The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #33366 Message #3672410
Posted By: GUEST,Rahere
27-Oct-14 - 10:58 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: 3rd verse of Danny Boy?
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: 3rd verse of Danny Boy?
There really should be some kind of prize for the worst National Anthem, surely? My current #1 is, of course, the European Anthem, a piece of Goethe doggerell of the lowest standards! It utterly spoils Beethoven's reputation for me: I can hear something sublime of his and the that damned thing pops up. I then have to reinnoculate myself with the memory of the Berlin 1989 concert, when Bernstein replaced Freude (Joy - as in Kraft Durch Freude, which sent so many thousands of German schoolkids to their deaths in 1945) with Freiheit - Freedom, on the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Any operation which has to resort to that kind of ersatz gemutlichkeit to mask their real intent deserves to be slammed. At least I now have the image of the Tuam killing field attached to The Fields of Athenry, as it's on the Athenry Road, to put it into context. They all universally only deal with one side of the story, and so are immoral: at least the UK's says it straight in the usually suppressed version, "Rebellious Scots to crush!", "Confound their politicks"... but then it does also "Lord make the nations see, That men should brothers be, And form one family, The wide world over." which is also usually suppressed. Says something about the editors, surely!
I went through a phase of similar repugnance with most of the rest of the hymnary, as well, as it's too often used to suppress individual reflection and hammer the pew-fodder into dogmatic conformity. But then again, that's the entire purpose of organised religion, surely, which lies at the root of this nationalism: it's the organisation which is being driven and not the individual's creed. It's a short-cut to mob psychology and militarism. At least there are some pieces which ride alongside my meditation without intrusion, variants on drones and bell/bowl harmonics. Ah well...
My general point is that we should all be rather allergic to any kind of agenda. The great value of folk music is we're not kowtowing to a commercial lobby, nor mostly to anything of massive current political relevance, and what there is is in general antithetical to the big guns.