Free Republic or Death! by Alex Marshall

languished in his gulags. It has a striking staccato melody and it doesn’t take much to picture rows of soldiers, tens deep, marching through Moscow to it, turning as one to salute their beloved leader. Unsurprisingly, a lot of dictators tend to go for this type of anthem. (Russia’s was actually dropped following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Vladimir Putin brought it back shortly after he first became the country’s president.)
    Alongside the hymns and marches, you also have fanfare anthems, once particularly common in the Middle East. These consist of little more than a few trumpet flourishes (Jordan’s and Saudi Arabia’s barely last thirty seconds), which may seem apt for Islamic countries where music is sometimes more tolerated than encouraged but tend to be found more often in the Emirates. This type raises the obvious question of how something so short could inspire anyone to patriotism, but for a sultan they probably answer the bigger question of how he can get through official ceremonies as quickly as possible.
    Finally – and saving the best for last – you have the epic anthems of South America. These are tunes that seem to ignore every convention of anthem composition. They’re not short (FIFA, football’s governing body, demands anthems are under ninety seconds, but these don’t even think of stopping for four, five or even six minutes – at matches they only play the intros), and they’re not easy to sing either. Instead they’re set out like mini-operas, with rollicking openings in which every part of the orchestra seems to try to out-play the others; melodramatic middle sections where oboes and flutes whimsically take the lead; and huge, over-the-top finishes, with multiple false endings. They’re songs that feel as if they were written for the stage, to accompany scenes of lovers being torn apart then explosively reuniting, or scenes of family feuds ending in gut-wrenching deaths. It’s not a surprise that opera composers wrote most of them, although perhaps it is that most of those composers weren’t from anywhere near the continent. Chile’s fantastic anthem, for instance, was written by a Spaniard, Ramón Carnicer, who’d never set foot in the country (Chile’s London ambassador begged him to write it because the anthems his country’s own composers had managed weren’t up to scratch).
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    So you have your hymns, your marches, your fanfares and your epics, but then you have Nepal’s. There isn’t a brass instrument or rattling snare to be heard in ‘Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka’. There’s no trumpet flourish for a king, or stately rhythm for soldiers to parade to. There’s no cymbal-crashing ending and nothing that could be hummed in four-part harmony. Instead there’s a folk tune, and one that, in the version you hear throughout Nepal, is played on the cheapest of Casio keyboards at that. It’s little more than a few synthesised strings bouncing up and down an addictively sweet melody and the sound of some hand drums tapping out a bassline. And because of that simplicity and difference, it’s wonderful. It’s the sort of music you imagine schoolgirls singing as they skip to class or farmers using to pass the time while stood thigh-deep in water in the middle of a rice paddy. If you heard it in a restaurant here midway through a plate of lentils, you wouldn’t look up – it’d fit in perfectly with all the other songs coming out of the radio. It couldn’t seem a more fitting song for this country. Although, obviously, if you heard it at the Olympics, or at a palace, you’d think something had gone seriously wrong.
    Nepal isn’t entirely alone in having an anthem that actually sounds like the country it comes from. Most of the ‘Stans’ of central Asia have anthems that sound as though they couldn’t have come from anywhere but former Soviet states. They trudge along in minor keys, like armies across the steppe. Mauritania’s, similarly, is an astonishing piece