National anthems: South Africa's composers are reimagining them

National anthems: South Africa's composers are reimagining themPhilip Miller, a prominent South African composer, has explored the complexities of national anthems in his work.

by The Conversation

17-05-2023 10:02

in Music

Hamilton Dhlamini in The Head & The Load, a production in which composer Philip Miller reworks the British national anthem. Image: The Conversation.

The rousing notes of the British national anthem God Save The King rang loudly in London's Westminster Abbey when King Charles III was crowned - and in official and informal celebrations in many other places, though not always to an enthusiastic reception. The song is still sung in many Commonwealth countries. But its place and the oppressive imperial legacy trailing it are increasingly questioned.

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That debate can be extended beyond one song. What baggage does any music acquire when it shifts from being - in South African literature scholar Zo Wicomb's phrase - national culture to official culture ?

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As a researcher into South African music, I'm often struck by how dominant the past is in my interviews about the present, particularly in relation to the current anthem. South Africa's national anthem is a composite of the African liberation hymn Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika and the apartheid-era Afrikaans hymn Die Stem (The Call of South Africa). Does a similar burden of history weigh down other national anthems and perhaps prevent us from hearing them simply as music?

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In recent work, two prominent contemporary composers, Philip Miller in South Africa and Amit Chaudhuri in India, have explored fresh ways of interpreting national anthems. Their projects suggest that anthems can be freed from historical baggage to reflect contemporary realities.

Phillip Miller Miller grew up during apartheid with the enforced singing of Die Stem at school. In an interview with me he recalls:

Coming from a very liberal home instilled almost a horror of national anthems in me.

Yet Nkosi Sikelele doesn't stir similar feelings, because it's a really beautiful song that has a historical genesis in African liberation, so the meanings it carries are very different .

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Miller and co-composer Thuthuka Sibisi had explored the meaning of singing South Africa's former colonial anthem, God Save the King, for Victorian-era African choristers in an earlier project. That work formed the foundation for the version of the anthem in their score for the stage production The Head & The Load, about the unacknowledged role of African labour in the colonial armies of the first world war.

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South African composer Philip Miller. Madelene Cronje When political regimes sour, even beautiful anthems can lose their beauty, and we can start feeling alienation instead.

University students during South Africa's Fees Must Fall protests created what they christened a decolonised national anthem. They retained Nkosi Sikelele's opening verse but set it to a new melody. New lyrics highlighted hard times when we are painfully abused .

Amit Chaudhuri contemporary national anthem Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika is not the only contemporary national anthem with roots in early anticolonial struggles. India's national anthem is Jana Gana Mana. It was composed by poet, artist and thinker Rabindranath Tagore in 1911. Its Bengali lyrics invoke a spirit of unity in diversity.

Amit Chaudhuri, Indian musician and author. Indranil Bhoumik/Mint via Getty Images ALSO READ: Flashback Friday: Anlia belts out the national anthem before Eben's 100th Bok Test

Chaudhuri, a novelist, critic and classically trained Hindustani singer, reimagines Jana Gana Mana on his most recent album, Across the Universe. Chaudhuri's project explores what he calls musical convergences : music grounded in the sonic contact he hears between compositions from diverse traditions.

His version of Jana Gana Mana is released from its former strict, anthemic marching rhythm into free time. It flowers out of a composition by Austrian keyboardist Joe Zawinul of the jazz fusion group Weather Report. The way the sound develops is paralleled on the accompanying video, where an image of the Indian flag flowers from shadowed and superimposed partial views.

Chaudhuri told me in email correspondence he is treating Tagore's composition as a piece of music. He views it not as a nationalistic commodity but as an aesthetic creation by the greatest songwriter of our time , rich with possibilities. The originality of Tagore's own musical approach - always gathering and repositioning the material he was collecting from every source in his songs - encouraged Chaudhuri to create an open-ended sense of estrangement, surprise, and unexpectedness that situates the anthem in history, but not in the history that we are told, one way or another, about ourselves or our country through books and historiography .

Burden of history Miller isn't sure it's possible to shear away the baggage from music, however beautiful, once it's been appropriated to power. He points out that before Nkosi Sikelele was adopted, the ANC anthem was South African composer Reuben Caluza's iLand Act. This was a far more strident anti-colonial protest song. Miller recorded it with a choral collective in 2020, at the very moment when the City of Cape Town was evicting informal settlers - including dragging a man naked out of his home. That was ironic - who's to say what South Africa's people's anthem really is?

Many Britons, equally, view God Save the King as contested territory. Some urge a replacement. They cite British poet William Blake's Jerusalem (invoking reform of in

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