And the winning anthem is ...

Guardian.co.uk ^ | August 11 2008 | Alex Marshall

[forkinsocket]

It is 8pm on a Tuesday evening, and I am busy annoying the Olympic associations of various Caribbean countries by asking them which national anthem will play if one of their athletes wins gold in Beijing. "You want to know what?" asks the receptionist at the Meat Market - a butcher that happens to share the same phone line as the Virgin Islands Olympic Committee.

"I just want to know if your athletes would listen to the US's anthem or that of the Virgin Islands."

"I don't know, son," she says. "All I know is we ain't gonna win no gold medal."

I have spent the last few weeks making calls like this because I have been trying to track down every single national anthem that might be heard at this year's Olympics. All 205 of them. My plan was to listen to all the anthems - the instrumental versions that you hear at the Olympics - with a music journalist's ear, and rank them; that way I would know who to cheer for. There is no other fair way to compare countries musically. National anthems are the same the world over - a short, classical piece meant to stir up pride. They have got to be boisterous and bombastic, with a tune simple enough that you can shout it whether drunk in a stadium, or drunk in front of the TV.

Little did I know that it would take a month to track down four hours, 26 minutes and 25 seconds of music, or that most of those tunes would be so tedious I would have to limit myself to five a day to stop them putting me ofbrass for life.

[forkinsocket]

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[supercat]

I think I've counted at least three versions of the Star Spangled Banner. In one of them, the last line has an extra syllable (dotted-eight/sixteenth instead of a quarter note) at the start of the second-to-last line. I wonder if they're playing one of the later verses. E.g. using slashes for measures, instead of

Oh / say does tha-at / star span-gled / ba-an-ne-er ye-et / wa-ave

perhaps

And_the / star span-gled / ban-ner in / tri-i-u-umph sha-all / wa-ave

Has anyone else noticed that?

[ItsForTheChildren]

Being of Welsh extraction I wanted to hear the Welsh National Anthem. Since the language is not familiar to me I found this comment helpful.

There's an English phonetic version of the first verse handy for non-Welsh speakers at public events By singing this they can appear to to sing the anthem: My hen laid a haddock, one hand oiled a flea, Glad farts and centurions threw dogs in the sea, I could stew a hare here and brandish Dan's flan, Don's ruddy bog's blocked up with sand. Dad! Dad! Why don't you oil Auntie Glad? Can whores appear in beer bottle pies, O butter the hens as they fly!

Apologies to any Welsh members of FR.

[TexasRepublic]

LOL!