Any Decent National Anthems?

[znmeb <znmeb...>]

[ Article crossposted from rec.music.classical,rec.music.folk ]
[ Author was Joseph C Fineman ]
[ Posted on Sun, 4 Jun 1995 21:33:28 GMT ]

roger (at) silvertone(dot)Princeton(dot)EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:

>See Fuld--it could even be Swedish.  The basic pattern of the tune is found
>in a half-dozen cultures.

Once upon a time, I heard Pete Seeger (maybe even on a record)
introduce "When I First Came To This Land" by singing scraps of
familiar tunes that bore some resemblance to it, including "Hatikvah"
& the tune to which American children sing the alphabet.

Of course, that doesn't prove that they have a common origin.  It
doesn't even prove that they form a kind with natural boundaries.
Conceivably, any two tunes in the world might be connected by chains
of tunes in which successive links differed as little as the tunes
mentioned differ from one another.  And if that is not so now, it
might become so: I gather that something on the order of 10^5 "new"
tunes are *copyrighted* every year.  Furthermore, somebody recently
programmed a computer to recombine phrases from existing popular
tunes, had it compose thousands of them, and copyrighted *them*.

When song space becomes a continuum, how many dimensions will it have?

%^)
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