It took a month to track down every one of the 205 national anthems that might be heard at this year’s Olympic games — and Alex Marshall sat through all four and a half hours of them. It’s time to reveal the handful that actually do their countries proud
It’s 8pm on a Tuesday evening and I am busy annoying the Olympic associations of various Caribbean countries by asking them which national anthem will play if one of their athletes wins gold in Beijing. “You want to know what?” asks the receptionist at the Meat Market — a butcher that happens to share the same phone line as the Virgin Islands Olympic Committee.
“I just want to know if your athletes would listen to the United States’s anthem or that of the Virgin Islands.”
“I don’t know, son,” she says. “All I know is we ain’t gonna win no gold medal.”
I have spent the past few weeks making calls such as this because I have been trying to track down every single national anthem that might be heard at this year’s Olympics. All 205 of them. My plan was to listen to all the anthems — the instrumental versions you hear at the Olympics — with a music journalist’s ear and rank them; that way I would know who to cheer for. There is no other fair way to compare countries musically. National anthems are the same the world over — a short, classical piece meant to stir up pride. They have to be boisterous and bombastic, with a tune simple enough that you can shout it whether drunk in a stadium or drunk in front of the TV.
Little did I know that it would take a month to track down four hours, 26 minutes and 25 seconds of music, or that most of these tunes would be so tedious I would have to limit myself to five a day to stop them putting me off brass for life. I also didn’t expect the search to create in me an undying hatred for both I (versions of which are used by seven countries) and God Save the Queen (used by three).
And what did I learn from all this? That there are only a dozen anthems that are musically worth listening to — and that most of the countries these belong to do not have a hope of winning a gold in Beijing.
Anthems go back as far as the 1560s when William of Orange’s family decided he needed a song, Het Wilhelmus (The William), to accompany his exploits fighting for Dutch independence against the Spanish. It is a peaceful song — calming, even — with a winding melody. In short, it is everything an anthem shouldn’t be, which is perhaps why no other country developed an anthem for a good two centuries. God Save the Queen was not performed until 1745, La Marseillaise until 1792 and what is now Germany’s — music written by Haydn — until 1797.
With colonialism anthems spread worldwide, although most were not made official until the 1920s and 1930s. The first time they were used at the Olympics was 1924. But colonialism did not lead to every country adopting the hymns and military marches that pass for anthems in Europe. Three other types developed: folk anthems based on traditional melodies; “the Arab fanfare”, common in Middle Eastern countries and consisting of little more than a trumpet flourish; and the Latin American “epic anthems”.
The last group are by far the most fun. Most of them last more than four minutes and are set out like mini operas. They have a rollicking opening section, in which each part of the brass section tries to outplay the others, a melodramatic, meandering middle section — oboes and flutes dominate — and an over-the-top finish.
All of which background is pretty irrelevant, as from listening to 205 of them I have realised there are actually just two types of anthem: the perfunctory, lifeless ones and those that make the effort to be different. Shame that 190 fall into the first group.
Antigua’s, for example, is a school assembly tune, not an anthem, while Sri Lanka’s sounds like a nursery rhyme. There are dull military marches, such as Malta’s and Burkina Faso’s, and dull hymns such as Zambia’s and Malaysia’s. Whoever wrote them seemed to be aiming solely for a tune simple enough that parents could teach it to their children on a recorder.
The other big disappointment with the majority of anthems is that no matter which country they come from, they sound as though they were written by a band leader from the Royal Navy. There are no cha-cha-cha rhythms in Cuba’s anthem, no highlife guitars in Ghana’s.
In spite of this, there are a handful of anthems that do stand out — either because they use non-Western instruments, scales and tunes or because they take a Western anthem and then toy with it, making it solemn or funny, and entirely their own. Most of the “Stans” of central Asia have anthems that sound as though they could not have come from anywhere apart from former Soviet states. They trudge along in minor keys, filled with imposing strings and booming drums, as if written to accompany armies clambering into battle.
Then there are Nepal’s, Senegal’s and Nigeria’s, all of which make use of local instruments. Senegal’s is even called Strum Your Koras, Strike Your Balafons after the instruments used to play it. Guinea’s, a military march, inexplicably has a 10-second “polka break” halfway through. Burundi’s does a similar trick, turning into the soundtrack from a Bruce Lee film for 10 seconds before realising that perhaps it wasn’t the best idea after all.
When you hear tunes such as these, which are genuinely different and exciting — world music fans would be lapping them up if they didn’t know they were anthems — it makes you wonder why others do not follow their example. But will you actually hear any of these at the Olympics? Well, Japan’s should get several airings. “We only have six athletes going to Beijing and they didn’t actually qualify,” says a spokesman for Bangladesh’s Olympic association. Surely, then, all the more reason to cheer them for their music. —