Anthem - Intellect

Signifying Europe
An anthem as well as a hymn is a song of praise made for communal singing. It
should preferably be reasonably easy to remember and to sing, making it tempting
or even irresistible to join in singing, and this activity of participation is intended to
spill over into some level of identification with what the anthem stands for. In this
way, anthems are constructed to emotionally boost collective identification, through
the medium of voice and sound. Peter J. Martin sees the unprecedented demand of
popular music today in the light of its capacity of forming communities: ‘The closeknit
communities of Romantic mythology have given way to the quest for a sense of
belonging’, where individuals ‘seek to identify themselves with symbolic entities’. Here
‘popular music becomes a useful commodity’, offering ‘a sense of who you are and
where you belong’. 331 Popular songs help construct a wide range of different collective
identifications, while anthems are made for underpinning those that have a more
official character, being supported by formalised institutions, such as nation states.
Malcolm Boyd has analysed a great number of national anthems and divided
them into five main categories, of which the two first are most common: (a) hymns
with a solemn pace and melody (for instance the British ‘God Save the Queen’ or the
European anthem); (b) marches (such as the French ‘La Marseillaise’); (c) operatic tunes
(exemplified by El Salvador and some other Latin American countries); (d) folk tunes
(mainly used in Asia, for instance by Japan and Sri Lanka); and (e) fanfares without
text (found in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and other oil states in the Middle
East). 332 Just like the idea of a nation was established in Europe, this is also true for the
sound of national anthems. Except for the few, mainly Asian, examples of folk anthem
category (d) that build upon a Herderian notion of ‘specific musical nationalism’,
expressing a particular ethnicity, Martin Daughtry has argued that most national
anthems tend towards a ‘generic’ musical nationalism, as they by musical means signal
that they are precisely that by adhering to the classical European musical conventions
that have established musical nationalism as a kind of specific supranational genre,
where they are perceived as sounding familiarly ‘anthemic’, rather than specific, to a
particular nation. 333
As a mode of communication, music has several peculiarities advantageous for
communal celebration. 334 First of all, it is based on sounds that involve the ear and
the human voice, but organises these sounds differently than in speech that is based
on a verbal logic of relatively late origins in the history of mankind. What is seen of a
person is primarily the outside surface, while what is heard tends to derive from the
interior of that person’s body, in particular the sonic organs in and around the throat.
The combination of physiological constitution and genetic origin lends to music an
extraordinary emotional reach and subjective involvement that have led many to
understand it as a unique and privileged mode of expression, reaching beyond or
underneath the more conscious modes of visual and verbal communication. Swearing
an oath, proposing to a beloved, crying or laughing—such strong subjective expressions
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