A NEW national anthem? With an Arts Commission already up, if not exactly running, this can keep its members occupied and divert their attention from taking away our power to enjoy ourselves in whatever way we wish.
Even if they get past the stage of merely publishing a strategic plan for a national anthem choice, their eventual proposal will be a real test of whether they can combine populism with aesthetic taste.
The commission should accept the challenge
of refuting the entry on national anthems in the Oxford Companion of Music, which declares that, with one or two exceptions, "the music of national anthems is undistinguished ... They are not noted for the quality of their texts".
It could then institute a competition along the lines of the Euro-Vision Song Contest, with entries voted upon by a button-pressing public. However, before this exercise in pure democracy, guidelines have to be issued to would-be composers.
Two interesting constraints were placed on those of us who entered a competition for a new national anthem held some 40 years ago by the then newly independent nation of Sierra Leone.
The first was that the competition was solely for the submission of a musical score, not an accompanying anthemic text. This was a relief. Composers may not be good lyricists, and the search costs for finding a text (out of copyright) could be high. On the other hand, the approach invited the suspicion that there could be a hidden text agenda and that really the hymn to the homeland was already chosen.
The Sierra Leone government added another constraint. No award would be made if they found a suitable excerpt from the works of their most famous composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a protégé of Elgar and whose oratorio Hiawatha is still in the repertoire.
Trying to guess which excerpt one was competing with was well nigh impossible. But there was one advantage: like Haydn, his work no longer had copyright protection.
I duly submitted my entry to the Sierra Leone government but heard nothing for months. Then I got an official letter of commiseration. No award had been made. But a small selection of entries, including my own, had been selected for preservation in the government archives.
The somewhat troubled history of Sierra Leone does not inspire confidence in its survival. And there are also predators such as termites which find official records a delicacy.
Cheer up those pessimists who do not rate their chances high of winning a competition of this sort. You can do as I did and recycle the piece. It is now embalmed in the recessional music at the University of Buckingham’s graduation ceremony.
Professor Sir Alan Peacock, a former economic adviser to the Department of Trade and Industry and the chairman of the Scottish Arts Council 1986-92, now writes on the economics of the arts.
