Eckert’s

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choice to not add a chordal harmony to the passage clearly articulates the interval.14 In short, Eckert’s harmonic arrangement of the new “Kimigayo” melody did not necessarily tarnish the “Japaneseness” of the piece. Rather, it highlighted the unique cultural value and identity of the country it represented. It is true that from the third bar onwards, Eckert added a standard four-part harmony in C major that contradicted the Ichikotsu mode whose keynote is D, not C.15 Some composers, including Olivier Messiaen and Akutagawa Yasushi, later criticized this aspect (Tsujita, 99).16 Nevertheless, establishing the C major tonality in the central part of the piece has the effect of making the last section sound as if it ends on the dominant in a half cadence, again helping to facilitate the impression of oriental mysticism.

“Kimigayo” as the Imperial Anthem In 1888, the score of the new “Kimigayo” with the title “Japanese Hymn” was officially sent out to foreign governments, confirming its international status as Japan’s national anthem. Domestically, however, it took some time for the piece to be truly recognized as representing the nation by the general public at large, who were expected to sing it voluntarily. As we have seen, “Kimigayo” was initially merely a piece of music prepared by a small number of bureaucrats with the help of privileged musicians. It thus had not evolved out of ordinary people in their nation-building efforts. In instilling “Kimigayo” in the public mind, compulsory education presumably played a central role. As early as 1879, the Ministry of Education set up the Ongaku Torishirabe-gakari (or Music Education Group) to examine and, where considered appropriate, adopt “useful” elements of Western music as part of the government’s modernization programme. The director of the Group, Isawa Shuji, an influential official in charge of music education policy, held that all primary school children should learn 14  The English composer Sidney Jones’ opera Geisha (1896), typical of Japonism music, also begins with an impressive ascending fifth. 15  In practice, “Kimigayo” was sometimes played in other keys such as B flat for the technical convenience of wind instruments, etc. 16  Akutagawa Yasushi, the son of renowned novelist Akutagawa Ryunosuke, was a Japanese composer active in the post-war period. Yasushi’s criticism may have been influenced by his leftist ideology while Messiaen’s opinion seems to have been out of his respect for a foreign culture.

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to sing shoka or educational school songs. For Isawa, the programme was the first step in building up kokugaku (or national music) in the long run. Its immediate aim, however, was to effectively ingrain “civilized thought and behavior” in Japan’s young imperial subjects (Okunaka 2008; Watanabe 2010). He invited American music educator Luther W. Mason to supervise the programme and imported the melodies of a number of European hymns and folk songs, including “Home! Sweet Home!”, “The Last Summer Rose” and “Auld Lang Syne”, merely replacing the original lyrics with newly written Japanese words. An important aspect to note here is that even a domestic education policy such as the shoka project was under the heavy influence of the steadily globalizing Western music style. Borrowing European melodies was a transitory measure only taken because there were at the time not yet enough Japanese specialists who could compose similar pieces on their own using Western notation. Indeed, the shoka compilation, edited between 1879 and 1884, included a song titled “Kimigayo” with the same lyrics as the national anthem but with an entirely different melody taken from an old English song. It was not that the Education Ministry had proposed a new or alternative anthem, but the title “Kimigayo” nevertheless became well-known throughout the country because of this shoka. In 1890, the Meiji government promulgated the guiding principles of their education policy by issuing the Imperial Rescript on Education in which Confucian ideology and moral principles were emphasized. Thereafter, the Education Ministry stipulated that the Gagaku version of “Kimigayo” should be sung solemnly and played during school ceremonies as one of the most important shokas. Needless to say, promoting a sense of nationalism and respect towards the emperor among young citizens were among the top priorities of the shoka project. After all, Japanese children were the ones who would soon grow up and sustain the expanding Japanese empire. Coupled with the publicity given by the bourgeoning public media such as mass newspapers and music journals, “Kimigayo” attained nationwide recognition as Japan’s national anthem by the turn of the century. Outside of schools, “Kimigayo’s” special position as the country’s transcendental and dignified national anthem was effectively enforced by the great surge in popularity of Western-style gunka (military songs/marches). If the former was like “God Save the King (Queen)”, the latter evidently fell into the category of “La Marseillaise”. While “Kimigayo” was a stately, slow-tempo hymn praising the emperor, the Japanese also needed more

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active, forward-moving music. Here, the ideological divide between monarchism and republicanism did not matter. Rather, marches were used to push for increased militarism in pre–Second World War Japan. These two types of nationalistic/imperialistic music co-existed and developed together, complementing each other in the history of Japan’s imperial expansion. In 1884, the Imperial Army hired high-profile French military musician Charles Leroux, who had studied the piano at the Paris Conservatoire, as the instructor of their military band. He stayed in Japan until 1889 and composed one of the first Western-style marches entitled “Batto-tai”. The piece, resembling “La Marseillaise” in many ways, was to enjoy such an exceptional reputation that it became one of the most important marches of the Imperial Army and even today remains as an official march of Japan’s Ground Self-Defence Force. It was composed amid anti-Chinese nationalistic uproar caused by the outcome of the Gapsin Coup of 1884  in Korea. The song’s lyrics were offered by the respected professor of Tokyo Imperial University, Toyama Masakazu, who later became the Minister of Education in the third Ito Hirobumi cabinet. Toyama and his colleagues had studied military songs from over the world, including “La Marseillaise” and “The Watch on the Rhine”, in their efforts to create a new music genre that would bring together all Japanese under the single goal of strengthening the country as an imperial power (Tsujita 2014). After Japan’s victories in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, numerous patriotic gunkas were written by emerging Japanese composers who had by then become sufficiently adept in the composition techniques of Western music.17 One such musician was Yoshimoto Kozo, one of Eckert’s best pupils. Upon Eckert’s departure in 1899, the Japanese government decided to cease their practice of hiring foreign instructors and instead ordered Yoshimoto to study in Europe with a view to making him the new leader of Japan’s military band. He entered the Berlin University of Arts to study the clarinet and various aspects of military music. During that time (circa 1902), he composed the popular Kimigayo March, which tactfully connected the slow melody of “Kimigayo” with an original swinging march. Despite Yoshimoto’s premature death in 1907, his friend and pupil Setoguchi Tokichi took over, producing popular gunkas one after another including 17  It is estimated that between 1885 and 1945, more than 10,000 gunkas were written by Japanese composers (Tsujita 2014).

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the two monumental masterpieces of imperial Japan, the Warship March (1900) and the Patriotic March (1937). As if to make a clear contrast with the generally fast and animated gunkas, “Kimigayo’s” solemn and imposing character was increasingly emphasized as the Japanese empire grew and expanded in the first decades of the twentieth century. This tendency was clearly reflected in the way “Kimigayo” was played and sung; the performance became substantially slower and heftier from at least the late 1920s onwards. What is interesting from the viewpoint of global history is that the change in tempo seemed to be partly influenced by the contemporary values of European classical music. Although recording technology did not exist until the early twentieth century, documentary sources and the scores themselves, which featured metronomic suggestions, indicate that “Kimigayo” was, with reasonable flexibility, generally recommended to be played and sung at the tempo of 69 quarter-note beats per minute (Shigeshita and Sato 1991, vol. 3, 122–132). This moderate tempo is sensible in terms of assuring the clarity of the words and ease of breath. Further, in the case of performance by a brass band or choir with piano accompaniment, which was the standard arrangement, a too-slow tempo was generally considered unsuitable. It is reasonable to assume that on official occasions and in schools until the 1920s or even later, “Kimigayo” was presumably not played and sung as slowly as we generally hear nowadays.18 An important turning point appeared to have come with the famous orchestral recording of “Kimigayo” in 1928 by the conductor Konoe Hidemaro, an eminent musician and influential nobleman who founded in 1926 the New Symphony Orchestra, the predecessor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra.19 Konoe often travelled to Europe, studied conducting with the great German master Erich Kleiber, and even directed the Berlin Philharmonic in 1924. As was often the case with other Western classical musicians and intellectuals in Japan from the period, he deeply admired hefty German romantic music such as that by Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. The orchestral version of “Kimigayo”, Konoe’s own arrangement, featured a thick symphonic texture and was 18  “Kimigayo” is generally sung nowadays at the tempo of much less than sixty-nine beats per minute. 19  His elder brother was the prominent politician Konoe Fumimaro, who was Prime Minister between 1937 and 1941.

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played in the recording at the slow tempo of 40 to 44 quarter-note beats per minute. With the help of radio broadcasting as well as the expanding record sales system and the distribution of the recording to schools nationwide, this extremely slow rendition of “Kimigayo” came to be regarded as a standard performance of the anthem. The solemn mood engendered by its romantic interpretation culminated in a highly publicized national event held in the Imperial Palace Square in 1940 that commemorated the 2600th anniversary of the Japanese imperial calendar. A total of 100,000 people gathered on this occasion and sang “Kimigayo” in unison. During wartime from the late 1930s to the catastrophic year of 1945, the national radio reported Japan’s military “successes” on an almost daily basis and came to treat “Kimigayo” as an almost divine piece of music that was too important to be played too often on the radio. The radio announcement of the opening of the anti-US/UK warfare operations in 1941, for instance, was sandwiched by a new piece titled “Umi Yukaba” played at the beginning followed by the Warship March played at the end. With a calm and solemn character similar to “Kimigayo”, “Umi Yukaba” was composed in 1937 by Nobutoki Kiyoshi and came to be regarded as the nation’s “second national anthem”. It was natural, therefore, that in advance of Emperor Showa’s surrender broadcast in August 1945, that “Kimigayo” was played gravely, strongly impacting listeners with the acute realization that the Japanese empire had come to an end.20 After the end of the Second World War, performances of “Kimigayo” faced certain restrictions under the US occupation of Japan. As it turned out, however, “Kimigayo” remained as the de facto national anthem. Although left-wing opinions insisted for some time that it should be replaced with a new anthem, their attempts were not successful. Instead, “Kimigayo” survived not as an anthem that was enthusiastically sung and played by the majority of the public, but as a piece of official music only passively heard at diplomatic or international events and sports games. The public would hear “Kimigayo” played when NHK, the national broadcasting corporation, announced the start and the end of its daily television broadcast, which began in the 1950s. The performance by the NHK Symphony Orchestra basically inherited Konoe’s interpretation at a slightly faster tempo of 44 to 48 quarter-note beats per minute.

 The emperor Showa is known as Hirohito outside Japan.

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Due to increasing Westernization, chorus culture took root more earnestly in post-war Japan; however, “Kimigayo” has never been part of the repertoire of most people as they do not want to become involved in sensitive political debates. The legalization of the anthem in 1999 can broadly be seen as a reflection of the return of national self-assertion and a nationalist turn of the public mood. However, it was more directly prompted by the argument that the legally unfounded and customary status of “Kimigayo” might put schoolteachers in an unnecessarily uneasy position over an issue where opinions were sharply divided and yet they were compelled to take sides for occupational reasons.

The Global Reach of “Kimigayo” As we have seen, the socio-political and musical history of “Kimigayo” can be examined from a broad international perspective. As noted, the practice of adopting a national anthem began in Europe in the age of nationalism. For East Asian nations, however, having a national musical symbol was a foreign concept. Nevertheless, once the diplomatic need for an anthem representing their country was recognized, nations wanted to incorporate elements of their own culture to the music and blend them with Western compositional techniques. This was most successfully achieved in Japan. The adoption of a Gagaku melody was merely one aspect of this achievement; the social recognition and status of “Kimigayo” owes itself to the national education system. Historian Yasuda Hiroshi points out that this “miracle” was possible because, in contrast to other East Asian and island countries in the Pacific, Japan alone was able to retain “sovereignty in education” in the era of formal and informal Western imperialism. Yasuda regrets that in many places in the Asia Pacific region, Western Christian missionaries were so powerful that almost all native musical elements—particularly those of the Pacific Islands—were “slaughtered” and completely replaced with European Christian hymns (Yasuda 2008). Although Japanese shokas were initially heavily dependent on “borrowed” Western songs, they progressively grew to become more original as Japanese composers actively wrote new types of children songs including Doyo (nursery rhymes) in the relatively liberal days of the Taisho Democracy in roughly the first two decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it must also be noted that while the Japanese empire was firmly in power, some Western composers used the melody of “Kimigayo”

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in their own works. One of the earliest examples is Giacomo Puccini’s impressive citations of “Kimigayo” and other Japanese folk melodies in his celebrated opera Madama Butterfly, composed between 1901 and 1903. When the First World War broke out, Russian composer Alexander Glazunov promptly composed Paraphrase on the Hymns of the Allies, op. 96, connecting the national anthems of Russia, Serbia, Montenegro, France, England, Belgium, and Japan. Other pieces that use “Kimigayo” include the opera La Bataille by André Gailhard, a pupil of César Frank, composed in 1931, and Paul Henri Büsser’s Impromptu on a Japanese theme for harp solo from 1932. Many of these pieces are orientalist in nature but they amply show that the cultural flows of the time were not only unidirectional. If we turn our gaze to Japan’s neighbouring countries, the situation was not so straightforward. Korea in the second half of the nineteenth century could have taken a course of modernization similar to Japan. However, this possibility was repeatedly hampered by political instability, social immaturity and recurrent interventions from both China and Japan. Moreover, the influence of Western Christian missionaries was far greater in Korea than in Japan, where Christianity was limited to a small number of elites. Under the missionaries’ influence, changga, which resembled shoka but with distinctly Korean elements, began to emerge by the turn of the century. Before it could fully develop, however, Japanese shoka education was imposed on Korea following Japan’s annexation of the country in 1910.21 An interesting episode concerned Franz Eckert, who had gone back to Germany after serving in Japan, when he was hired as a music adviser by the Korean dynasty on the brink of its demise. Eckert was asked to compose Korea’s national anthem, “Aegukga”, or “Patriotic Hymn”, in 1901. This piece is different from contemporary North and South Korean national anthems that bear the same title. As he had done in Japan, Eckert also trained the military band of the Korean dynasty but his efforts were frustrated as the dynasty was soon abolished and his native country of Germany became an enemy state for Japan in the First World War. Nevertheless, these turns of events reveal the importance of the global movements of music specialists in the history of national anthems. 21  A similar course was followed in the Southern Pacific Islands, where Christian missionaries were particularly powerful. The Japanese arrived as administrator in the framework of the mandate system of the League of Nations (Yasuda 2008).

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In China, too, the Qing dynasty was sluggish or at least reluctant to adopt Western-style modernization; however, after its unexpected defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894, its leadership started to adopt shoka education to spread modern ideas in an effort to reform the conventional education system centred on imperial examination.22 As regards its national anthem, the Qing dynasty did not recognize the need for one for a long time, only using traditional tunes when diplomatically necessary. It was not until the very last moment that China’s first national anthem, “Cup of Solid Gold” (Gong Jin’ou), came into being in 1911. This was on the strong recommendation of influential diplomat Zeng Jize, China’s ambassador to Britain, who witnessed European nations with “proper” national anthems. The piece was composed by court musicians in traditional fashion but was only in place for a week or so before the Xin Hai revolution brought about the end of the Qing dynasty. China’s turbulent years of civil war, foreign intrusions and the communist revolution that followed are beyond the scope of this chapter to address. It should be noteworthy, however, that the global history of national anthems continued on its established trajectory in East Asia in relation to Japan’s imperial expansion. When Japan installed the puppet state of Manchukuo in the 1930s in northern China, its “national anthem” was composed by eminent Japanese composer Yamada Kosaku (Iwano 1999).23 During the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945, Chinese violinist Nie Er composed the famous “March of the Volunteers” based on the lyrics written by the celebrated playwright and activist Tian Han. Musically and ideologically, it was in the same category as “La Marseillaise” and “The Internationale”.24 Er had grown up in the ­international environment of Yunnan Province, worked as a musician in Shanghai, and finally composed “March of the Volunteers” in 1937 22  Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 brought about the recognition among conscious Chinese that the reason for the Qing dynasty’s incompetence was its lethargy in adopting modernization. As a result, Chinese students studying in Japan numbered almost 10,000 per year in the beginning of the twentieth century. They studied law, education, ideology, technology and management as well as the Western music that Japan learned from the West. 23  Japan wanted the anthem to be played at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1932 to obtain international recognition of Manchukuo but to no avail. Afterwards, the anthem changed a few times until Japan’s surrender in 1945. 24  In Southeast Asia, the only remaining independent state, Thailand, experienced a revolution in 1939 and adopted a new national anthem that was musically a march, although the country continued to be a constitutional monarchy.

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during his stay in Japan (Okazaki 2015; Kubo 2019). The music had been composed for an anti-imperialist film that won the Honorary Prize at the 1935 Moscow International Film Festival. Music was now imbued with more power alongside visual images, as evidenced in the effective use of “Kimigayo” as “a theme of the villains” in numerous anti-Japanese films produced in China during the post–Second World War years up to the present.

References Best, Antony. 2020. British Engagement with Japan: The Origins and Course of an Unlikely Alliance, 1854–1922. New York: Routledge. Black, John Reddie. 1870. The Satsuma Band. The Far East, May 20, Yokohama Archives of History. Boyd, Richard. 2009. State Making in Asia (Politics in Asia). New  York: Routledge. Cummings, William Hayman. 1902. God Save the King; the Origin, and History of the Music and Words of the National Anthem. London: Novello and Co. Gallagher, John, and Ronald Robinson. 1953. The Imperialism of Free Trade. The Economic History Review 6 (1): 1–15. Go, Julian. 2011. Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gottschewski, Hermann. 2003. Hoiku-shoka to Kimigayo no Merodi. Toyo Ongaku Kenkyu 68, 1–17: 23–24 Hanzawa, Asahiko. 2016. Ongaku to Kokka. Rekishigaku Kenkyu 943: 18–23. Ishida, Kazushi. 1997. The Stuff of Legends. The Strad, August. Iwano. 1999. Odo Rakudo no Kokyo Gaku. Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha. Kasahara, Kiyoshi. 2001. Kurofune Raiko to Ongaku. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan. Kolb, Kristina. 2005. ‘Singing Nations’: National Anthems as a Cultural Expression of the Formation, Reproduction and Promotion of National Identity in France and Germany. Munich: Grin Verlag. Kubo, Toru. 2019. Nihon de Umareta Chugoku Kokka: “Giyugun Koshinkyoku no Jida”. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Marshall, Alex. 2015. Republic or Death! Travels in Search of National Anthems. New York: Random House Books. McGeary, T. 2016. The Politics of Opera in Handel’s Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mori, Konate. 2015. ‘Kimigayo’: Nihon Bunkashi Kara Yomitoku. Tokyo: Heibonsha Shinsho. Naito, Takatoshi. 1997. Mittsu no Kimigayo: Nihonjin no Oto to Kokoro no Shinso. Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha.

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Oda, Toyoji. 2018. Shodai “Kimigayo”. Tokyo: Shogakusha. Okazaki. 2015. Uta de Kakumini Idonda Otoko. Tokyo: Shin Hyoron. Okunaka, Yasuto. 2008. Kokka to Ongaku: Isawa Shuji Ga Mezashita Nihon Kindai. Tokyo: Shunjusha. Oyama, Mahito. 2020. Rikugun Buretsu Koshinkyoku to Futatsu no Kimigayo. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Porter, Andrew, ed. 1999. The Oxford History of the British Empire, Nineteenth Century. Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riley, Matthew, and Anthony D. Smith. 2016. Nation and Classical Music: From Handel to Copland (Music in Society and Culture). Suffolk: Boider Press. Shigeshita, Kazuo, and Tetsuo Sato. 1991. Kimigayo Shiryo Shusei. 5 vols. Tokyo: Daiku Sha. Tanaka, Nobunao. 2000. Hinomaru Kimigayo no Sengoshi. Tokyo: Iwanami Shhoten. ———. 2012. Rupo Ryoshin to Gimu: Hinomaru Kimigayo ni Aragau Hitobito. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Tokoro, Isao. 2000. Kokki/Kokka to Nihon no Kyoiku. Tokyo: Moralogy Kenkyu Jo. Tsujita, Masanori. 2014. Nihon No Gunka: Kokuminteki Ongaku no Rekishi. Tokyo: Gentosha. ———. 2015. Fushigi na Kimigayo. Tokyo: Gentosha. Watanabe, Hiroshi. 2010. Utau Kokumin: Shoka, Utagoe, Koka. Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha. Yamada, Takao. 2019. Kimigayo no Rekishi, Kodansha. Tokyo. (originally published in 1953). Yasuda, Hiroshi. 2008. Nihon no Shoka to Taiheiyo no Kiseki: Shoka Tanjo wa Naze Kisekidattanoka. Tokyo: Tozan Shobo. Yoshida, Susumu. 1994. La Marseilles Monogatari: Kokka no Seiritsu to Henyo. Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha.

CHAPTER 10

Anthemic: The Unofficial Boricua Ballad Marco Katz Montiel

Five hundred years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, I spent New Year’s Eve with a group of friends gathered to celebrate in Madrid. Pleased by my inclusion in this gathering, almost entirely made up of people who knew each other from their childhood years in the neighborhood of Moratalaz, I enjoyed tortilla española, jamón serrano, and—in preparation for the upcoming Epiphany—roscón de reyes. One friend staged a marvelous magic show, and we all marveled as groups and individuals sang Broadway songs, jazz standards, and rock ’n roll. Many of my new friends, it turned out, performed excellently, some professionally, and they gladly shared these abilities with the gathering. The wealth of talent ensured that this show went on for many hours into the New Year, so I had time to take in a great deal before they turned to me, the professional musician from La Gran Manzana, for a contribution to the festivities. Gratefully borrowing one of the proffered guitars, I quickly decided on a song that I thought they might like, even though I

M. Katz Montiel (*) The Ephesus Project, Edmonton, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_10

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knew they had never before heard it: “Sale, loco de contento,” I sang happily, “con su cargamento, para la ciudad, ay, para la ciudad.” Looking around the room, I noted smiles and tapping feet that validated my choice of repertoire. To my astonishment, I also saw nods of recognition and heard at least one older person singing along. ¿Cómo han aprendido esta canción? I thought to myself, wondering how these madrileños could have learned “Lamento borincano,” long idealized by Puerto Ricans as their “unofficial national anthem” even as it has remained, or so I thought, unsung in a wider world. Satisfying my curiosity had to wait until I made my way through a few other selections that, while not taking the world of show business by storm, served to solidify friendships that last have lasted until the present time. What I began to discover that evening was confirmed by subsequent presentations of the song in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru: far from remaining hidden as a local gem, “Lamento borincano” has boldly gone out into the world and become known in many places where people sing in Spanish. Although popularly known as “the unofficial anthem of Puerto Rico,” people in other countries also sing it in a wide variety of musical settings. Reading Hannah Arendt’s Kantian views of culture in Between Past and Present (1968) help me return to those performances in different places and consider what this song, composed by Rafael Hernández Marín (1891–1965), has accomplished over nearly a century of its existence. In particular, I have learned to understand how the widespread dissemination of this song among people who judge it beautiful enough to learn and sing it for themselves has turned it into a locus of musical activity that continues to create a cultural space in which members of a society can engage in a dialogue more productive than those found in the public square, the marketplace, legislative assemblies, or—more recently—on social media and other overtly partisan fora. The history of the song, which I will touch upon here, and its relation to the people of Puerto Rico and its extensive diaspora, make it possible to comprehend the Arendtian ways in which cultural context actualizes political possibilities. Indeed, I do not resort to hyperbole when I state that the today’s multi-territorial entity defined as Boricua would not exist in the twenty-first century without music, specifically “Lamento borincano.”

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Historical Deprecation of Puerto Rico Before relating the history of the song and considering philosophies that reveal its crucial cohesion, I must turn to some of the reasons that made it necessary. As a colony relegated to the margins by one empire and then barely considered by another, Puerto Rico could easily have submerged as one of those territories that throughout the history of humanity have lost national identification and cultural potency on the international stage. Apart from the depredations of colonial empires and hegemonic superpowers, the island nation called Borinquen by its Taino inhabitants, invaded by a growing Caribe empire even before a newly unified Spain arrived on the scene, has suffered from insults added to injury inflicted by Spanish speakers from other American nations. As a musician performing with bands in Argentinian, Colombian, Costa Rican, Cuban, Equatorian, and Venezuelan communities in New York, I constantly heard belittling comments about Puerto Ricans; these anecdotal observations gained traction from the demographic geography of the city, in which I rarely observed Puerto Ricans living in the neighborhoods populated by those other nationalities. Didactic panels for visual works and comments made in cultural anthologies provide further documentation. In Chile, for example, I have seen one such manifestation that literally wipes Puerto Rico off the map: a mural that David Alfaro Siqueiros painted in a library at the Escuela México in Chillán presents flags of “all of the flags belonging to Latin American countries,”1 with the exception of one. While visiting that otherwise inviting city, I looked for the Puerto Rican flag and instead found a blank white space on the wall and a didactic panel stating, “Puerto Rico, having been annexed as a Commonwealth by the United States, lost its flag.”2 At that moment, I felt as though the writer of this panel, along with the muralist, blamed the colonized, rather than the colonizers, for the colonization. In fairness, I suppose I should add that there was also no flag to represent the Mapuche, another existing American nation that continues to battle colonial domination from its northern neighbor, Chile.

1  “todas las banderas de los países pertenecientes a América Latina” (unless otherwise noted, this and all other translations are my own.) 2  “Puerto Rico, al ser anexada a Estados Unidos como estado asociado, perdió su bandera.”

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In addition to direct attacks on Puerto Rico’s “Latinness,” attempts to oust the island from the American continent based on its links to the United States suffer from a failure to comprehend the latter as a Latin American nation. As M.  Elizabeth Boone points out in The Spanish Element in Our Nationality, far more of the land making up the United States came from former Spanish territories than from erstwhile British colonies (Boone 2019). Her monograph takes its title from a speech given by Walt Whitman in 1883. As I have pointed out in Music and Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature from Our America, “the Anglo-American conquest of Latin America began in New York. First by means of military incursions and later through economic appropriations and cultural hegemony, descendants of British subjects converted the United States into their most successfully dominated Latin American nation” (Katz 2014, xxiii). Accepting Puerto Rico as an undisputed part of Latin American remains crucial for understanding the national anthem, however unofficial, under discussion here. Others attempt to diminish Puerto Rican by appropriating its culture even as they dismiss it. Volumes have been written about the Cuban danzón and US ragtime, with few noting the roots of both styles in danzas composed by Juan Morel Campos and other Boricua composers of the nineteenth century (Katz Montiel 2001). Listeners led astray by scholarly sounding imposters, promoters of “world music” recordings, and uneducated organizers of campus concert series once attributed the vast cultural achievements of salsa to Cuba, a distortion of music history that has only recently begun to receive its due correction. In an unusually frank acknowledgment of this prejudice against Puerto Ricans, the owner of London’s Bar Cuba tells interviewer Patria Román-Velázquez: What can be Spanish Caribbean? Puerto Rico, well, no. Cuba, well, that is a good idea, it is basically Spanish. Not Puerto Rico, because it normally reflects fairly violent images. Puerto Rico is West Side Story, things like that, Puerto Ricans in America, and I did not want to have that sort of image. I wanted a mysterious image of the Caribbean extended in the food, be a little more competent in the food, rather than just the tapas. (Roman-Velázquez 2002, 274)

Should any doubt about this bar owner’s ignorance remain, I will point out here that this is the only place that I have ever seen the word tapas connected to either Cuba or Puerto Rico.

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In the late twentieth century and into our current era, the denigration of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans continues with more blatant appropriation of salsa. In “Willie Colón Speaks Out,” the famed salsero, also recognized for his persistent efforts to engage with political institutions in the United States, pushes back against prevailing trends that “redefine everything Latino as Cuban” (Colón 2000). Turning to the music that made him known around the world, in an interview with Frank J. Oteri, Colón points out that salsa is “not a rhythm, it’s a concept. It’s a way of making music. It’s an open concept and the reason that it became so popular is because it was able to evolve and accept all of these other musics. We put the bombas and plenas in it; we put calypso, samba, bossa, and cumbia in it” (Oteri 2009). An acceptance of salsa’s importance as a living concept inextricable from all aspects of life forms a crucial part of understanding music as a cohesive force not only in Puerto Rico but among the diasporic Boricua communities in the New  York City Tri-State area that includes New Jersey and Connecticut and the metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond. In all of these times and places of Puerto Rican cultural production, “Lamento borincano” remains constant, serving as a foundation for this cultural structure, creating a central focus that demonstrates, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “how quickly people recognize each other, and how unequivocally they can feel they belong to each other, when they discover a kindship in questions of what pleases and displeases” (Arendt 1968, 223). In particular, music created by Puerto Ricans and their diasporic relatives, popularly known as Nuyoricans (even if they live in New Jersey), cemented a cultural foundation in danger of crumbling, and “Lamento borincano” provided the sealant that, continually renewed, saves that edifice from deterioration.

History of the Song As a salsa trombonist, I had no trouble encountering “Lamento borincano.” La Lupe, singing with Tito Puente, created an early salsa version in a tradition that continues to the present day with singer Marc Anthony. Although the song was older than many of its performers by this time, no one expressed concern about its musical value or contemporary relevance. In addition to numerous covers by salseros, the song has been performed by artists as diverse as Chavela Vargas, Roberto Torres, Caetano Veloso, Radio Pirata, Paco de Lucía, and Plácido Domingo.

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Having the good fortune to live and make music with Elba Luz Mercado, known among dedicated aficionados of plena in the Puerto Rican barrios of New York, I learned this and many other musical selections, many of them polkas and other country music less known among my fellow salseros. On lazy afternoons when we had no rehearsals or other chores, she would head to the homes of relatives and, after chatting for a while, sing songs. I accompanied these on a nylon string acoustic guitar, and began to feel as though I was learning something when an elderly aunt told me that I sounded like the musicians she remembered hearing back home. Although I cannot attest to the accuracy of her recollections, the compliment encouraged me to continue. At the time, I did not know this—and, indeed, it may have only passing relevance—but Elba had come to New  York from the birthplace of the composer who wrote the music and lyric for “Lamento borincano”: Aguadilla. Born on the 24th of October 1891, Hernández showed early musical abilities by learning the piano, guitar, violin, trumpet, trombone, and euphonium as a child. As Alejandro C. Moreno y Marrero observes, the young musician moved to San Juan as an adolescent, and performed with the Orquesta Municipal, at the time directed by Manuel Tizol (uncle of Juan Tizol, who later became a famed valve trombonist and composer with Duke Ellington). These connections underscore the importance of training and technique among Puerto Rican musicians that subvert stereotypes of unschooled primitives that persist discussions of non-European artists. In fact, Moreno y Marrero and other Hernández biographers follow the increasingly cosmopolitan career of this “jíbaro”3 musician as he works with great artists in Havana, studies composition and counterpoint at Mexico’s National Conservatory (where he meets and marries María Pérez), and finally lands in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he serves as the 3  The term jíbaro sometimes gets translated as if it equated to the Appalachian hillbilly or simply a country person, much the way that guajiro has been taken out of context in discussions of the Cuban countryside. Although such scans may have their uses, in this case they miss the mark. Since it was first used to denote people, like Rafael Hernández, who came from the countryside, jíbaro has come to signify a more encompassing Puerto Rican identity. In live performances of the song “Mi gente,” Héctor Lavoe, as grand a salsa star as the Big Apple ever produced, insists that he remains a jíbaro, and the audience understands that through this performative device, all them, even the day laborers in the Garment District and the top corporate executives on Wall Street, are likewise jíbaros. Unusually, the affectionate diminutive, jibarito, employed less often in Puerto Rico than in it might be in  Mexico, appears in this song and in much of the literature written about it. Without a suitable alternative, I have adopted both terms into the English language for the purposes of this essay.

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orchestral director for the government radio station and receives recognition as Honorary President for Life of his country’s Association of Authors and Composers (Moreno y Marrero 2006). As Ruth Glasser points out in “Buscando Ambiente,” bandleaders in the United States valued the “reading musicians who were well-trained in Puerto Rico’s municipal bands” (Glasser 1998, 15). As a result, many of these musicians fared well when highly competitive wartime bands auditioned musicians hoping to escape the front lines during the First World War.4 Hernández played well enough to gain acceptance into the 369th Regimental Army Band, part of a regiment popularly called the Harlem Hellfighters. “They were an all-Black band in the segregated army led by James Reese Europe, who many credit as helping to initiate the Harlem Renaissance,” reports the City Lore website: The band, which recruited up to a third of their members from Puerto Rico, introduced European audiences, particularly in France, to live jazz music and influenced the careers of notable musicians including Latin music’s greatest composer Rafael Hernandez as well as jazz greats Noble Sissle, Charles “Lucky” Roberts, and Frances Eugene Mikall. (City Lore 2022)

“The multitalented Rafael Hernández played trombone for the regimental band, an important instrument in military and early jazz bands,” adds Elena Martínez. “His musical talent was noticed, as the regiment’s trombone section ‘was the outstanding feature of the band’” (Martínez 2014, 3). These early collaborations connected Hernández to musicians prominent in both the Latin and jazz explosions about to rock France and the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century.5

4  It turned out that playing in the band did not keep the promising composer out of dangerous situations. As Elena Martínez reports, “The musicians in the regimental band did not actually fight because, customarily, band members act as stretcher-bearers in the Ambulance Corps (though this did not lessen their danger, as it often put them on the front lines). Rafael (who had become a sergeant in the band) remembered ‘running from trench to trench offering help to the wounded more than playing music’.” 5  As I have pointed out in “El jazz latino no existe,” (2018) the marking off of these genres has always had more to do with record company marketing interests than with any real separation between the music and the musicians. In a study of US musical genres titled Depression Folk (2016), Ronald D. Cohen chronicles how these same corporate interests spent most of the twentieth century cooperating with broadcast outlets and segregationist politicians to extend these divisions to Black and white as well as English- and Spanish-speaking colleagues.

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After the war, Hernández followed many of his bandmates to New York, where opportunities opened up for the young musicians who had figured so prominently in the Harlem Hellfighters. Unlike some of their comrades, who were granted citizenship for their service in the wartime armed forces, the Puerto Rican veterans had this honor thrust upon them by federal decree on the 17th of March 1917 (Flores 2015, 6). Citizenship opened up a widespread diaspora that would further complicate issues of Puerto Rican identity and nationhood in ways important to the dissemination of the song under discussion here. Following a four-year stint as director of Fausto Theater orchestra in Havana, Cuba, Hernández returned to New York, reports Raquel M. Ortíz Rodríguez, where he enjoyed another surge of recognition singing and playing guitar in the Trío Borinquen, which also featured Salvador Ithier and Manuel “El Canario” Jiménez (Ortíz Rodríguez 2011, 47). While in this ensemble, the perpetually prolific performer composed “Me la pagarás,” “Adiós para siempre,” “Payaso,” “Amor y desengaño,” “Purupita,” “Mis amigos,” and the song that most interests us here, “Lamento borincano.” Sources place the composition what would become an anthem in varied places, none postulated vigorously, but all agree that this creation sprung from the composer’s pen between 1929 and 1930  in the East Harlem neighborhood also known as Spanish Harlem or, most simply, El Barrio. Although other birth narratives for “Lamento borincano” have their charms, I favor Juan Flores’s decision that it came out of a record store that the composer’s sister, Victoria Hernández, founded on the corner of 114th Street and Madison Avenue (Flores 2015, 6). Both Ortíz and Flores place “Lamento borincano” as a marginalized creation, the former referring to it as “a popular [in the sense of the people’s] artistic expression of protest”6 (Ortíz 2011, 45) and the latter conferring on it the distinction of being “the first Latin American protest song”7 (Flores 2015, 3), a description that ignores a great deal of music history, including indigenous melodies and lyrics from the colonial era, of the American continent. To be clear, the government of the United States has continually provided sound reasons for Puerto Rican protests, and Hernández was certainly aware of these concerns. In “Preciosa,” after citing the bards who sing the history of his land and call it precious, he  “una expresión artística popular de protesta.”  “la primera canción de protesta latinoamericana.”

6 7

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insists, “it doesn’t matter that the tyrant treats you / with black wickedness”8 (Hernández Marín 1935). Although sound reasons exist for interpreting Hernández’s words in various ways, a focus on the composer as a victim and his lyric as merely a complaint make it impossible to fully comprehend the power of a song that becomes—de facto and, in at least one instance, de jure—an anthem.

Beauty and Art as Opposed to Consumable Entertainment The power of “Lamento borincano” comes from the stature that it has attained as art, as opposed to entertainment or as a tool to be consumed, and thus used up, in any other way. “Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life,” observes Arendt in an essay so appropriate to this song that it almost seems incredible that the famous Jewish philosopher did not have it specifically in mind. “An object is cultural to the extent that it can endure; its durability is the very opposite of functionality, which is the quality which makes it disappear again from the phenomenal world by being used and used up” (Arendt 1968, 208). Indeed, Flores points out the very durability that ensures the place of Hernández’s song as far more than a useful partisan tool, showing how the music and lyric go beyond agreeableness, goodness, or utility to form a creation whose hearers can generally agree on its beauty and begin to create consensus that transcends their differences. In 1930, the same year that a recording of “Lamento borincano” began circulating among listeners, notes Flores, Moisés Simons released “El manisero,” a widely performed Cuban hit that went on to become a jazz standard (Flores 2015, 3). Listeners enjoyed the Simons composition as a commercialized reproduction of a pregón, a first-person ditty that would be sung by precisely the type of street vendor memorialized in the third person by the Hernández lament. As Juan Otero Garabís acknowledges, the composer of “Lamento borincano” “did not give his jibarito a voice— because of this, we do not know the fruits of ‘his cargo’”9 (Otero Garabís 2015, 207). 8  “Preciosa te llaman los bardos / Que cantan tu historia / No importa el tirano te trate / Con negra maldad” 9  “Rafael Hernández no le diera voz a su jibarito—por lo que no sabemos los frutos de ‘su cargamento’ […]”

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In contrast, “El manisero” emphatically gives voice to its protagonist, making the subject of the song as fetching to his potential clients as the interpreter of the moment means to be to his audience. “Although the song was originally recorded and popularized by the idolized Cuban singer Rita Montaner,” writes Flores, “the attraction of that historic RCA recording has never been questioned: it is pure entertainment very much in tune with its times; in fact, it was presented for the first time to US spectators that same year during her Broadway opening”10 (Flores 2015, 3–4). Aside from the fact that one is authentically Puerto Rican and the other just as clearly Cuban, Flores goes on to detail differences in the reception between the two hit songs: The popularity of the pieces confirms, of course, the growing population of Latin Americans, a population exceeding one-hundred-thousand inhabitants, and also reveals the powerful role of the nascent recording industry in New York had at the time in molding popular musical tastes along with public opinion among and about Latin Americans. It is interesting to note how, having been created during the beginning of the financial crisis, both songs deal with economic transactions. These transactions are seen clearly in the “insanely happy” jíbaro, bringing his “cargo” of agricultural products to the town’s desolate market and the street vendor loudly announcing the sale of his small paper cones filled with peanuts.11 (Flores 2015, 4)

Even so, Flores describes marked differences between the sad ballad heard in one song and the sprightly show tune sung by a staged vendor. Simons’s recreation of a pregón (as a song that publicizes) becomes a Latin 10  “Aunque la canción fue originalmente grabada y popularizada por la idolatrada cantante cubana Rita Montaner, el atractivo de aquella grabación histórica de RCA nunca ha estado bajo cuestionamiento: es puro entretenimiento muy en sintonía con la animada cultura popular de sus tiempos; de hecho, fue presentada por primera vez a espectadores estadounidenses durante su estreno en Broadway ese mismo año.” 11  “La popularidad de las piezas confirma, por supuesto, el crecimiento poblacional de los latinos, población que ya excedía los cien mil habitantes, y también ilustra el poderoso rol de la naciente industria de la grabación neoyorquina a la hora de moldear el gusto popular musical y la opinión pública entre y sobre los latinos. Es interesante notar cómo, habiendo sido creadas durante el inicio de la crisis financiera, ambas canciones hacen resaltar transacciones económicas. Estas transacciones se perciben claramente en el jíbaro que, «loco de contento», carretea su «cargamento» de productos agrícolas al desolado mercado del pueblito y en el vendedor ambulante que anuncia a toda boca la venta de sus pequeños conos de papel llenos de maní.”

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American “crossover,” a song more beloved by the English speakers downtown than among the Spanish speakers of El Barrio. “Rafael Hernández’s emblematic piece evokes real-life suffering, with disillusion, pride, and nostalgia for the distant homeland while the call of the peanut vendor is playful, a passing serenade, an invitation to sensual pleasures that seek to postpone the latent misery of daily life”12 (Flores 2015, 4). At this moment in its trajectory, both songs appear to have obvious purposes and places in which they get put to use, but as time goes on, one becomes consumed, devoured by listeners with exotic tastes and the other evolves and moves far beyond the oblivion that eventually catches up with most pieces of popular music. A reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement helps me understand the beauty that transforms “Lamento borincano” into a lasting work of art. Considering beauty as a common (or what I prefer to scan as demotic) sense, Kant offers this evaluation: I maintain that taste can be called a sensus communis more legitimately than can sound understanding, and that the aesthetic power of judgment deserves to be called a shared sense more than does the intellectual one, if indeed we wish to use the word sense to stand for an effect that mere reflection has on the mind, even though we then mean by sense the feeling of pleasure. We could even define taste as the ability to judge something that makes our feeling in a given presentation universally communicable without mediation by a concept. (Kant 1987, 162)

For Kant, a realization of beauty in a work of art involves a profound consideration of the work as seen from the point of view of everyone else; in this sense, one decides on the quality of cultural production not as an individual, although each individual retains an absolute right to idiosyncratic tastes, but instead as part of a community. With this understanding of taste, the beauty of Hernández’s song achieves the social and political significance of culture, based on mutual appreciations of art rather than conceptual debates, that Arendt arrives at in Between Past and Present. Reading the song and the history of its reception through these philosophers, “Lamento borincano” provides an 12  “La emblemática pieza de Rafael Hernández evoca el sufrimiento de la vida real, la desilusión, el orgullo y la nostalgia por la patria distante, mientras que el grito del vendedor de maní es juguetón, una serenata pasajera, una invitación a placeres sensuales que busca postergar la latente miseria del diario vivir.”

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exemplary revelation of the productive political discourse Arendt proposes, in this case with interactions based on musical affect as opposed to precisely the persuasive rhetorical attempts at influencing decried by Socrates in the Gorgias (Plato 1987, 17). People who hear the music and lyric of the song can contemplate its beauty in a present tense that does not require rhetorical persuasion, creating a space in between past and future, in which they can understand what brings them together in the moment. While “El manisero” makes its “crossover” into what Flores calls the downtown non-Latin American audience, “Lamento borincano” requires little promotion to win the hearts of Puerto Rican listeners uptown. Often performed as an instrumental piece, the musical elements alone contain sufficient content to create community. When sung, the lyric comes across as a ballad, not in the romantic or sentimental usage of the term but rather as the traditional literary form of a story told in verse. As a matter of taste, listeners could easily hear this song from the point of view of others, all the more so when it was sung communally. Heard in this way, it is worth nothing that the melody is accessible without resorting to obvious simplicity; participants need neither a wide vocal range nor an extensive musical formation. The song has four main parts. In the first, minor chords support the feeling that a solution needs to be found for an existing problem. I have created my own harmonies, with several chord substitutions, to play along with this melody but, like most other artists who have done so, my version retains the basic progressions between I-IV-V in the first arrangement, and I would never leave out the half step motion that momentarily moves up to the VI and back down into the dominant seventh chord (Fig. 10.1). As happily as the jibarito heads off to the urban market with his presumably ample load, the chords as well as the words express his concern about the welfare of his family. “Piensa remediar la situación / Del hogar que es

Fig. 10.1  Extract from the minor section of “Lamento borincano” (Hernández Marín 1929)

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Fig. 10.2  Extract from the major section of “Lamento borincano” (Hernández Marín 1929)

toda su ilusión, sí.”13 All of his hopes center on thoughts of solving that situation. Triumphantly, the second part moves into a major mode, shifting between the tonic and dominant seventh, a pattern again retained in most realizations (Fig. 10.2). Along with this shift, the lyric here commences with an extended notes that emphasize the final two syllables of “alegre,” a declaration of happiness, as the jibarito travels “pensando así, diciendo así, cantando así” (thinking, saying, and finally singing in this manner) along the road to the city. The protagonist expresses himself in first person for the next two lines, promising God that he will buy a new dress for his wife if he manages to sell his cargo. These exclamations of joy are not confined to the human who drives the cart; his mare joins in this hymn of happiness, perhaps even waking up some neighbors, as the sun does not come up until they have almost completed their journey. At this point, with the jibarito on the edge of town and about to realize his dreams, many performers conclude the song. Elba never went further than this, and for years I heard no requests for a second half; it appeared to have been forgotten. Most performances that I have heard leave out the brutal poverty of that subsequent section, demonstrating one reason that Hernández’s song has functioned more often as an anthem that celebrates a place than as a protest against those who conquered it. I never knew the rest of the story until one afternoon I reluctantly acceded to the importuning of friend who owned a Mexican restaurant that I request a song from the house musicians. These singers harmonized brilliantly and, as I prepared to exclaim “¡bravo!” and applaud, went directly into what at first seemed like a different piece of music. 13  This song will go out of copyright and into the public domain about a year after the expected publication of this anthology. Until then, lead sheets, with words and music, have been posted on numerous internet sites, making them available to any readers willing to perform a simple search for them by using the title or the name of the composer.

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Melodically and harmonically, the third and fourth sections of “Lamento borincano” repeat the first two parts, firmly planting the action of the ballad in a way that, counterintuitively, makes the second half come across as entirely distinct. Returning to the melody and chords heard at the beginning, the lyric relates the poverty that the jibarito encounters on the city pavements. For the entire morning, not a single person comes by to purchase the products on his cart, not for lack of desire but because the streets are empty. Instead of being populated by buyers, the town is filled with necessity. Extrapolating from this, the narrative wraps up this part by declaring that all of Borinquen has fallen on similarly hard times. Morteza Abedinifard and I used to perform a medley that combined “Lamento borincano” with fragments of a Persian and Kurdish songs that he recalled from his youth. During rehearsals, we waxed enthusiastically about how the fourth part of Hernández’s fit into a Middle Eastern tradition of major mode shifts that retain the nostalgic feel of minor keys.14 At the moment that corresponds with the hymn of happiness in the second part (where we heard “alegre”), with its obvious modulation into the major, the lyric bursts into sadness that emphasizes “tristeza” by holding onto the final two syllables before having the jibarito “pensando así, diciendo así”—and then “llorando así” (crying in this manner) before, once again, having the protagonist bring out two lines of first-person dialogue in the same place as it appears in the song’s second section. Once more directing his words at God, the jibarito asks what will become of Borinquen and what will happen to his home and children. Filled with a sadness brought on as much by the musical elements as by the words of the story, the narrator invokes an important literary personage, José Gautier Benítez, who lived and wrote poetry in Puerto Rico for twenty-nine years during the second half of the nineteenth century: “Borinquen, la tierra del Edén / La que, al cantar, el gran Gautier / Llamó la perla de los mares” (Hernández Marín 1929). In fact, Gautier the poet refers to this Edenic land as a pearl in various works, including “A Puerto Rico (Ausencia),” “A Puerto Rico (Regreso),” and “Canto a Puerto Rico” (Gautier 2011).

14  Morteza, a brilliant singer and instrumentalist of Iranian and Kurdish music as well as a doctoral candidate of musicology at the University of Alberta, also admired how the composer managed this in other works, such as “Temporal” and “Campanitas de cristal,” that we performed.

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The denouement comes on the dominant seventh to tonic of the major key with the narrator stepping in to reveal a place within the story, asking to join in this lament. The final line briefly rests on a minor IV chord that returns to the tonic along with the words “yo también” to show that I, the performer, also sing this song with you. This final first-person affirmation draws all of us who have sung this song, including pianist Larry Harlow, “el judío maravilloso,” and singer Joe Bataan, who declared: “My father was Filipino and my mother was African-American, and my culture is Puerto Rican,” into this Boricua community (Walker 2020). As a way of drawing people in, the final part of this song has succeeded brilliantly: from Eddie Palmieri’s “Puerto Rico” to Andy Montañez’s “Soy Puerto Rico,” I have never heard as many people lovingly compose and sing so many songs about a place they call home.

Political Consensus Formed from a Song Following the song’s composition and initial popularity, public performance and reception helped it achieve anthemic status. Within a decade, it became the official anthem of the new Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), founded, as the party’s website relates, in 1938 by the writer Luis Muñoz Marín. An emblem also mentioned on the PPD page, shows an image traditionally associated working people from the countryside, along with the slogan “Pan, Tierra, Libertad” (Bread, Land, Liberty). Obviously, Hernández’s song about a jibaro fit perfectly with this early electioneering, and together they brought political victory to Muñoz Marín, who went on to renegotiate the Commonwealth status of the island and to become the first popularly elected governor of Puerto Rico (Partido Popular Democrático 2019). Had the song been retained as a party piece, it might have had more trouble fulfilling its greater destiny. Instead, Hernández’s composition was replaced in this role by a Johnny Rodríguez (brother of Tito Rodríguez) song titled “Jalda arriba” (a colloquial expression calling for the people to rise up) that sounds like what most listeners would expect from an anthem. Complete with militaristic snare drum ruffles and flourishes underpinning triumphal trumpets, the arrangement of Rodríguez’s musical setting on the party’s site comes off as an invincible march, just as politicians expect from songs crafted on their behalf (Partido Popular Democrático 2019).

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After its dismissal as the anthem of a political party, “Lamento borincano” moves inexorably toward its current status as an anthem that’s not actually the anthem of a country that may have started out as a colony but has turned out to be far more than a simple nation. As Valérie Vézina writes in “Puerto Rico: The Quest for a ‘National’ Anthem,” a referendum conducted in 1952 led to the establishment of Puerto Rico as an Estado Libre Asociado, or Commonwealth of the United States, and the adoption the (previously outlawed) official flag and a (previously outlawed) song titled “La borinqueña” as the official national anthem (Vézina 2017, 228). The history of this final anthem demonstrates why Hernández’s song could not have functioned as an official anthem and at the same time how no other song could occupy the political space now held by “Lamento borincano.” A Catalan immigrant to Puerto Rico named Felix Astol Artés composed the music for “La borinqueña” in 1816 (“Himno” 2019). This early example of a danza, reports Lizbeth L.  Rivera López, might now merely form part of a neglected trove of treasures15 had not Lola Rodríguez Tío, one of the women who fought in the Grito de Lares rebellion in 1868, chosen its melody for an incendiary lyric demanding independence (Rivera López 2014, 287). This lyric, adds Rivera, “presents the Puerto Rican jibaro raising machetes in order to gain independence for Puerto Rico. The lyric of ‘La borinqueña,’ inserts the existing ‘Bellísima peruana’ or ‘Bellísima trigueña’ already sung by Puerto Ricans in the nineteenth century, converting it into the patriotic and revolutionary version of the separatists”16 (Rivera López 2014, 287–88). With its unequivocal call for armed uprising, Rodríguez Tío’s words specifically invoke the combat already underway and urge her compatriots to follow the example of the Cubans, already in revolt against Spanish domination: “Bellísima Borinquén, / a Cuba hay que seguir; / tú tienes bravos hijos / que quieren combatir” (qtd. Rivera López 2014, 288).

15  I have written about the enduring influence of the danza form for piano, beautiful in its own right, as an obvious precursor of ragtime in the Preface for my arrangements of Four Danzas for Two Trumpets, Horn, Trombone, and Tuba by Juan Morel Campos. 16  “[…] presenta al jíbaro puertorriqueño levantando los machetes para lograr la independencia de Puerto Rico. La letra de La Borinqueña, intercalo a la ya existente Bellísima Peruana o Bellísima Trigueña que estuvo en boca del Puerto Rico del siglo XIX. Convirtiéndose en la versión patriótica y revolucionaria de los separatistas.”

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Having gone back to these beginnings of Puerto Rico’s history of anthems, it is worth noting Rivera’s mention of the island’s current status as “the oldest colony in the world.” Some three hundred ninety years of Spanish domination and about one hundred sixteen years of the same type of colonialism under the United States makes up the history of Puerto Rico. During the nineteenth century, the ideals of Bolivarian independence infected a cultured and privileged class. Simón Bolívar himself added Puerto Rico to his plans. This planned Puerto Rican revolution, however, did not take place, and even after the Grito de Lares, the Attempted Coup of Yauco, and the Insurrection of 1950, colonialism in Puerto Rico remains to this day. This does not mean that the fight for the island’s independence was not the dream of these valiant women.17 (Rivera López 2014, 270)

Even though multiple elections have confirmed the desire of the voters of Puerto Rico to retain its association with the United States, Rodríguez Tío’s “hymn remains alive among the Puerto Rican people,” writes Rivera. “Today, it is sung by groups who believe in the people’s independence”18 (Rivera López 2014, 288). It will likely not surprise readers of this essay to find out that the lyric changed drastically before this once-outlawed revolutionary song was adopted as an anthem 1952. As a listener might expect, the officially sanctioned version, composed by Asturian immigrant Manuel Fernández Juncos shortly after the US takeover, waxes lyrically upon Borinquen as a magical garden where an always-clear sky serves as an ever-present canopy over lullabying-lapping waves. Maybe a little surprisingly, at least to the postcolonially trained ear, these lines of subjection pay tribute to the supposed founder of this Edenic colony: 17  “Puerto Rico es hoy la colonia más antigua del mundo. Unos trecientos noventa años de dominación española y unos ciento dieciséis de igual coloniaje estadounidense, forman la historia puertorriqueña. Durante el siglo XIX una culta y privilegiada clase se contagió con los ideales de la independencia bolivarianas. El mismo Simón Bolívar añadió a Puerto Rico en su plan. Esta revolución puertorriqueña se planificó, sin embargo, no trascendió. El coloniaje en Puerto Rico permanece hasta nuestros días. Tras varios intentos como el Grito de Lares, la Intentona de Yauco y la Revuelta del 50 la Isla prosiguió su rol de colonia. Eso no significó que la lucha por la independencia de la Isla no fuera el sueño de algunas valientes mujeres.” 18  “Su himno permanece vivo en el pueblo puertorriqueño. Hoy es cantando por los grupos que creen en la independencia del pueblo puertorriqueño.”

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When to its beaches Columbus cried ‘land ho,’ He swelled with admiration “Oh, oh, oh!” This lovely land That I sought and now see Borinquen the daughter Of sun and sea.19 (Himno 2019)

No matter how performed, “Lamento borincano” captures neither the lust for violence in Rodríguez Tío’s version nor the over-the-top acquiescence expressed in the lyric by Fernández Juncos. Keeping its place as a work of art, in the sense that Arendt describes cultural production, the words and music by Hernández Marín would never serve as a tool for either purpose. As an unofficial national anthem, “Lamento borincano” makes it possible to imagine a Boricua community larger than the population of one island. Since the 1952 decision to associate freely with the United States, the island has conducted more than half a dozen plebiscites that have revived debates over commonwealth, statehood, or independence. Democrats and Republicans, representing the major mainland parties, have gone back and forth with their support for these issues; for example, the Republicans, once in favor of statehood, currently fear that option as likely to add two Democratic senators to the US Congress. Issues of identity also create difficulties for those mounting elections that would gauge the mood of the electorate. Who, after all, gets to participate? Restricted to residents of the island, this procedure would disenfranchise Puerto Ricans who chose or were forced by economic factors to live in the United States, where, unlike their compatriots back home, they get to vote in US federal elections. Inclusion of Puerto Ricans on the mainland brings up other questions, such as the rights of children who have never lived in their parents’ homeland to have a say in these vital decisions. Even if this could be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, there would be issues of intermarriage; do children of one parent or, for that matter, the descendants of one grandparent, get to take part? Moving in the other direction, what about people who were not Puerto Rican but have now 19  “Cuando a sus playas / llegó Colón, / exclamó lleno de admiración: / ‘¡Oh! ¡Oh! ¡Oh!’ / Esta es la linda tierra / que busco yo; / es Borinquen la hija, / la hija del mar y el sol.”

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lived on the island for decades? What about their island-born children? Immigrants from other countries and their children receive clear, if sometimes unjust, guidance on whether or not they can vote—even when they have lost any interest in those far-off places; like Jews throughout millennia, Puerto Ricans do not have that firm guide to nationality, a situation that has created a far-flung diaspora. As the anthem of a diaspora, itself necessarily an unofficial entity, “Lamento borincano” serves perfectly. Recognition of a diasporic condition has spread widely among Boricua people and those who pay attention to them. In this, Puerto Rico retains significant differences from the four other US territories governed as imperial outposts by the government in Washington: the nearby Virgin Islands, once controlled by Denmark; Guam; the Northern Mariana Islands; and American Samoa. The combined population of these four, one in the Caribbean and the others in the Pacific Ocean, amounts to less than 10 percent of the number of Puerto Rico’s inhabitants. Still, reports Andrew Van Dam in The Washington Post, they all have in common a population drain, with large numbers of citizens headed for Alaska, Hawaii, and the US mainland, just as people throughout the states have left rural areas in order to work, study, and ultimately make their lives in cities (Van Dam 2022). “U.S. citizens by birth, territorial residents are nonetheless stuck in constitutional limbo, disadvantaged by complicated, more-than-a-­centuryold legal decisions that deny them certain rights and benefits because they are ‘fierce, savage and restless’ people who cannot be governed by ‘Anglo-­ Saxon principles’,” adds Van Dam as a way of pointing out how Washington created these restrictive policies (Van Dam 2022). In spite of these legislated restrictions, however, corporate longing for cheap labor created loopholes. As Van Dam concludes, “there’s a simple way to break out of that limbo: They can move to the mainland. The moment a territorial citizen steps off a plane in Florida or California, their vote counts in federal elections and they’re eligible for every federal benefit” (Van Dam 2022). At the time this article came out in The Washington Post, which coincided nicely with my arrival at these final paragraphs, “There are now more people of Puerto Rican ancestry living in the states than there are people living in Puerto Rico, total” (Van Dam 2022). Perhaps contrasting with the populations of the other US territories, Puerto Ricans, whether in diaspora or on the island and whatever political views they hold, have a musical work of beauty that holds them together as a community.

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For all of them, on the island, from the island, descendants of the island, and even those who, like Larry Harlow and Joe Bataan, have adopted Boricua culture, the beautiful words and music created almost a century ago by Rafael Hernández Marín provide a common bond, a political interaction described two centuries earlier by Immanuel Kant, that surpasses all other rhetorical strategies aimed at developing political cohesion. No matter how we identify or what legislative remedies we advocate going forward, Hernández’s musical work grants us a place to fiercely debate these ideas while engaged in contemplations of musical harmony.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking. Boone, M. Elizabeth. 2019. ‘The Spanish Element in Our Nationality’ Spain and America at the World’s Fairs and Centennial Celebrations, 1876–1915. University Park: PennState University Press. City Lore. 2022. The 369th Regiment Harlem Hellfighter’s Marching Band. https://citylore.org/urban-­culture/the-­369th-­regiment-­harlem-­hellfighters­marching-­band. Cohen, Ronald D. 2016. Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-wing Politics in 1930s America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Colón, Willie. 2000. Willie Colón Speaks Out: Is There No Limit to the Miami Mafia’s Egotism & Greed? Salsa Magazine, September 13. http://www.salsa. bigstep.com/generic.jhtml?pid=22. Flores, Juan. 2015. Boleros, guarachas y el «frenesí de la rhumba». Boletín Música 40: 3–11. Gautier Benítez, José. 2011. “A Puerto Rico (Ausencia),” “A Puerto Rico (Regreso),” and “Canto a Puerto Rico.” Poemas de José Gautier Benítez. https://www.poemas-­del-­alma.com/jose-­gautier-­benitez.htm. Glasser, Ruth. 1998. Buscando Ambiente: Puerto Rican Musicians in New York City, 1917–1940. In Island Sounds in the Global City, ed. Ray Allen and Lois Wilcken. New  York: The New  York Folklore Society and The Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College. Hernández Marín, Rafael. 1929. Lamento borincano. New York: Peermusic. ———. 1935. Preciosa. New York: Peermusic. Himno de Puerto Rico: Historia, letra y música. 2019. Histopedia de Puerto Rico. https://www.histopediadepuertorico.com/post/historia-­d el-­h imno-­d e-­ puerto-­rico. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgement. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar of Kritik der Urteilskraft, Prussia, 1790, Indianapolis: Hackett.

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Katz Montiel, Marco. 2001. Preface. Four Danzas for Two Trumpets, Horn, Trombone and Tuba by Juan Morel Campos. New  York: International Music Company. ———. 2014. Music and Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature from Our America—Noteworthy Protagonists. New York: Palgrave. ———. 2018. El jazz latino no existe. [Latin Jazz Does Not Exist] Diálogo Atlántico—El Blog del Instituto Franklin—UAH, June 14. Martínez, Elena. Spring/Summer 2014. Rafael Hernández and the Puerto Rican Legacy of the 369th Regiment’s Harlem Hellfighters. Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore 40 (1/2): 3–12. Moreno y Marrero, Alejandro C. 2006. Rafael Hernández, ‘El Jibarito’ (1891–1965). Revista BienMeSabe, Fundación Canaria Tamaimos, no. 119, August 21. https://bienmesabe.org/noticia/2006/Agosto/rafael-­hernandez-­el­jibarito-­1891–1965. Ortíz Rodríguez, Raquel M. 2011. Música y memoria: El ‘Lamento borincano’ de Rafael Hernández. Música oral del Sur: Música hispana y ritual 9: 43–57. Oteri, Frank J. 2009. Willie Colón: Salsa Is an Open Concept. Interview in NewMusic USA, March 1, 2009. https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/ willie-­colon-­salsa-­is-­an-­open-­concept/2/#. Otero Garabís, Juan. 2015. El cantante. In Cocinando suave: ensayos de salsa en Puerto Rico, ed. César Colón Montijo, 207–216. Caracas: Fundación Editorial El Perro y la Rana. Partido Popular Democrático. 2019. Historia del PPD. https://www.ppdpr.net/ historia-­del-­ppd. Plato. 1987. Gorgias. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis: Hackett. Rivera López, Lizbeth L. 2014. La eterna Lola de las Lomas. Historia y Comunicación Social 19: 269–298. Roman-Velázquez, Patria. 2002. The Making of a Salsa Scene in London. In Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music, ed. Lise Waxer, 259–287. New York: Routledge. Van Dam, Andrew. 2022. People are Fleeing Puerto Rico, Guam and Every Other U.S.  Territory. What Gives? Washington Post, September 23. https://www. washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/23/american-­territories-­population-­ loss. Vézina, Valérie. 2017. Puerto Rico: The Quest for a ‘National’ Anthem. Shima 12 (12): 220–231. Walker, Lydia, ed. 2020. Joe Bataan. Latin Boogaloo: Exciting Mashup of Latin and Black Music Born in New  York City, December. https://azalea-­puma-­tps5. squarespace.com.

CHAPTER 11

Anthems in Middle Childhood: Negotiating Musical Experiences and National Identities Sandra Sanchez Adorno

Music functions as a way for children to regulate mood, entertain, and incite aesthetic enjoyment as well as learn about and evaluate different social groups and cultural belief systems (Adorno 2017; Merriam 1964). As children experience music through their various daily environments and social contexts, they begin to explore and evaluate how they might identify with and situate themselves and others through music. Children’s evaluations of these experiences are guided by the motivational and emotional connections, or lack thereof, that they affiliate with them (Archer 1993). Hargreaves et al. (2002) conceptualized how individuals use their explorations of music in two ways: to understand and express how and to what extent they identify within music (e.g., musician, composer, singer) and to explore, develop, conceive, and express aspects of their social identities including ethnic, national, gender, and youth identities (Adorno 2017; Dibben 2002; Folkestad 2002; Tarrant et al. 2002).

S. Sanchez Adorno (*) Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_11

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Folkestad (2002) discussed national identities from a “top-down” approach, influenced largely by macrosystems composed of public policies, mass media, and political beliefs. Though national identity is unique from other social identities due to its relation to governmental influence and authority, the importance of context, affect, and nuance are constant. Depending on children’s personal experiences and situations, their national identities may be at the forefront or in the background of their personal and social identities. Factors such as geographical location within a country, ethnicity, and language(s) spoken at home and school (Barrett 2007, Winstone and Witherspoon 2016) positively or negatively impact children’s national identity development, national pride, and affect for national symbols such as the national anthem (Dennis et al. 1972). Though anthropologist Allen P. Merriam suggested that musical anthems bring members of groups together and “reminds them of their unity” (1964, 227), individual responses to the music depend on their backgrounds and situations (Gilboa and Bodner 2009). Musical styles and traditions can be powerful representations or symbols of certain groups and influential among individuals who struggle to negotiate and express their social identities (Folkestad 2002; Tarrant et al. 2002). Since children often conceptualize nationality in concrete terms and symbols (Howard and Gill 2001) and internalize their own national identities through cognitive and affective aspects (Barrett 2005), exploring children’s musical experiences and perspectives can shed light on how they explore and express their own national identities through music. This chapter discusses social, musical, and national identity development in middle childhood and explores the perspectives of first- and second-­ generation immigrant children ages 10–12 in multicultural Miami, Florida, USA, to gain greater insight into the meaning and functions of their experiences with the US National Anthem and the role it plays in the negotiation of their national identities. In support of this central purpose, the following sub-questions guided this case study: 1. How do first- and second-generation immigrant children in the United States experience the US National Anthem in the different contexts of their lives? 2. What roles does the US National Anthem play in the exploration and expression of their national identities? 3. Why is the US National Anthem meaningful and valuable in their lives?

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Social and National Identity Development in Childhood Individuals tend to classify themselves and others into social groups, large (e.g., gender, race, religion) and small (e.g., peer groups, school cliques), based on characteristics such as interests, beliefs, values, appearance, and behaviors (Tajfel 1981). According to social identity theory (SIT), the groups one identifies with are known as their in-groups, while out-groups refer to groups in which one does not (Turner et al. 1979). Individuals maintain positive social identity and group distinctiveness by distinguishing their in-groups as more favorable than their out-groups. If an individual does not perceive their in-group in a positive light, identification with that group will often decrease or cease altogether (Tajfel and Turner 1979). Social identity theory has guided national identity research by exploring its salience in the various contexts of one’s life, individual responses to national identity threats, and factors individuals associate with members and non-members of a national group (Schildkraut 2014). However, perceiving social group memberships through biased social comparisons can have psychological consequences such as in-group favoritism, out-group prejudice, and stereotyping (Tajfel and Turner 1979). Nesdale and Flesser’s (1999) social identity development theory (SIDT) extends SIT to focus on ethnic identity development in children, accounting for both cognitive and affective responses that may result from group memberships and social comparisons. First, children are unaware of characteristics illuminating racial, ethnic, and national group members. As they become more aware of different group characteristics, they realize their membership in certain social groups and begin to show preferences for their in-­ groups compared to out-groups. Though not the case with all children, children as young as seven may begin to shift their focus from their in-­ groups to their out-groups and develop negative perspectives and prejudices toward them. According to SIDT, negative attitudes largely depend on children’s memberships in their in-group and the degree to which they identify with the group, other in-group members’ attitudes, and the extent of threatening feelings associated with the out-group (Ilari, 2017). Children’s knowledge and identification with a nation increase as they develop cognitively. Their exploration and understanding of their and others’ national identities primarily center around material and expressive aspects of culture. Children often conceive national identity in concrete

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terms such as symbols, language, location and standard of living, and national characteristics (Howard and Gill 2001). As early as five years old, children begin to recognize national symbols of their own country, such as national anthems and songs (Jahoda 1963). By middle childhood, most are aware of both symbolic and geographic knowledge of their own and others’ countries (Barrett and Oppenheimer 2011). Just as children recognize national symbols as early as five, they begin to exhibit preference and pride toward their national groups and develop stereotypes of others around the age of seven (Barrett and Short 1992; Barrett et  al. 2003; Jaspars et al. 1972). By the time children are 10 and 11 years old, they often hold extensive beliefs concerning numerous national groups’ typical physical features, clothing, habits, psychological and personality traits (Barrett 2007). It is also around this age that children tend to develop a more salient national identity and show a stronger preference for their own country when compared to others (Barrett & Oppenheimer 2011; Barrett et al. 2003), though this is not always the case for all children of a country. Factors such as background, birthplace, ethnicity, and language(s) can strongly impact children’s national identity development (Barrett 2007; Carrington and Short 2008; Waldron and Pike 2006; Winstone and Witherspoon 2016). Additionally, the country itself and location of residence within it are also important, as socialization and enculturation greatly influence children’s national identity development (Barrett 2007; Cheoung and Li 2011). Children learn about their own and other national groups through various formal, informal, and nonformal sources, including school, teachers, family, and the media (Barrett 2007). These sources influence children’s cognitive knowledge and behaviors regarding a nation as well as their affective domains concerning personal affiliations, belonging, and attachments to it. School teachers and curricula typically offer learning experiences particular to children’s countries through national history and geography, civic education and leadership, literature, and language lessons (Barrett 2005). In addition to planned curricula, schools around the world often encourage national identification through ritualized interactions with national symbols such as the anthem (Cheoung and Li 2011). Though repetition might habituate responses and decrease emotional connections to music such as the national anthem, it also builds familiarity, which in turn can evoke strong emotional responses when “heard in new or emotionally charged contexts” (Abril 2012, 88). Family members also serve as an influential source for learning about national identifications.

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Solano-Campos (2015) explored elementary students’ perspectives concerning national identity in the United States and Costa Rica, finding that family served as primary sources of information concerning their national identity. In addition, children viewed their nationality as something “passed on” or inherited from their parents (85). Though children are often bound physically to their immediate social environments, the growing presence of technology affords greater, prolonged access to digital media and information (Andersson 1986; Bronfenbrenner 1979). Media is a significant outlet for children’s learning about countries different from their own (Barrett and Short 1992; Byram et al. 1991). With the rapid advancements of technology in the 2000s, hand-held and other portable devices such as iPads and tablets have encouraged children’s autonomy, resulting in explorations beyond their physical spaces to connect with their heritage (Custodero 2009; Lum 2008) and family members who live abroad (Solano-Campos 2015), learn about others, and explore popular trends and cultures around the world (Adorno 2017).

Identity Status in Childhood Marcia’s (1966) theory of identity achievement views youth identity status through the presence, absence, and extent of two identity processes: exploration and commitment. Described as, “the exploration of alternatives with the intention of establishing a firm commitment in the near future” (Marcia 1980, 178), identity exploration consists of (a) knowledgeability of a particular domain, (b) activity toward gathering domain-­ specific information, (c) consideration (or lack thereof) identity alternatives, (d) emotional tone, and (e) desire to make an early identity commitment (Archer 1993). Identity commitment is a stable investment in a particular domain, exhibited by knowledge of a domain, domain-related activities, emotional connections to it, future aspirations involving it, and a resistance to be swayed away from it (Archer 1993). Identity foreclosure consists of a high commitment toward a domain but low exploration activities supporting it. In contrast, identity moratorium involves a low commitment to an identity but high exploration activities in various domains. Identity diffusion exhibits a low commitment to and exploration of identities and identity achievement relates to high levels of each (Marcia 1966). Phinney (1989) expanded on Marcia’s identity status framework and identified three stages of ethnic identity development and formation: unexamined, moratorium, achievement. Like diffusion and

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foreclosure, unexamined ethnic identity occurs when individuals have not explored their ethnicities due to lack of interest or blind commitments to ethnicity with little activity related to exploring it. Ethnic identity moratorium is the active exploration and questioning usually initiated by an impactful event or experience, often referred to as an identity crisis. Ethnic identity achievement is the stable commitment to and internalization of one’s ethnic identity.

Musical Identities in Childhood Hargreaves et al. (2002) conceptualized two domains of musical identities: identities in music and music in identities. Identities in music (IIM) concerns socially defined elements of musical identities. Social and cultural influences impact how and to what extent individuals view themselves as musicians. Social influences, such as family and school, and culturally defined roles in music, such as musician or composer, serve as references for determining musical self-concept and defining oneself within the musical domain. On the other hand, music in identities (MII) relates to how individuals use music to develop non-musical aspects of identity. Though IIM and MII explain musical identities in musical and non-musical terms, they are interrelated. The extent to which one identifies with music relates to the extent of music’s influence on non-musical aspects of identity and vice versa (Hargreaves et  al. 2002). The role music plays in developing children’s social identities such as gender, youth, and national identity can be great or small, depending on the degree of their musical interests and engagements (Dibben 2002; Folkestad 2002; Hargreaves et  al. 2002; Tarrant et al. 2002). Adorno (2017) found that musical confidence and success, future aspirations, familial support, and group membership motivated children’s engagement in music and encouraged positive identifications within the musical domain. The aesthetic attraction and emotional connection the children developed with their music served as inspiration as well. Children demonstrated commitments to their musical identities through their musical knowledge, musical engagements, emotional connections to music, future aspirations with music, and resistance to being swayed in terms of their musical identities, choices, and activities (Adorno 2017; Archer 1993). However, not all children exhibit consistency in their musical engagements and preferences throughout the various social contexts of their lives.

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Children’s musical behaviors and preferences vary depending on where and who they are with (Adorno 2017; Finnäs 1989). Broader social environments, such as cultural, ethnic, religious, and national, create overarching systems and norms that affect the musical landscapes of societies, while immediate social environments, such as peer groups, directly influence changes in children’s musical behaviors and preferences (Finnäs 1989; Folkestad 2002). For example, a child may prefer engaging in hip-hop music with his friends, salsa with his family, and classical music with his teachers (Adorno 2017). These varied contexts and musical experiences can also provide children with an avenue to development of various non-­ musical social identities such as gender, youth, ethnic, and national identity (Adorno 2017; Dibben 2002; Folkestad 2002; Ilari, 2017; Tarrant et al. 2002). Adorno (2017) found that second-generation immigrant children use their musical experiences as a means to explore, understand, and express aspects of their ethnic, gender, and youth identities. One child explored their ethnic identity through a variety of traditional and contemporary practices in music, dance, media, and cultural celebrations encouraged mainly by her father. Others used music to practice, maintain, and transmit their ethnic identities via listening to, learning about, and performing traditional music of their heritage. Furthermore, one girl’s experiences surrounding popular music influenced her conceptions of desirable female qualities, triggering her gender identity transformation from “tomboy” to “girly girl” (102). Lastly, the children used music to establish and express group membership in their youth identities. They rejected the music of those considered in their out-group and often excluded out-group members from engaging in their music. At the same time, they idolized and emulated those they considered members of their in-groups.

Music in National Identities According to Folkestad, music expresses and communicates national identity in two ways: from the “inside-looking in” and “outside-looking in” (2002, 156). From an in-group perspective, groups can use music to strengthen the bonds between group members and give them a sense of belonging and ownership. Additionally, music can support the maintenance and validation of national identity (Winstone and Witherspoon 2016) and encourage social assimilation and pride toward one’s in-group (Abril 2007). In the out-of-group perspective, music is recognized by

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non-group members as typical music of a particular nation or group and used as a means for identifying individuals who belong to those groups. National identities, normative national behaviors, and affect toward a nation vary by country and region. The extent to which music functions as a tool for social integration and national identity formation varies as well. For example, populations with common national musical identities, regardless of social, religious, or ethnic backgrounds, are more prevalent in countries impacted by suppression or war, particularly those who fought for their freedom (Ruud 1997). Despite belonging to varying cultures and age groups, Gilboa and Bodner (2009) found that individuals residing in Israel made similar national associations while hearing the national anthem. However, immigrants, adolescents, and “ultra-religious” individuals identified less with the anthem when compared to the rest of the adult population. Additionally, when compared to the national anthem, the Israeli flag evoked similar responses from the participants, suggesting that “the unique power of the anthem is not in its musical attributes but in the (national) meanings that are attributed to it” (477). Winstone and Witherspoon (2016) expanded upon Gilboa and Bodner’s (2009) findings in their exploration of children’s responses to the British National Anthem by taking the salience of their national identities into account. National identity was measured through a five-question survey concerning degree and importance of national identification, pride, and feelings associated with national identification, and internalization of national identity. Results found that children ages 8–10 made national (i.e., royal, sport, military) and non-national (i.e., religious ceremonies, music, other) references while listening to it. National associations were coded when they referenced people, places, feelings, or events associated with the nation, and non-national associations were coded for responses such as religious traditions and musical elements. Results found that the number of national associations made while listening increased with age. Though overall, the main effect of national identity was not significant, the nine- and ten-year-old children with high national identities generated significantly more national associations than those who reported low national identities. Though the current literature involving one’s interactions with and responses to national anthems takes demographic characteristics and

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national identity salience into account, it overlooks the degree to which participants identify in music. Gilboa and Bodner (2009) allude to the idea that national anthems have similar effects to non-musical national stimuli. However, none of the non-national associations made by participants related to musical aspects of the songs. Some of the children in Winstone and Witherspoon’s (2016) study commented on musical elements heard in the British National Anthem, responding how they liked the “loud instruments” and “lots of people singing” (267). Perhaps considering individuals’ relationship with music, in general, would help inform the ways people respond to musical stimuli, such as a national anthem. For example, Abril (2012) described how his initial experiences with the SSB felt ritualized and lacked emotion. He recounted, Standing tall behind our desks, monitored by the teacher, my peers and I would partake in a monotonic recitation of the “Pledge of Allegiance” and a sing-along to a recording of the SSB. The arrangement, including an assertive drum roll, dramatic trumpet calls, and full SATB choir, was meant to rouse the spirit. In my early years in school I couldn’t understand the lyrics of the song, let alone the story they told. (85)

It was not until he performed the music in high school that he felt a deeper emotional connection to it, reflecting, I recall performing the SSB one Fourth of July in a high school summer camp orchestra for a standing crowd of hundreds who sang along. As we played the last two phrases in dramatic conclusion, the music evoked a visceral response in me—I can only assume others shared with me in that experience. (Abril 2007, 73–74)

Individuals’ musical experiences vary between passive and active engagement and spans from “having virtually no investment to very high levels of commitment” (Hargreaves et al. 2002, 15). Thus, music can play a large or small role in different aspects of one’s identity. Perhaps those with more salient identities in music are impacted by musical stimuli differently than those who identify less with music. Furthermore, those who engage with music more actively may have more diverse experiences with an anthem, potentially serving roles as both listeners and performers (Abril 2012).

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Case Study Method This qualitative case study explored the perspectives of six first- and second-­generation immigrant children, ages 10–12, who were members of a music outreach program in Miami, FL, to gain greater insight into their experiences with the US National Anthem and its role in the exploration and expression of their national identities. Data was collected over the span of eight weeks through student-generated artifacts, conversations, observations during class meetings, and semi-structured individual interviews. Data was analyzed through a constant comparative approach with social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979), social identity development theory (Nesdale 1999), and musical identity (Hargreaves et  al. 2002) as guiding frameworks. Data Collection As part of the eight-week music program curriculum, the children completed worksheets that served as artifacts regarding the children’s perspectives and reference points during interviews to help stimulate conversation and clarify or expand upon any of their responses (Clark 1999). The children listened to two versions of the US National Anthem, otherwise known as “The Star Spangled Banner” (SSB). The first recording, a traditional-­style, military concert band and choir performance adhering to the normative performance expectations of the SSB, including triple meter, moderate tempo, an unembellished and unaltered melody, simple harmonies, singing accompanied by a traditional ensemble, and English-­ language lyrics (National Anthem Committee 1942). The second recording was a less-traditional arrangement performed by US popular music artist Lady Gaga, which wavered between duple and triple meters. While listening, the children completed a worksheet adapted from Winstone and Witherspoon (2016) that prompted them to list and draw things they associated with the music and answer questions based on their knowledge and experience with it (e.g., Have you ever heard this anthem before? Do you know the lyrics of this anthem?). The children then participated in individual semi-structured interviews during weeks six and seven to further discuss and expand upon their perspectives and experiences.

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Participants The context of multicultural Miami, Florida, is unique from other parts of the United States. It is home to a large, diverse Hispanic population considered the majority population in the region, although they are considered a minority group in the United States. Furthermore, Spanish language, culture, and personnel are prevalent in homes, communities, schools, and media. Hispanic families in Miami cross all socioeconomic classes, as did the children in this study. Six children took part in the study, all of whom had a connection to Cuba as first- and second-generation immigrants. Isabella and Paula were born in Cuba, and both left around the age of two. Paula immigrated straight to Miami, while Isabella moved to South America prior. Both are fluent in English and Spanish and recalled visiting Cuba yearly, as much of their extended family still live there. Celine and Eloise have similar situations, though they were born in Miami as US citizens rather than in Cuba. Ana was born in a different region of the United States and moved to Miami when she was three or four years old. She is bilingual, and her parents were born in Cuba; however, she has not visited the country and extended family like the others. Lastly, David was born in Miami and knows some Spanish. His father was born in Cuba, and his mother was born in the Northeastern United States with Italian heritage. The children exhibited commitment to a general identity in music through their musical knowledge and interest in music, engagement in music-related activities, emotional connections to music, and future aspirations regarding music (Adorno 2017; Archer 1993). The children’s musical knowledge, interest, and engagement in music were apparent through their participation in the extracurricular music program and their descriptions of their school music experiences. Additionally, the children described deep emotional connections to an array of musical styles, often using it as a way to feel happy when they are sad, relaxed when they are anxious, and confident when they are unsure of themselves. Their future aspirations were also an indicator of commitment to their identities in music, as each of them spoke of short-term (e.g., auditioning for music programs) and long-term (e.g., music as a profession) musical goals.

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Findings and Discussion Experiences with the SSB The “Star Spangled Banner” serves “as a musical and poetic badge of the United States” (Abril 2007, 72). Originally a poem written by Francis Scott Key, who drew inspiration from the US flag flying over Ft. McHenry after a conflict with the British, and adapted to the British tune, “The Anacreontic Song,” the SSB has officially served as the national anthem of the United States since 1931. As Abril describes, “the singing and playing of the SSB has served as ritual, punctuating concerts, sporting events, military functions, patriotic holidays, and school days. Its essence has become a deeply engrained facet of U.S. culture” (2007, 72). The children primarily experienced the SSB in two spaces: school and home. All of the children described their school experiences with the anthem as a daily tradition where a traditional recording that adheres to the normative performance expectations of the SSB was played through the school’s intercom system or via a classroom television. The children recounted their teachers’ expectations for them to stand for the song’s duration with their right hands over their hearts. Though singing was not particularly encouraged or expected, some described singing quietly, mouthing the lyrics, or singing in their heads. Others described moving or swaying to the music while standing at attention, while only one described using that time to analyze and reflect on the SSB and its history and meaning. In the United States, it is typical to engage with the SSB regularly at school. Abril’s (2007) depiction of a typical school morning ritual of standing up, reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance,” and listening to a traditional, military-style performance of the SSB mirrors the experiences of these children and most other elementary-aged students in the United States. The children’s experiences with the SSB outside of school primarily took place in their homes via televised sporting events and parades. All of the children spoke of their parents initiating the viewing events, though some engaged more directly with the media while others heard it more passively from another room. David reflected happily on the times he spent with his father and younger brother watching football and described how they directly responded to the performance of the SSB by standing up and saluting the television, despite being in the comforts of their living room. Though the other children described listening to it via televised

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events, no one else admitted to responding to the SSB in their homes with normative behaviors associated with the SSB such as, “standing as a sign of respect when the music is playing, facing the US flag or the sound source of the performance, singing along, removing one’s hat or head covering, and expressing solemnity and respect through facial expressions and body positioning” (Abril 2012, 81). Musical Roles with the SSB Children’s musical experiences occur in a range of social contexts and formal, informal, and nonformal settings. The nature of their musical experiences can be explained through two broad categories: music-making and music listening (Adorno 2017). As music-makers, children actively participate in making music through performance and creation. Music listeners engage with music via emotional regulation, active engagement (e.g., clapping or singing along, planned or spontaneous movement), and analytic thought. Though children carry out many musical roles through a vast array of musical experiences, the children in this study only experienced the SSB through engaged and analytic listening. The extent of their engagements with the SSB included subtle singing or moving along to the music and analyzing and reflecting on the origins and meaning of the song. David described singing, albeit quietly, to the SSB in school, “When I sing it, it is really low … like, maybe my friends next to me will hear me but the other kids won’t.” Despite their perceived knowledge of the music, the other children admitted to only “singing in [their] head” or not singing at all. In addition to standing up during the anthem, as expected from their school teachers each morning, Eloise responded to the music through subtle body movements, explaining, “sometimes I like to just listen to the melody of it, and with my foot, I’ll move it around to the music.” The children’s active participation with the music in school seemed to be limited by, in part, changing social pressures typically associated with singing as children mature in school (Lamont 2002). Noticing a shift in behavior between age groups, Eloise explained, “The little kids’ classes, they like to sing it. Like, I sing it in my mind, but no one really sings it out loud in the higher-up grades.” The children also described analytical responses when listening to the anthem. Some explained how they focused more on musical elements of the song, listening “to the music over the lyrics,” while others focused more on the lyrics and what they mean. As children develop cognitively,

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their attention to and comprehension of musical lyrics increases (Bosacki et  al. 2006; Greenfield et  al. 1987). Though Roe (1985) found that youths’ responses to must were more physical and emotional than cerebral (i.e., listening to lyrics), perhaps children’s musical identities and preferences play a role in their listening behaviors. Adorno (2017) found that a child who identified more with singing tended to put more focus and value on song lyrics than those who identified more with playing an instrument. Perhaps the range of musical preferences and skills exhibited by the children in this study played a role in directing their attention while listening to the SSB. SSB in National Identity Children’s national identities are a combination of both cognitive and affective processes. The cognitive aspects include knowledge of the national group and its associated symbols and identification as a member of the national group. The affective aspects refer to the value of and attachment to the national group and the extent to which children positively or negatively evaluate their membership to the national group (Barrett 2007). The children exhibited cognitive aspects of their national identities through their knowledge of the SSB and the associations they made while hearing it (Barrett 2007). The children recognized the song almost instantly and reported knowing most or all of the lyrics. While listening to the SSB, the children made almost exclusively national associations with the music. National associations included symbols, people, places, feelings, and events such as the US flag, military, presidents, Independence Day, and ideals of freedom and liberty. Non-national associations with the anthems were all musical in nature. The children commented on musical or performance aspects, including singing quality, lyrics, instrumentation, and tempo as well as the anthem’s meaning and the story it tells. Children’s associations while hearing the SSB were mainly positive. When asked what they liked about the music, they described positive national emotions and positive feelings evoked by national reasons echoing sentiments of the meaning, history, and symbolism behind the song and ideals of happiness, gratefulness, and freedom. Additionally, some of the children commented positively on music elements such as “the singing sounds nice” and “I like its catchy tune.” The negative associations the children made while listening aimed solely at the musical interpretation and performance of the song. The children compared the two versions in

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their descriptions, often expressing their disdain for Lady Gaga’s performance. One described how “the feeling changed” while listening to Gaga’s version, while others described it as having too many pauses, unclear lyrics, and not enough instruments. A number of the children’s responses while listening to the SSB related to the affective aspects of their national identities. They described the feelings they associated with the SSB as well as the extent and value of their membership within the national group. David commented on how the SSB made him feel happy while hearing it, describing, “It makes me happy. Happy to know that there are other people here that like it too. And that we all get along.” Additionally, he associated the SSB with watching sports with his dad and brother, which also incited feelings of happiness. Ana also described feelings of happiness and memories with her family. While listening to the SSB, she drew a picture of her family on a flag, smiling and holding hands. Celine commented on the positive and affirming feelings the SSB incites as well. She explained, “It makes me feel nice because, uh, I wasn’t born in Cuba but my family was. So it makes me feel like I’m Cuban but also American at the same time.” Celine was not the only child to comment on nationality. Just as the children from the United States in Solano-Campos’ (2015) study, the children embraced ideas of ethnic nationality, fluid, and hybridized national identifications. During interviews, the children’s perspectives on American and Cuban identities and the extent and value of their membership in a national group, in part, aligned with Phinney’s (1989) ethnic identity statuses. Paula, a first-generation immigrant, exhibited more of an unexamined national identity, describing she had not given much thought to calling herself American or Cuban-American. She began wrestling with the idea, explaining, “well, I’ve lived here for most of my life. I only lived in Cuba for two years, and I’ve been living here for almost eight.” When it came to the SSB, she was the only one to admit a lack of personal connection. Her national associations with the SSB focused solely on military personnel. When I inquired if the anthem meant anything to her, she replied, “not really because I’ve never had anyone in the army or anything here.” When listening to the SSB, she explained how she focused more on the musical elements than the lyrics or meaning of the song and was the only one to compliment Lady Gaga’s version of it due to her talented singing voice. On the other hand, Eloise exhibited a more explicit commitment to her national identity. “I call myself Cuban-American,” she blurted out before

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I could even finish asking her. “I was born here, but we go back every year.” She explained embracing both cultures and the positive, albeit very different, aspects each had to offer, I love it when I visit Cuba because I just play in the street with all of the other kids. It’s so much fun. But the kids there, they don’t really know better because they don’t have the technology like we do here. We have a lot here that they don’t. So when I go there, I’m like, ‘take my phone! I don’t need it!’

She also described her affinity for being part of a nation as diverse as the United States: I feel that this country is made up of so many different people and they just come together and form a big nice happy family, country thingy. So many different cultures, foods, and that makes us the United States … it’s really nice.

Eloise also had several positive and heartful responses while listening to the SSB.  She referenced the anthem’s impactful lyrics and origins and referred to ideals of gratefulness and freedom explaining, “It makes me feel grateful … because some people in this world don’t have everything that we have and we have to be grateful that we have those things.” She continued, “It also makes me think of us having freedom and it also makes me think about Cuba and how hopefully they have freedom one day too.” The value of being a hybridized American is not lost on the children. Most of the other children echoed Eloise’s sentiments of the SSB with comments such as, “it reminds me that I have to be grateful for whatever I got” and “it reminds me to be grateful for our freedom and liberty.” During interviews, the children expanded on these feelings, often expressing gratitude for having so much when many of their Cuban counterparts have so little. Isabella, who left Cuba around the age of two, described, It makes me feel, I don’t know how to explain it, but like, I’m grateful that I actually got out of Cuba and came to America because it is really hard to. Like, there is a lot of process. So, I’m like, you know, I feel good that I’m here in America.

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Meaning and Value of the SSB As Campbell (2010) stated, “for children, musical meaning is deeply related to function … they are buoyed by it, comforted in it, reflective through it, and exuberant as a result of it” (pp. 226–227). The children found meaning and value in the SSB for its personal and social functions. In this section, Merriam’s (1964) social functions of music serve as an organizer for understanding the children’s musical experiences and their power to evoke emotional response, communicate meaning, represent symbols and ideals of a nation, encourage collective identity, and teach and reinforce traditions. Emotional Functions. Children and adolescents have long used music as a form of emotional expression and response (Campbell 2010; Hargreaves et al. 2002; O’Neill 2002). Though Abril’s (2007) reflections of his own early childhood experiences with the SSB lacked emotional response, the children in this study felt happiness, togetherness, and pride while listening to the anthem. Despite having nearly identical school rituals, the children seemed to be more engaged by the SSB and attach more meaning to it. The traditional, militaristic version of the SSB evoked much more of a positive emotional response when compared to a version that varied at times by meter and note length. The children referred to the first as the “normal” version, often commenting negatively on performances that veered from the norm. Celine commented, I really like the SSB, I just couldn’t come up with things that I didn’t like about it. Well, I didn’t like the Lady Gaga one. I liked the first one, the regular one. You got to stick to your classics, you know?

After discussing the two versions a bit more, she continued, I mean she is a good singer, but I mostly like the regular one basically because it is a nice song, it’s very nice. Lady gaga was a bit pitchy and she kept pausing all the time.

Abril (2012) commented that his school experiences habituated the SSB.  Though he admitted that his early experiences evoked minimal response, “the cumulative effect of singing/hearing the song over the years seemed to facilitate emotional responses in future encounters” (85). Perhaps hearing the anthem outside of school, in the context of the outreach music program, incited similar reactions for the children. Their

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strong emotional attachments for the more traditional version of the song might result from their repeated experiences and familiarity with it (Finnäs 1989). Though national anthems are unique to other national symbols due to their performative, interpretive, and expressive nature, many groups find importance in anthems remaining stable and unchanged (Nettl 2004). The United States is no exception, as performance and behavioral norms aligning with the SSB did not develop by chance. Heads of the state and the National Anthem Committee conceptualized and codified performance and behavioral expectations into law in 1942 (National Anthem Committee 1942). Much of the musical norms of the SSB follow the Service Version of 1918 to preserve aspects such as its original melody, harmony, and syllable divisions. Veering from the traditional performance of the music was believed to “seriously impair the beauty and effectiveness of both the music and the lyric” (National Anthem Committee 1942, 1). As a result, it is no surprise that the children’s experiences with the anthem, which essentially took place in school, aligned primarily with traditional performance ideals. Communicative, Symbolic, and Validating Functions. Music is unique in that it can communicate emotions and meaning as well as symbolize cultural groups and values (Merriam 1964). Though Abril (2012) recalled the lyrics of the SSB as mostly “musical utterances and misinterpreted text” that lack meaning in his initial experiences with it (86), the children frequently reflected on the lyrics of the SSB and how they transcended the anthem’s meaning and historical events surrounding it. The children commented how they liked the lyrics of the SSB due to its detailed descriptions and the meanings they communicate. On her worksheet, Eloise listed two things she liked about the music: the lyrics and that it says, “that our flag was still there.” During our conversation, she expanded on her response, explaining, Well, the more you listen to it, you can kind of visualize what was going on and how the flag was still standing …it makes me feel like I know more about the country and its history. And it makes me think about what it was like back then and how much we’ve evolved.

As Scheepers et  al. (2003) suggested, national anthems “function to convey a sense of nation” (572) and can evoke unifying national associations among varying groups of a nation (Gilboa and Bodner 2009).

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Beyond surface-level communications through the anthem’s lyrics, the SSB communicated ideals that transcended both music and text. To the children, it served as a symbol of the United States, the flag, and the people who live there. Furthermore, they perceived the SSB as a musical representation of freedom, liberty, and pride. Upon hearing it, all of the children made at least one association of the SSB relating to, “the US,” “our country,” “the American flag,” “our flag,” “America’s freedom,” and “our freedom.” In Koh’s (2010) study, children in the United States conceptualized American identities in idealistic terms that centered around freedom and aligned with American ideals of justice, equality, and humanity. When compared, children in Singapore and Costa Rica conceptualized their countries in more materialistic and pragmatic terms, while American children related to more abstract principles including liberty, democracy, and equality (Koh 2010; Solano-Campos 2015). Integrative and Contributive Functions. National anthems serve as compelling symbols that have the power to bring individuals together and encourage a personal affinity for and identification with a particular nation (Merriam 1964). In this case, the students primarily experienced the SSB with their peers, classroom teachers, and family members. Their daily school routines, no doubt, encouraged their engagement with the SSB and their cognitive knowledge associated with it. However, their repeated exposure to the anthem was limited to one traditional performance and often lacked meaningful dialogue between teachers and students. Though the children described learning about the history of the United States and the national anthem in school, ongoing conversations relating to it were not apparent. Eloise explained, “My teachers don’t really say much about it. Maybe they’ll say, ‘They fought for us’ or something, but that’s about it. So I just think about it myself.” On the other hand, the children mentioned conversations with their parents as impactful sources that informed and encouraged their national affection and identification. Specifically, their feelings of gratitude and pride while listening to the SSB primarily stemmed from family interactions and personal experiences. Though most of the children discussed aspects of the anthem that they learned through other sources, David described his role in teaching them. For him, the behaviors related to the SSB and their meaning were important things to pass down to his little brother. “Whenever it played, like before a game, he would stand up, but wouldn’t put his hand on his heart because he didn’t know. He would just follow us,” David explained. “So we wanted to tell him what it means.” David and his father’s tradition of

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standing up and putting their hands over their hearts during televised football pre-game performances of the SSB was something he thought was important to share with his little brother. He continued, explaining the importance of engaging with the SSB for both himself and his brother: I do it because I like to salute the flag and to know that I’m part of this country and so is everyone else. So I like that my brother does it too.… Like, he knows what to do but he doesn’t understand it all the way, so I like that he does it with us now.

Participation in and passing on these rituals had a uniting function that helped David pay tribute to his country and community and feel connected to his family members as well as a bigger collective—all from the comforts of his living room.

Conclusion Though some recalled hearing it at the beginning of televised sporting events and parades, the children’s exposure to the SSB primarily took the form of traditional arrangements via morning school rituals. National identity research worldwide agrees that school plays a primary role in the national enculturation of children. One of the primary ways schools impact children’s national enculturation is through the integration of civil culture within daily school practices and routines (Barrett 2007). Though more covert or subdued in other nations, school practices in the United States are quite explicit in promoting the nation, as students are expected to engage in daily routines such as listening to the SSB and reciting “The Pledge of Allegiance.” Cheoung and Li (2011) found ritualized interactions with national symbols and affairs that support a national cause to play a primary role in children’s identification with a nation, further supporting the interplay of school and nationalistic education. Though rituals can result in more habitual behaviors and superficial interactions, the school rituals the children in this study experienced greatly influenced their familiarity and cognitive knowledge of the SSB. Familial contexts greatly influenced the children’s explorations and expressions of national identity as well. Just as in Solano-Campos’ (2015) study, the children’s perspectives regarding their national identity were informed by their parents’ backgrounds and opinions. The children in

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each study described processes of “inheriting” national attitudes, values, and identities from their parents (85). Most promoted their hybridized Cuban-American identity regardless of where they were born, mentioning their parents as their reason for doing so. Additionally, much of the children’s affinity for the SSB and the United States in this study stemmed from their observations of and conversations with family members. In addition to the common themes of liberty, justice, and freedom found in previous research regarding children’s descriptions of the United States (Koh 2010; Solano-Campos 2015), the children in this study also mentioned gratefulness, often referring to the sacrifices and hardships their family members experienced in order to live in the United States. As Abril described, “the meaning of an anthem—or any other musical work—does not reside within the work alone; its meaning also exists within a sociocultural field of human actions and perceptions” (2007, 72). Much of the meaning and value the children attributed to the SSB stemmed from its social functions. The repeated exposure to and shared experiences with the anthem through school routines as well as collective experiences and dialogue with family members at home helped the children learn about, understand, and become emotionally connected to the national anthem. Though school rituals and history lessons play an important role in developing cognitive domains of children’s national identities, their affective domains are better supported through multiple avenues for engaging with the music (e.g., listening, singing, playing), meaningful dialogue, and shared experiences with loved ones, peers, and community members (Abril 2012; Solano-Campos 2015).

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Index1

A Abedinifard, Morteza, 220 Aberle, Juan, 73 Abidjanaise, L, 97 Abril, C.R., 3, 232, 235, 237, 240, 241, 245, 246, 249 Ack, Värmeland, du Sköna, 178 Acuña de Figueroa, Francisco, 64 Adenauer, Konrad, 27 Advance Australia Fair, 91 Aegukga (Patriotic Hymn), 97, 202 Afame, René Djam, 97 Ahn Chang-ho, 97 Ahn Eak-tae, 97 Ah! Vous dirai-je, maman, 178 Aida, 188 Aikoku Koshin-kyoku (Patriotic March), 189 A las barricadas, 22, 141, 145, 146, 146n9 Alborada, 114

Alde Friezen, De (The Frisians of Old Times), 117 Alexandrov, Alexander, 25 Alexei Alexandrovich, grand duke of Russia, 191 Alfaro Siqueiros, David, 209 Alfonso XIII, king of Spain, 22 Alfred of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, duke of Edinburgh, 191, 193 Álvarez Ovalle, Rafael, 62 Alvear, Marcelo T., 19 Alzedo, José Bernarzo, 62 Ambrose, Saint, 85 Anacreon, 85 Anacreon in Heaven, To, 45, 58n1 Anderson, Benedict, 6, 62, 86, 102, 144, 167 Andreas-Hofer Lied/Zu Mantua in Banden, 127 Arana, Sabino, 115

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 J. Moreno-Luzón, M. Nagore-Ferrer (eds.), Music, Words, and Nationalism, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41644-6_

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INDEX

Arendt, Hanna, 208, 211, 215, 217, 218, 224 Arne, Thomas, 38, 39n8, 41, 42 Astol Artés, Félix, 73, 222 Auld Lang Syne, 97, 197 Aurality/hearing, 6, 144, 147, 150, 150n11, 153, 167, 178, 212, 236, 242, 243, 245, 247, 248 Ayestarán, Lauro, 73, 74, 74n13, 74n15 B Bablot, Alfredo, 75 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 90 Balaguer, Victor, 128 Bamba, Samuel Minkio, 97 Banal nationalism, 2, 121 Banderita, La or Pasodoble de la bandera, 21 Baptiste-Blackett, Irva Merle, 65 Barengayabo, Marc, 97 Barthes, Roland, 99 Bataan, Joe, 221, 226 Bataille, La, 202 Batto-tai, 198 Bayamesa, La, 75 Becker, Nikolaus, 117 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 42, 138n2, 143n7 Berger, Henry, 192 Bernard, Saint, 85 Blanc, Giuseppe, 146 Boas, Ives Franz, 160 Bodner, E., 230, 236, 237, 246 Bohlman, Philip V., 3, 4, 44, 54, 159n1, 170, 170n8, 174, 176 Bolívar, Simón, 60, 61, 99, 223, 223n17 Boone, Elisabeth, 210 Borinqueña, La, 65, 65n5, 222 Bozner Bergsteigerlied, 125, 127

Brabançonne, La, 16, 53, 54 Brahms, Johannes, 166n7, 199 Branham, Robert James, 42, 43, 45 Brecht, Bertold, 27 Brennero è italiano, Il, 127 Britten, Benjamin, 194–195 Bro Goth agan Tasow (Old Land of Fathers), 119 Bro Gozh ma Zadoù, 120 Bruce, Robert, king Robert I of Scotland, 123n7, 126 Buch, Esteban, 15, 19, 35, 38, 41, 43, 45–47, 53, 59, 143n7 Burkholder, J., 5, 37, 37n6 Burns, Robert, 126 Busby, Thomas, 41 Büsser, Paul Henri, 202 C Campbell, P.S., 245 Canción del legionario, 142, 143 Canto degli Italiani or Inno di Mameli, 29, 54 Cap tà l’immortèla, De (To the Edelweiss), 128 Cara al sol, 22, 23, 54, 142, 143, 145, 150 Carnicer, Ramón, 73 Cassale, Francesco, 74 Castagne, Patrick, 64, 73 Castinove, Anselmo, 63 Castro, Ricardo, 75 Cavedagni, Luis, 74 Ceaucescu, Nicolae, 25 Cękalski, Eugeniusz, 152 Chant de ralliement, 97 Cheoung, C., 232, 248 Childhood, 207, 229–249 Christian VII, king of Denmark, 43 Chubinsky, Pavlo, 118 Churchill, Winston, 140

 INDEX 

Civic Prayer for Victory/ Russia, Our Sacred State, 25, 28 Clementi, Muzio, 75, 187 Cloonan, Martin, 149 Coello, Augusto, 63 Cohen, Samuel, 178 Colón, Willie, 211 Colonialism/semi-colonialism, 160, 161, 163, 164, 167, 181, 223 Columbus, Christopher, 161, 207, 224 Communism, 25, 28, 103 Concentration and death camps, 149 Congolaise, La, 86, 89 Conscience, Hendrik, 116 Coupo Santo (The Holy Cup), 127, 128 Coward, Noël, 152 Curtiz, Michael, 139 Cusick, Suzanne, 148, 149 D Dabrowski Mazurka/Mazurek Da ̨browskiego, 20, 36, 118 Debali, Francisco José, 73, 74, 74n13 De Geyter, Pierre, 139 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 61 Deutschlandlied, 20, 26, 27, 140, 140n4, 145, 151, 152 Díaz, Porfirio, 19 Dievs, svētı ̄ Latviju! (God Bless Latvia), 125 Dio Salvi la Patria, 75 Dio vi salvi Regina, 113 Domingo, Plácido, 211 Donizetti, Gaetano, 74, 188 Donizetti, Giuseppe, 188 Don Sanche ou le château de l’amour, 76 Doubrava, Jaroslav, 152 Dowland, John, 40 Durkheim, Émile, 12

257

E Ebert, Friedrich, 26 Eckert, Franz, 195, 196, 198, 202 Education, 104, 191, 196, 197, 201–203, 203n22, 232, 248 Edward of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, prince of Wales, 119 Eldgamla Ísafold (Ancient Iceland), 112 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 40 Ellington, Duke, 212 Els Segadors, 124, 141, 146, 146n9 Er, Nie, 203 Erkel, Ferenc, 47 Estrada, Joaquim Osório Duque, 63 Ethnomusicology, 3 Ethnosymbolism, 2 Eusko Abendaren Ereserkia (Anthem of the Basque Race), 115 Eusko Gudariak (Basque soldiers), 115, 128 Eyck, F. Gunther, 36, 137, 138 F Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta, 146 Fantasy on the Brazilian National Anthem, 76 Fascism, 29, 143, 146, 148 Fébus, Gaston, 124 Fenton, John William, 190–195, 191n10, 193n12 Fernández Juncos, Manuel, 65, 223, 224 Figueredo, Pedro Felipe, a.k.a Perucho, 64, 73 Flags, 2, 12, 17, 18, 22, 25, 34, 67, 90, 91, 105, 110–113, 118, 129, 188, 194, 209, 222, 236, 240–243, 246–248 Flores, Juan, 214–218 Flower of Scotland, 123n7, 126 Foerster, Josef Bohuslav, 152

258 

INDEX

Folkestad, G., 229, 230, 234, 235 Folklore, 2, 122, 129 Foster, Steven, 189 Foxá, Agustín, 142 Francis II, emperor of Austria, 45, 47 Franco, Francisco, 22–24, 141–143, 146, 148 Frank, César, 202 Frederick William II, king of Prussia, 43 Friedland, S. T., 178 Fryxell, Anders, 178 G Gailhard, André, 202 Gallagher, John, 187 Gaudeamus igitur, 166, 174 Gautier Benítez, José, 220 Geffrard, Nicolas, 63 Geminiani, Francesco, 187 George II, king of England, 38 George III, king of England, 42 Georges, Kenrick, 64, 73 Gernikako Arbola, 115, 141 Geronimo, Francis de, 113 Gibson, Timothy, 64, 73 Gilbert, William Schwenck, 195 Gilboa, A., 230, 236, 237, 246 Gilman, Benjamin, 159 Giménez, Remberto, 74 Giovinezza, 24, 26, 29, 54, 142, 146, 152 Glasser, Ruth, 213 Glazunov, Alexander, 202 Glinka, Mikhail, 28 God Bless the Prince of Wales, 119 God Save the King/Queen, 14, 15, 20, 25, 35–48, 50, 51, 53, 91, 98, 112, 119, 129, 160, 185–187, 189, 192, 197 God Save the Tzar, 45 Goebbels, Joseph, 140

Gong Jin’ou (Cup of Solid Gold), 203 González Bocanegra, Francisco, 62 Goodman, Glenda, 39, 45 Gossec, François-Joseph, 49 Gott erhalte/Kaiserlied, 36, 45–47 Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 76 Gounod, Charles, 90 Grant, Ulysses, 194 Gregory, Saint, 85 Guimerà, Angel, 114 Gunkan Koshin-kyoku (Warship March), 189, 199, 200 Gutiérrez Estévez, Manuel, 92, 95, 102, 105 H Haas, Pavel, 152 Hail, Columbia, 189 Halbertsma, Eeltsje, 117 Han, Tian, 203 Händel, Georg Friedrich, 41, 187 Hargreaves, D.J., 229, 234, 237, 238, 245 Harlow, Larry, 221, 226 Hartling, Carlos, 63, 73 Hartnett, Stephen, 42, 45 Haschka, Lorenz Leopold, 45 HaTikva (Hope), 97, 176–180, 178n9 Hawai’i Pono’I, 192, 193 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 20, 26, 45–47, 53, 90, 140, 185 Heil Dir im Siegerkranz, 25, 43, 44 Heil, Kaiser Joseph, Heil!, 43 Heine, Heinrich, 174 Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land of My Fathers), 119 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 44, 129 Hernández Marín, Rafael, 208, 212–215, 212n3, 215n9, 217–222, 217n12, 224, 226 Hernández, Victoria, 214 Herz, Henri, 62

 INDEX 

Heuss, Theodor, 27 Hey, Slavs, 118, 119 Hey, Slovaks, 119 Hidemaro, Konoe, 199 Hijos del pueblo, 141, 145 Himno de Oriamendi, 54 Himno de Riego, 21, 22, 34, 35, 53, 54, 141, 142, 146, 146n9 Hino da Carta, 23 Hiroshi, Yasuda, 201 Hobsbawm, Eric, 96, 105 Hofer, Andreas, 111, 127 Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August Heinrich, 26, 45 Hogarth, William, 42, 42n9, 43 Homer, 85 Horaisan, 192 Horst-Wessel-Lied/Die Fahne Hoch, 26, 140 Houssaini, Ali Squalli, 97 Hymne an Deutschland, 27 I Ibarra Mayorga, Salomón, 63 Idelsohn, Abraham Zvi, 175 Imber, Naphtali Herz, 178 Imperialism, 6, 152, 186, 201 Impromptu on a Japanese theme for harp solo, 202 Innu Malti, L-, 114 Internationale, The, 18, 24, 139–141, 146, 186, 187, 203 Iparraguirre, José M., 115 Isabel II, queen of Spain, 21, 142 Ithier, Salvador, 214 Iturbide, Agustín de, 19, 61 J Jaffrennou, François-Taldir, 120 Jahani, Abdul Bari, 97

259

Jahiz, 93 Jaldati, Lin, 151 James, Evan, 119 Ja, vi elsker dette Landet (Yes, We Love This Land), 126 Jedna si jedina/One and only one, 103, 104 Jeremiaš, Otakar, 152 Jerusalem, 96, 98, 176 Jiménez, Manuel “El Canario,” 214 Jize, Zeng, 203 Jochumsson, Matthías, 114 Johnson, Bruce, 149 Jonson, Ben, 38 Jorge, Santos, 73 Joseph II, emperor of Austria, 43 Joven guardia, La, 141 Juan Carlos I, king of Spain, 23 K Kalākaua, king of Hawaii, 193 Kant, Inmanuel, 106, 217, 226 Karm, Dun, 114 Karyzny, Uladzimir, 92 Kde domov muj (Where is my Motherland?), 124, 152 Kelen, Christopher, 5, 122, 138, 144, 145, 147, 153 Key, Francis Scott, 90, 240 Kimigayo, 183–204 Kimigayo March, 198 Kiyoshi, Nobutoki, 200 Kleiber, Erich, 199 Klimkovich, Mijail, 92 Knebelsberger, Leopold, 127 Kölcsey, Ferenc, 47 Kosaku, Yamada, 203 Kozo, Yoshimoto, 198 Kreil, Alfredo, 90 Krejči, Iša, 152

260 

INDEX

L Lachmann, Robert, 176 Lady Gaga, 238, 243, 245 Laks, Simon, 149 Lamento borincano, 208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 217–220, 222, 224, 225 Land of Hope and Glory, 98 Language, 15, 22, 26, 37, 37n4, 43, 47, 64–73, 76, 77, 87, 87n1, 95, 98, 113, 115, 116, 119, 126, 127, 129, 143, 144, 161, 163, 164, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174–176, 179, 212n3, 230, 232, 239 Lavallée, Calixa, 94 Lenin, Vladimir, 25, 103 Leroux, Charles, 198 Le Roy de Sainte-Croix, François Noël, 48, 48n10 Lhérisson L., Justin, 63 Li, J., 232, 248 Lijepa nasa domovino (Our Beautiful Homeland), 125 Liszt, Franz, 33, 76 Loewe, Heinrich, 172–174 Lofsöngur (Song of Praise), 114 London Pride, 152 Loon, Jacobus van, 117 López de Santa Anna, Antonio, 19, 61 Lorelei, Die, 174 Louis-Philippe I, king of France, 52 Lucía, Paco de, 211 Luckner, Nicolas, 48 Luker, Archibald Leonard, 63, 65 Lupe, La, 211 Lvov, Aleksei, 45 Lyrics/words, 5, 11, 12, 14–16, 19–26, 28–30, 35–39, 35n3, 41, 43–45, 48, 51, 52, 54, 58–74, 69n9, 71n12, 76, 77, 90–95, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 110n2,

111–114, 116–129, 137–140, 142–145, 147, 149, 151–153, 161, 162, 168, 169, 172, 174, 177, 178, 184, 185, 189, 191, 197–199, 203, 210–212, 214, 215, 217–224, 219n13, 226, 237, 238, 240–244, 246, 247 M MacMahon, Patrice de, 17 Medeiros e Alburquerque, José Joaquim de Campos da Costa de, 63 Mahler, Gustav, 199 Maleski, Vlado, 120 Mameli, Goffredo, 29 Mann, Thomas, 106 Mantovana, La, 97 Marcha de Cádiz, 35 Marcha Real or Marcha Granadera, 20–23, 29, 34, 35, 53, 143, 144, 146 Marcha Zaragoza, 75 Marche Franco-Mexicaine, 75 March of the Macedonian Revolutionaries, 120 March of the Volunteers, 189, 203 Marcia, J.E., 233 Marcia Reale, 23, 29 Maréchal, nous voilà!, 18, 139, 139n3 Marquina, Eduardo, 22 Marseillaise, La, 14–23, 26, 29, 35, 36, 46–54, 75, 75n16, 89, 100, 103, 112, 115, 116, 123, 129, 139, 139n3, 141, 185, 186, 197, 198, 203 Marshall, Alex, 77 Martínez, Elena, 213, 213n4 Martín Gutiérrez, Covadonga, 150 Marxism, 86 Masakazu, Toyama, 198

 INDEX 

Mason, Luther W., 197 Matheson, Johann, 51 Maximilian I, king of Bavaria, 43 Méhul, Étienne Nicholas, 52 Meiji, emperor of Japan, 195 Melody, 11, 15, 19, 20, 25, 27, 36, 38, 39, 41–45, 47, 50, 54, 90, 97, 103, 105, 106, 117, 121, 124, 144, 152, 160, 174, 177–179, 184, 185, 189–192, 193n12, 194–198, 201, 218, 220, 222, 238, 241, 246 Mercado, Eva Luz, 212 Merriam, Alan P., 229, 230, 245–247 Messiaen, Olivier, 194, 196, 196n16 Messiah, The, 187 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 75 Miguez, Leopoldo, 63 Mikall, Frances Eugene, 213 Mikhalkov, Sergey, 24, 25, 28, 90, 91 Milà i Fontanals, Manuel, 124 Military music/army, 2, 19–22, 24, 38, 42, 48, 50–52, 54, 121, 126, 150, 188, 195, 198, 213, 243 Milli Tharana, 97, 103 Minorities, 59n2, 106, 109–130, 151, 239 Miquelarena, Jacinto, 142, 150 Miry, Karel, 116 Mistral, Frédéric, 128 Molina, Juan Manuel, 62, 151 Monarchy, 14, 16, 17, 21–23, 29, 110, 112, 115–117, 119, 126, 127, 129, 186, 203n24 Mononofu no Uta, 192 Montaner, Rita, 216, 216n10 Montañez, Andy, 221 A Montevideo, 76 Morales, Melesio, 75 Morel Campos, Juan, 210 Moreno y Marrero, Alejandro C., 212, 213

261

Morera, Enric, 114 Morley, David, 147 Mosen, Julius, 127 Mosse, George, 26, 53 Mourlane Michelena, Pedro, 142 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 75, 75n16, 90, 179 Muhammad, 93, 188 Mu isamaa (My Motherland), 117 Müller, Filip, 151 Muñoz Marín, Luis, 221 Murdoch, Brian, 137, 152 Mussolini, Benito, 23, 24, 146 My Country, ‘Tis of Thee’ or America, 15, 44, 45, 159–161 N Nad Tatrou sa blyska (Lightning over the Tatras), 125 Nahda, James, 119 Nakamura, 192, 192n11, 193 Napoleon III, emperor of France, 17 Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France, 17, 20, 118, 186 National anthems, 43 Afghanistan, 94, 98, 103, 186 Africa, 23, 94, 100 Andorra, 92, 96, 100 Argentina, 19, 59, 66, 71, 73, 96, 99, 208 Asia, 3, 193 Australia, 53, 89, 91, 186 Austria/Austria-Hungary, 20, 23, 26, 35, 46, 48, 90 Bahamas, 64, 73 Baltic states, 28 Bangladesh, 90 Basque Country, 123, 141 Belarus, 92 Belgium, 16, 54, 93, 98, 116, 202 Bhutan, 94

262 

INDEX

National anthems (cont.) Bolivia, 19, 61, 66, 71, 73, 97–99, 101 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 93, 103, 104, 143 Brazil, 19, 23, 63, 71 Brittany, 120, 123, 130 Bulgaria, 25, 89, 98, 120, 130 Burkina Faso, 99, 100 Burundi, 89, 93, 97, 99 Cameroon, 92 Canada, 53, 58, 186 Catalonia, 117, 123, 124, 128, 130, 141, 146, 178n9 Central African Republic, 98 Chad, 89 Chile, 60, 66, 71, 73, 93, 96, 97, 99, 101, 104, 208, 209 China, 186, 189, 189n5, 193n12, 202–204 Colombia, 19, 60, 63, 71, 73, 99, 101, 208 Congo, Republic of, 89, 98 Cornwall, 119 Corsica, 123, 130 Costa Rica, 19, 93, 99, 101, 233, 247 Croatia, 95, 125, 130 Cuba, 66, 73, 210, 214, 222, 239, 243, 244 Cyprus, 105, 111, 130 Czechia, 124, 126 Czechoslovakia, 20 Denmark, 43, 89, 225 Dominican Republic, 59, 93 Ecuador, 59, 71, 73 Egypt, 188 El Salvador, 71, 74 Estonia, 106, 117 Ethiopia, 186 Europe, 3, 4, 14, 15, 21, 24, 27, 29, 30, 34, 37n4, 42, 43, 45,

47, 112, 129, 130, 137–153, 183, 184, 186, 198, 199, 201 Finland, 93, 103, 111, 117, 130 Flanders, 116, 130 France, 16–18, 20, 23, 29, 35, 46, 48, 60, 73, 92, 101, 103, 112, 116, 128, 129, 138, 139, 139n3, 152, 185, 186, 188, 202, 213 Frisia, 117 Galicia (Spain), 123, 141 Germany/Prussia, 15, 20, 23, 26, 27, 54, 90, 113, 141, 142, 145, 150, 152, 172, 202 Ghana, 89, 95, 98 Greece, 89, 106, 111, 120, 138, 139 Grenada, 65 Guatemala, 62, 63, 65, 71, 96, 99, 101 Guyana, 58, 63, 65, 67, 72 Haiti, 63 Hawaii, 193 Honduras, 71, 73 Hungary, 25 Iceland, 114 India, 90 Ireland, 120, 123 Israel, 96, 97, 151, 164, 168, 177 Italy, 16, 29, 54, 95, 101, 115 Ivory Coast/ Côte d'Ivoire, 89, 97, 99 Jamaica, 72 Japan, 4, 183–204 Korea, 189, 204 Latin America and the Caribbean, 70 Latvia, 125 Liechtenstein, 112, 185 Macedonia, 120 Malta, 114, 130 Manchukuo, 203, 203n23

 INDEX 

Mexico, 59, 71, 73, 75, 96, 98, 99, 101, 208 Micronesia, 89, 98, 106 Montenegro, 119, 202 Morocco, 93, 97, 99 Netherlands, The, 15, 35 New Zealand, 53, 186 Nicaragua, 19 North Korea, 89, 98 Norway, 126, 130, 185 Occitania/Languedoc, 127, 128 Oman, 97 Panama, 73, 98, 99, 102, 105 Paraguay, 60, 66, 71, 74, 96, 98, 99, 101 Poland, 20, 25, 145 Portugal, 59n2, 89, 90, 93, 101 Puerto Rico, 58, 65, 73, 104, 208, 210, 223 Romania, 25 Russia/Soviet Union, 54, 89–91, 94, 103, 105, 139, 150, 202 Saint Kitts and Nevis, 73 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, 65 Sardinia, 115 Scotland, 123, 123n7 Senegal, 94 Siam, 186 Slovakia, 119 Slovenia, 116 South Africa, 186 South Korea, 94, 97, 101, 202 South Tyrol, 127 Spain, 16, 20, 22, 34, 59, 60, 98, 100, 142, 145 Surinam, 65, 72 Sweden, 15 Switzerland, 15, 112, 185 Trinidad and Tobago, 64, 73 Turkey/Ottoman Empire, 179, 188 United Kingdom/Britain, 91, 92, 96, 98, 130, 187

263

United States, 64, 65, 89, 103, 130, 150, 240, 247 Uruguay, 60, 64, 66, 69, 73, 74, 76, 98 Vatican City, 90 Venezuela, 98, 101, 105 Wales, 120 Yugoslavia, 120, 125 Zanzibar, 162 National identities, 1–3, 36, 77, 114, 122, 151, 166, 184, 229–249 Nationalization, 2, 13, 14, 18–20, 22, 30 Nazism, 26, 54, 106, 139, 140, 142, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152 Nesdale, A.R., 231, 238 Nettl, Paul, 35, 36, 53, 110n2 Neumane, Antonio, 73 Nicholas I, Tzar of Russia, 45 Niemann, August, 43 Nko’o, Moïse Nyatte, 97 Novak, Vitězslav, 152 Núñez, Rafael, 19 Nunó, Jaime, 62, 73 O O Canada, 94 Ode to freedom, 111 Opera, 21, 74, 75, 90, 187, 188, 196n14, 202 Orléans, Louis-Philippe, 17 Ortega, Aniceto, 75 Ortiz Rodríguez, Raquel M., 214 Orwell, George, 145 Oteri, Frank J., 211 Otero Garabís, Juan, 215 P Pacius, Frederik, 36 Palma, José Joaquín, 63, 65 Palmieri, Eddie, 221

264 

INDEX

Paraphrase on the Hymns of the Allies, 202 Parera, Blas, 73 Parisienne, La, 17, 52 Partant pour la Syrie, 17, 52 Pasha, Isma’il, 188 Patriotic March, 189, 199 Patriotism, 17, 21, 34, 35, 57, 61, 62, 64, 72, 76, 141, 146, 147, 153 Patriotu sardu a sos feudatarios, Su (The Sardinian Patriot to His Lords), 115 Pedro IV, king of Portugal (Pedro I, emperor of Brazil), 23 Peduzzi, Lubomír, 152 Peene, Hippoliet Van, 116 Pemán, José María, 143, 144 Pepper, Herbert, 94 Pereira, Ramón, 62 Pérez, María, 212 Perry, Matthew, 189 Pétain, Philippe, 18, 139, 139n3 Philip IV, king of Spain, 124 Pindar, 85 Pinochet, Augusto, 104 Pinos, Os, 141 Plavec, Josef, 152 Poincaré, Raymond, 18 Political legitimacy, 2, 14, 16, 30 Popular music, 150n11, 193, 216, 216n11, 217, 235 A Portuguesa, 23, 53–54 Potter, Simon, 147, 151 Pottier, Eugène, 139 Preseren, France, 116 Primo de Rivera, José Antonio, 142 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 21 Puccini, Giacomo, 202 Puente, Tito, 211 Puerto Rico, 58, 65, 73, 104, 208–213, 212n3, 220–223, 222n16, 223n17, 225

Punnett, Phyllis Joyce McClean, 65 Putin, Vladimir, 28, 104 Q Quijano, Fernando José, 73 R Rama IV, king of Siam, 189 Regionalism, 29, 113–115, 117, 127, 176 Religion Catholicism/Catholic church, 87, 144 Christianism, 85, 152, 185, 189, 191, 201, 202 Islam, 93 Shinto, 194 Renner, Karl, 20 Republicanism, 16, 22, 95, 185, 186, 198 Réveil du Peuple, Le, 16 Revolutions European revolutions of 1848, 16 French Revolution, 15, 18, 185, 186 Russian/Bolshevik revolution, 16, 112 Rheinlied/Die Wacht am Rhein (The Watch on the Rhine), 117, 139, 198 Rice, Tom, 151 Ridruejo, Dionisio, 142 Rivera López, Lizbeth L., 222, 223 Roberts, Charles “Lucky,” 213 Robinson, Ronald, 187 Rodríguez de Astudillo y Ponce de León, Dolores, a.k.a Lola Rodríguez de Tió, 65, 104 Rodríguez, Johnny, 221 Rodríguez, Tito, 221–224

 INDEX 

Roe, K., 242 Romanticism, 129, 166, 184 Román-Velázquez, Patria, 210 Rossini, Gioacchino, 74, 75n16 Rouget de Lisle, Claude Joseph, 16, 18, 48–50, 52, 75n16 Rubertis, Victor de, 75 Rufst du, mein Vaterland, 44 Rule, Britannia!, 42, 45 Runeberg, Johan Ludvig, 103 S Sánchez Mazas, Rafael, 142 San Martín, José de, 60–62 Santa Espina, La, 114, 146, 146n9 Sappho, 85 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 106 Sauvageot de Dupuis, François, 74 Scheepers, D., 246 Schnoor, H.C., 117 Scholes, Percy, 42 Schumann, Robert, 75n16, 117 Schumi Maritza (The River Maritza Roars), 112 Scotland the Brave, 121, 126 Scots Wha Hae (Scots Who Have), 123n7, 126 Se canta, 117, 124, 127, 128 Serna, Víctor de la, 148 Servan, Joseph, 49 Showa, emperor of Japan, 200, 200n20 Shuji, Isawa, 196 Silcher, Friedrich, 174 Silva, Francisco Manuel da, 63, 76 Simons, Moisés, 215, 216 Sindici, Oreste, 63, 73 Skalovski, Todor, 120 Smetana, Bedrich, 97, 178 Smith, John Stafford, 90 Smith, Samuel F., 44

265

Socrates, 218 Solano-Campos, A., 232, 233, 243, 247–249 Sonner av Norge (Sons of Norway), 126 Sonntags am Rhein, 117 Sorozábal, Pablo, 145, 146 Sousa, John Philip, 110n2, 161–163 Soy Puerto Rico, 221 Stalin, Joseph, 24, 25, 28, 90, 103, 104, 140 Star-Spangled Banner, The, 15, 45, 58n1, 89–90, 186, 189 Štědroň, Vladimír, 152 Steiner, George, 88 Strauss, Johan, 192 Stuart, prince Charles Edward, 38 Sullivan, Arthur, 195 Sultan’s or National Air, The, 162 Svěceny, Ladislav, 152 Syrian melodies, 178 T Tagore, Rabindranath, 90 Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilich, 75 Tellería, Juan, 142, 150 Thiesse, Anne-Marie, 128 Thomas, Saint, 85 Thomson, James, 38, 42 Thórarensen, Bjarni Vigfússon, 112 Tito, Josip Broz, 25, 119, 120 Tizol, Juan, 212 Tizol, Manuel, 212 Today Over Macedonia, 120 Tokichi, Setoguchi, 198 Tomášik, Samuel, 119 Tommaso of Savoy, duke of Genoa, 191 Tomomi, Iwakura, 194 Torres, Roberto, 211 Torre Ugarte, José de la, 62

266 

INDEX

Tracy, Benjamin H., 163 Traverso, Enzo, 138 Tsvetkov, Tsvetan, 89 Tyl, Josef K., 124 U Ukraine Has Not Yet Died, 118 Umi Yukaba, 200 Ureklyan, Gabriyel, El-Registan, 24 Üsküdara gider iken, 179 V Van Dam, Andrew, 225 Va Pensiero from Nabucco, 29, 35 Vargas, Chavela, 211 Veiga, Pascual, 114, 121 Veillons au salut de l’Empire, 17 Veloso, Caetano, 211 Verbytsky, Mykhailo, 118 Verdi, Giuseppe, 29, 35, 75n16, 188 Vézina, Valérie, 222 Vicenti, Benedetto, 73 Victor Emmanuel III, king of Italy, 23 Vive Henri IV!, 17 Vlaamse Leeuw, De (The Flemish Lion), 116, 117 Volksgeist (national soul), 2, 12, 76, 129 W Wagner, Richard, 199 Waltzing Mathilda, 91 Wars First Sino-Japanese War, 198, 203 First World War/The Great War, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 26, 110, 139n3, 146, 164, 174, 202, 213 Russo-Japanese War, 198

Second Sino-Japanese War, 203 Second World War, 14, 18, 24, 28, 29, 138, 149, 164, 184, 189, 200 Spanish Civil War, 22, 138, 141, 142, 145, 148, 150 Warship March, 189, 199, 200 Wasa, Babrak, 97 Weber, Carl Maria von, 42 Weber, Max, 13, 87 Wenceslas, Saint, 152, 153 Whitman, Walt, 210 Wilhelmus, 15, 95 William of Orange, 15 Winstone, N., 230, 232, 235–238 Witherspoon, K., 230, 232, 235–238 Words/lyrics, 11, 12, 14–16, 19–25, 28–30, 35–39, 35n3, 41, 43–45, 48, 51, 52, 54, 58–74, 76, 77, 90–95, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 169, 172, 191, 197, 199, 210, 211, 214, 215, 217–222, 224, 226, 237, 238, 240–244, 246, 247 Wybicki, Józef, 118 Wyss, Johann Rudolf, 44 Y Yankee Doodle, 36, 45, 160, 161, 189 Yasushi, Akutagawa, 196, 196n16 Yeltsin, Boris, 28 Yun Chi-ho, 97 Z Zdravljica (Toast), 116 Zhukosky, Vasili, 45 Zionism, 4, 164–166, 165n5, 169, 171, 174–177, 179, 181