The right way to sing the National Anthem Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the May 25, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer LAST week, I was invited to a cultural event in one of the shopping malls that started, as always, with a prayer and the singing of the National Anthem. When a young girl approached the microphone, it was fairly obvious that we would not be singing with a taped version of the anthem, and that we would have live singing without any musical accompaniment. Her voice was quite good, definitely "American Idol" material, but the Simon in me reared its ugly head when she started singing slowly as if the National Anthem was the "Ama Namin." In the Philippines, we seem to equate seriousness and solemnity with slowness. The tempo was so excruciatingly slow that I gave up singing after the second line and asked myself, "Aren't we supposed to sing the anthem as Julian Felipe composed it in 1898: as a military march?" Toward the end of the anthem, she picked up speed and people who had given up on the singing earlier started to join in. Then at the last line, she pumped up the volume and belted out the last word in a pitch that caught everyone off guard. Wild applause followed; the audience liked her. Yes, the voice was good, the showmanship superb, but was this the way our anthem was supposed to be sung? Shouldn't the anthem be fast and martial? This type of singing has its origins in the way Americans invite name performers to sing the US anthem to open major baseball or football matches. But why is the US more lenient with regard to the use of their flag and anthem than we are? Because we have a law that makes us so. A few months back, Butch Jimenez came up with a brilliant proposal to get young people attuned to the National Anthem by asking various recording artists to do different versions of this familiar tune. The idea of updating the anthem to bridge the generation gap was excellent, except that under the present Flag and Heraldic Code such a project would be unlawful. Can our youth still identify with a tune that is over a century old? Or do we reinvent or repackage that same tune to make our youth sit up, rap, or dance, as they revisit the past? We take too many liberties with the National Anthem. Watch and cringe over videos shown during the last full-show in movie houses or those aired when television stations sign off. Choral groups are particularly at fault when they change the tempo, tone and pitch of the anthem to suit their artistic expression. Sometime back, one senator had a fit when a choral group performed in the Senate. The object is to get the audience to sing or feel patriotic. The anthem is not there to showcase the vocal range of choral groups. Nobody seems to care that the Flag Code prescribes that the anthem be sung the way Julian Felipe composed it in 1898. Is this possible? If we take the law literally, then we have to cope with a solo piano version or that of a brass band. If we follow the 1898 Felipe original, either the lyrics will slow down the music or we will be unable to sing and keep up with the music. One of the things I dug up in the Newberry Library in Chicago was an original lithograph copy of the National Anthem printed in Hong Kong in 1899. I had this photocopied and asked my landlady, a piano teacher, to play it for me, using the metronome setting indicated in the piece. I was surprised that the anthem could be quite lively. After playing it twice, my landlady asked why this piece was different from other versions of the National Anthem she had sight-read in the past. I explained that the copy in the Newberry Library was what Julian Felipe allowed to be reproduced and disseminated in Hong Kong in 1899. This piece was, after some improvements, how Emilio Aguinaldo heard the tune for the first time in Kawit in 1898. Felipe played it on the piano and, upon Aguinaldo's approval, trained a band to play it for the first time during the Declaration of Independence on June 12, 1898. People have forgotten that the National Anthem started out as incidental music, that it did not have words when it was adopted as the National Anthem and first played officially during the Declaration of Independence. Jose Palma put in the Spanish words a year later, and this was later translated into English and known to the pre-war generation as "Land of the Morning" but now known to us as "Lupang Hinirang" (or wrongly as "Bayang Magiliw"). The original, which was first composed for piano and later arranged for a brass band, was in 2/4 time. Then in the 1920s to make singing easier, the time signature was adjusted from 2/4 to 4/4 and the key was changed from the original C to G. It is unfortunate that Felipe's original holograph cannot be located, so we cannot see how far we have strayed musically. In 1924, Felipe attempted and failed to get a copyright for his only memorable composition because it was deemed public property. However, the Philippine Legislature authorized the payment of P4,000 if he could turn over his original manuscript to the National Library. While I have given up on Felipe's original in Manila, I'm optimistic that the contemporary copy presented to George Dewey in 1898 will be found in the US Library of Congress or in someone's attic someday and returned to the Philippines. If it's extant, it's like the elusive Holy Grail, but I will find it. Source:http://news.inq7.net/opinion/index.php?index=2&story_id=38046&col=80 Labels: article |
