Music has always been a great encapsulator of time and place - when someone makes an historical documentary or drama, for example, it is a powerful aid to play music in the background relevant to the events and times depicted in order to immediately evoke an atmosphere of presence and impart a reality to the story being presented. But sometimes music has stepped out of that background to take central stage in history itself; it has become a player in the unfolding drama and a catalyst for historical change - on occasion great change.

To take one example: in April 1974 the Portuguese dictatorship established by Salazar (now headed by Prime Minister Caetano) seemed, to the bulk of the population and the world at large, as impregnable and permanent as ever. What the Portuguese public could not know however was that for two months a small group of military officers had been secretly plotting to stage a coup. Their intentions are still a subject of debate, seeming to range from a simple takeover of the dictatorship's hierarchy to its complete abolition. What could not have been predicted by any of them was the public's response. When the coup was finally put in motion on the 25th the streets were immediately filled with hundreds of thousands of citizens, at first interpreted as a spontaneous but directionless movement, but which quickly developed, as the "Carnation revolution" continued, into an emphatic demand for democracy.



One signal for that coup was a pre-arranged playing on the radio of that year's Portuguese entry in the forthcoming Eurovision Song Contest " "E depois do adeus" sung by Paulo de Carvalho. The song itself was to finish joint last in the competition a few weeks later but to the Portuguese this mattered little. Its place in their country's history had been secured.



The other signal used was also a song - this time by the then banned folk singer Zeca Alonso whose rendition of "Grandola, Vila Morena" was the cue for the coup leaders to announce to the public they had ousted the old regime.



Other songs spring to mind which were more specifically written to effect change, and others which played that role accidentally, though few maybe with quite as sudden an effect as that above. Are there any which you feel maybe deserve a place on this list of music as political or social catalysts of change?

"Lillibullero" from the late 17th Century, was reputed to have sung James VII and II out of the kingdoms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillibullero

The music of Mikis Theodorakis could be said to have encapsulated the resistance to the regime of the Colonels in Greece and it was illegal to play, posses or listen to any of it.
I must admit I didn't even realise he was still alive but I see that not only is he still with us but continues to be a symbol of resistance and survival there.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eirini-zarkadoula/mikis-theodorakis-the-gre_b_2116915.html

Another song that springs to mind, though it was probably a lottery at the time as to which song of its genre (essentially black music sung by white people) would be the one to make the breakthrough and impinge on the consciousness to such a degree that it meant something fundamental to almost everyone - the proof of a decline of standards into delinquency on the part of an older generation and something akin to liberation for their younger contemporaries. Its specific role in changing history is open to debate but it is most definitely seen generally as a watershed in western society, and one which heralded social changes that reached far beyond a simple revision of popular musical tastes.

This is certainly a protest song, whether actually changed history I'm not sure,though it may have been influential in changing attitudes;

One unlikely candidate is Martin Luther, of all people. Not content with being the catalyst whereby western christianty was to split and diffuse with such huge social consequences in its wake, Luther also assaulted history in a most unexpected way. As part of his effort to reform and redefine the role of christian congregations he suggested that singing in church, hitherto the preserve of choirs, should be an event in which everyone participated, and in their local tongue. To do this however meant popularising the notion of easy to remember and easy to sing hymns, of which at the time very few examples existed. Not one to shirk at a challenge Luther took Psalm 46 and set it to the music of a then popular folk song in his native Saxony; the hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" still being one belted out with fervour, spittle and the odd bum note by assembled Christians in Protestant churches around the world.

Besides facilitating the social reforms mentioned above it is important to note also that this new form of choir required new choral arrangements. Multiple part harmonies, background vocals, the classification of male and female voice ranges, and indeed the idea of a conductor (used first in choral work before adapted for orchestral concerts), all stemmed from this radical new approach to communal singing.

All together now ...

Classical music had a great impact on mida. Thanks to the songs I heard with my father, I became fond of music. I'm currently singing lessons and I'm starting to prepare my album. The music of childhood make us who we are.

Welcome Antonito.  Could you give us an example of a song that affected you?  I'm learning Spanish (with the local U3A - a retired persons' group in the UK) and our teacher has intermittently taught us some 'protest' songs in Spanish.  I can't remember them offhand but I'll have a look through my notes to see if I can find one of them.

When I was a teenager in the 1960s there were many songs questioning the morality of having nuclear weapons for example.  Looking back it was a time of change.  The mood of the mid-sixties was captured by Robert Allen (aka Dylan) Zimmerman's The Times they are a Changin'.  We had hope then that the world might change for the better but as someone else remarked on this site (I can't reference it offhand) we could in early 2020 be living in a dystopian novel.

During the First World War, Japanese forces seized Kiaochow, a German territory on the Shandong peninsular in China. Following the Siege of Tsingtao (the capital of Kiaochow) over 3,000 German prisoners were taken who were later interned at the Bando POW camp on Shikoku in Japan. There they remained until 1920 (i.e. over a year after the Armistice) before the camp was finally dissolved. During that time the prisoners had organised an orchestra which played concerts for both military and civilian audiences with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony featuring regularly on programmes and becoming a firm favourite with their Japanese hosts. As a result, the 9th Symphony gained widespread and enduring popularity across Japan becoming a standard fixture on the musical curricula of the country’s schools and colleges etc.

Spin forward 60 years and Japan’s Sony corporation and the Netherlands’ Philips company were working together on a joint project to produce the first commercially viable compact disc (CD). This they launched in 1980 with the play length of the CD being 74 minutes in duration. This was considerably longer than the 45 minutes available on one side of a standard vinyl long-playing record (LP). For the CD, Philips had originally proposed a 60-minute play length (i.e one hour) which would still have been 15 minutes longer than an LP. It would also have matched the 60 minutes available on one side of a C120 cassette tape (the longest popularly available at that time). But Sony had pushed for 74 minutes. The reason being that Norio Ohga, chairman of Sony and a music graduate, appreciated that this was what would be needed for the CD to accommodate Beethoven’s 9th.     

And the rest as they say, is history, with the CD overtaking both vinyl records and cassette tapes in sales popularity in the 1980s to then reign supreme in music retail in the 1990s and 2000s. The CD would then itself succumb to competition from downloads and streaming etc from 2010 onwards.

They must have been a very talented and well-equipped group of German POWs at the Bando camp. Beethoven originally scored his 9th symphony for an unusually large and complex orchestra, comprising nearly every usual instrument from a piccolo down to a contrabassoon, trumpets pitched in both D and B♭, clarinets in three different keys (A, B♭ and C) and likewise three sets of horns (in  D, B♭ and E♭). In addition to the orchestra those German POWs also had to find amongst their number sufficient singers for the choir (sopranos, altos, tenors and basses) and more critically, four sufficiently accomplished singers for the soloists, including the female soprano and alto parts. I assume there were no women in the POW camp so who I wonder sang the soprano and alto parts of the soloists and in the choir?

The very first complete musical work ever pressed onto a CD was a 1981 test recording of Richard Strauss's 'An Alpine Symphony', made with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Like Beethoven's 9th symphony this is, at typically about 50 minutes duration, longer than the 45mins of a vinyl LP record. It is also - again like the Beethoven's work - sonically very rich, in that Strauss specified an orchestra of at least 125 players which, in addition to the usual full orchestra, includes such unusual instruments as a heckelphone, a celeste, an organ, cowbells, a wind machine and a thunder machine.

The first commercial compact disc was produced on 17 August 1982 and was a 1979 recording of Chopin waltzes by conducted by Claudio Arrau. The first 50 titles were released in Japan on 1 October 1982, the very first of which was a re-release of the Billy Joel album '52nd Street'.

Yes – it’s a remarkable story. This article says that the camp not only 2 orchestras but also 2 choirs:

From a POW camp to esteemed music halls nationwide: Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 marks 100 years in Japan

What the exact definition of an ‘orchestra’ is in the context of a POW camp, however, is another matter. It notes that a Japanese aficionado of Classical music witnessed the amateur performance of the piece and was impressed by their ‘passion’. Mmm.

In terms of the range and quality of instruments at their disposal then the article doesn’t mention this. The accompanying photograph shows mainly the members of the choir in the foreground, while among the musicians seated to the rear there appears to be a double bass, a bassoon and something else which could be a flute or a viola. Any other instruments are obscured from view.

I'm not sure that his music can be said to have changed history but some of Giuseppe Verdi's early operas certainly influenced history. How much he actively supported the Risorgimento movement for the unification of Italy is uncertain, but he was clearly sympathetic to the cause. Either way his music was often taken to covertly express support for Italian unification and independence from foreign control (principally Austria) in the years up to 1861. For example his 'Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves' (known as Va, pensiero) from the third act of the opera Nabucco (first performed in 1842) was used as an anthem by Italian patriots, and as it was from a popular opera it could be openly sung or whistled in the streets in apparent innocence. (The chorus's theme of exiles singing about their homeland and its lines such as O mia patria, si bella e perduta / "O my country, so lovely and so lost" clearly resonated with many Italians). Themes of rebellion and pleas for freedom also occur in the operas I Lombardi alla prima crociata (1843), set during the 1st crusade to retake Jerusalem; Ermani (1844 ), set in 16th century Spain; and in Il trovatore (1853), set in 15th century Aragon.


"Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate" / Fly, thought, on golden wings - or the 'Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves' from Nabucco.

Of course it may be that the political dimension of Verdi's operas has subsequently been somewhat exaggerated by nationalistic historians. Verdi himself rarely commented publically on the underlying themes in his works, and from the mid 1850s onwards his operas displayed few obviously patriotic motifs. However this may well have been simply because of the heavy censorship by the absolutist Austrian regime then in power. Nevertheless beginning in Naples in 1859 and spreading throughout Italy, the slogan "Viva VERDI", whether daubed on walls or shouted from an audience, was used as a defiant acronym for Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia (Long live Victor Emmanuel King of Italy), referring to Victor Emmanuel II, then king of Piedmont-Sardinia who was a leading military commander in the war for Italian independence and who subsequently in 1861 became the first king of a united Italy. Austrian officials and army officers (being cultured opera-loving Viennese) were generally an attentive audience of Verdi's operas, but they seem to have remained largely oblivious to the nationalistic undercurrents they contained, and none of his operas were ever banned.

MM, What interesting items you and Vizzer mentioned. I learned today new insights in stories that I never heard before, as the link between Nabucco and the Italian risorgimento...

Thank you both and kind regards from Paul.

I tend to think of "La Marsellaise" as being the flagship song for the French Revolution, Gilgamesh, but there must have been other songs like "Ca ira" * that were also associated with that event.  A thought just came into my head - in the long run though did the rich and powerful (obviously the ones who didn't get their heads cut off) in France lose anything beside their titles?  There are still rich people in France who are descended from the pre-revolution nobility.


* I know that "Ca" should have a cedilla but everything is so slow on this laptop....

Ça ira" (French: "it'll be fine") is an emblematic song of the French Revolution, first heard in May 1790.
La Marseillaise, French national anthem composed in one night (April 24, 1792) during the French Revolution by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle (both citations from Wikimisleadya)

I think the latter was more a response to other countries reaction to the revolution, the former was part of the fuel.

Yes, I reckon if the rich can survive the initial onslaught in any revolution, unlike the Complaints Dept of Sirius Cybernetics, they usually re-establish the prior establishment.

Despite what is generally stated by wiki etc, although the words to 'La Marseillaise' were indeed written by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in 1792, the melody itself was originally composed by the Italian violinist, Giovanni Battista Viotti, in 1781 when he was employed in the ducal household of Alfonso dal Pozzo della Cisterna of Piedmont, and which he called simply 'Tema e variazioni in Do maggiore' - theme and variations in D major, for violin and orchestra. Poor Viotti rarely gets the credit for composing the rousing tune that eventually became the French national anthem.

Green George wrote:

Ça ira" (French: "it'll be fine") is an emblematic song of the French Revolution, first heard in May 1790.
La Marseillaise, French national anthem composed in one night (April 24, 1792) during the French Revolution by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle (both citations from Wikimisleadya)
...

G G Gil,

Sorry for going out on a tangent, but

Your remark re wiki gave my mind a twist unto Groucho Marx 



Far be it from me to suggest that Groucho or the other Marx brothers changed the world, but in my mind they made it a brighter one.

And the "Internationale"...






Composer: "our" Pierre De Geyter from Ghent...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_De_Geyter

From the wiki:

"It took Pierre one Sunday morning to compose his music on a harmonium. According to one source, he then asked his brother Adolphe to play it on the bugle, and subsequently made some minor changes to the music. The new composition was first played by the Lyre des Travailleurs at the yearly fête of the Lille trade union of newspaper sellers in July 1888. Six thousand leaflets were printed at Pierre's favorite printing firm, Boldoduc, and sold to raise money for the socialist party in Lille. To protect his job, only "Degeyter" was named as the composer but Pierre was dismissed regardless and was subsequently blacklisted by Lille employers. He was soon reduced to performing odd jobs, such as making coffins. In 1902, he left Lille with his wife and daughter and moved to Saint-Denis, near Paris.


In fact, Pierre De Geyter had neglected to secure copyright. As the song became ever more popular, his brother Adolphe De Geyter claimed copyright in 1901 and began to collect royalties on it. Pierre had become estranged from the socialist establishment of Lille by siding with the left-wing opponents of the Bloc National government of 1902, and with the Marxist war opponents influenced by Bolshevism, who would later form the communist party. In 1904, Pierre started court proceedings against Adolphe, but Gustave Delory (mayor of Lille by then) supported Adolphe's claim (though in an 1888 meeting with the Ghent socialist leader Edward Anseele he had identified Pierre De Geyter as the author) and, as a result, Pierre was unable to prove his authorship. He lost the case in 1914. At the beginning of 1916, however, during the First World War, Adolphe De Geyter hanged himself, leaving a note for his brother in which he acknowledged his fraud and asserted that he had been pressured by others to make the claim. Pierre, who was in unoccupied France at the time, received the letter only after the war. In 1922, the copyright verdict was reversed.


In 1927, leaders of the Soviet Union discovered that the real author of The Internationale, which was then the Soviet Union's national anthem, had not yet died. Pierre was invited to Moscow for the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution and was in the stands of the honorary guests, with the German sculptor Käthe Kollwitz at his side. Joseph Stalin awarded him a Soviet Union state pension (according to some sources as a compensation for his copyright). As this was Pierre's only income, apart from modest fees collected on music for the other Pottier poems (particularly L'Insurgé and En avant la Classe Ouvrière) and on popular tunes he had also composed, and although the left-wing town administration of Saint-Denis granted him a free apartment, Pierre De Geyter spent the last years of his life in precarity. After his death at Saint-Denis in 1932, more than fifty thousand people attended his funeral.


Kind regards, Paul.

Reputedly the first 3-part harmony (not "strict organum") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzvxxy1jG-c

PaulRyckier wrote:

And the "Internationale"...  Composer: "our" Pierre De Geyter from Ghent...

... although there are quite a few similarities in the melody to the earlier 'Chant du départ' of 1794, which was the official anthem of the First French Empire before 'La Marseillaise' was adopted the following year.



And while we're on Napoleonic military songs, there's also the 'Chanson de l'Oignon'. According to legend before the battle of Marengo (1800), Napoleon found some grenadiers rubbing an onion on their bread. "Very good," he said, "there is nothing better than an onion for marching on the road to glory." Only the French could march into battle singing about how much they like fried onions.

As the national anthem, 'La Marseillaise' only lasted two decades at first. With the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814 the old royal anthem was reinstated, only now called 'Le Retour des Princes Français à Paris'.

The melody of this hymn was derived from a popular Christmas carol of the sixteenth century, which is recorded in the collection of Christophe de Bordeaux (1581), although it probably started out as an early sixteenth century dance tune called 'Les Tricotets' (from tricoter meaning to knit, and so perhaps implying a complicated winding dance where one continually changed partners, although this isn't certain). A variation of the melody also appears in Thoinot Arbeau's 'L'Orchésographie' (1588), a dance manual giving both music and steps, where it is called the 'Branle Coupé de Cassandre'. A branle - from the French branler meaning to shake, wave, sway, wobble etc, referring to the side-to-side movement of the dancers - was a popular dance from the early 16th century in which couples danced, with linked arms or holding hands, in a circle or line. It is still performed in parts of France today. Here's Arbeau's 'Branle de Cassandre':



Around 1600, during the reign of Henri IV, the master of the royal chapel, Eustache du Caurroy, took this popular dance music and added some accompanying words of praise for the king to create a royal hymn or anthem. Although specifically about Henri IV Caurroy's 'Marche Henri IV', or 'Vive Henri IV' as it was also known, became associated with the monarchy in general and over the centuries lyrics were added and changed to express the current political mood. For example around 1770 for the needs of a comic opera, 'The Hunting Party of Henri IV', Charles Collé added three additional verses. Performances of this comedy were not authorized in public theaters in Paris until four years later after the death of Louis XV in 1774, but when its performance was finally permitted the song became very popular, and it is this 1770 four-verse form that is usually remembered today.



Despite its rather frivolous words, as a royalist, even affectionately loyal song, it was in practice the national anthem of the Kingdom of France until the Revolution, and again after the Restoration. The 'Marche Henri IV', was frequently played to welcome the king or members of the royal family when they entered a public ceremony, however in these cases if it was to be sung, the couplet about Good King Henri's talent for drinking, fighting and womanising was usually changed to "Où peut-on être mieux qu’au sein de sa famille?" / "Where can we be better than within his family?", or something similarly anodyne.

Tchaikovsky, an avowed francophile, borrowed the melody for the last act of his ballet 'Sleeping Beauty' (1890) and with his arrangement of the tune as a grand royal anthem it had certainly come a long way from its roots as a jolly dance tune.

I wonder if any of these could eventually "change history"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Qn91hThBU

or perhaps this :-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKKM-CzjQCk

The use of the same tune is no accident, this being the original, actually there is/was a fourth one - from the Chubut valley in Patagonia, though they appear now to use the third. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50W-ZnWx6k

Or, perhaps more likely, this:

Meles meles wrote:

PaulRyckier wrote:

And the "Internationale"...  Composer: "our" Pierre De Geyter from Ghent...

... although there are quite a few similarities in the melody to the earlier 'Chant du départ' of 1794, which was the official anthem of the First French Empire before 'La Marseillaise' was adopted the following year.

 
Yes MM, you are right. As I hear it ... Because my hearing is not the same as two knowledgeable music lovers as you (and as I read it you were also an actual singer in the time) and Gilgamesh...

It can be that "our" Pierre De Geyter was copying some (if it was nowadays illegally) tunes from that "Chant de départ". And nowadays it would perhaps give a lot of legal turmoil and fees, the American way.

But look at him:



Wasn't he not enough punished?

From the "Wiki":
"In fact, Pierre De Geyter had neglected to secure copyright. As the song became ever more popular, his brother Adolphe De Geyter claimed copyright in 1901 and began to collect royalties on it. Pierre had become estranged from the socialist establishment of Lille by siding with the left-wing opponents of the Bloc National government of 1902, and with the Marxist war opponents influenced by Bolshevism, who would later form the communist party. In 1904, Pierre started court proceedings against Adolphe, but Gustave Delory (mayor of Lille by then) supported Adolphe's claim (though in an 1888 meeting with the Ghent socialist leader Edward Anseele he had identified Pierre De Geyter as the author) and, as a result, Pierre was unable to prove his authorship. He lost the case in 1914. At the beginning of 1916, however, during the First World War, Adolphe De Geyter hanged himself, leaving a note for his brother in which he acknowledged his fraud and asserted that he had been pressured by others to make the claim. Pierre, who was in unoccupied France at the time, received the letter only after the war. In 1922, the copyright verdict was reversed"


Kind regards, Paul.

Meles meles wrote:

Or, perhaps more likely, this:

I had tacitly assumed that. Could be the trigger for Wales if successful. Cymru am byth!

Green George wrote:

I had tacitly assumed that. Could be the trigger for Wales if successful. Cymru am byth!

Gil, can't see the video, while seemingly the "uploader" hasn't made the youtube available in Belgium...
Regards, Paul.

Paul :
Not sure which you can't see. Mine were, successively, "Bro goth agan tasow" - Cornish anthem. "Bro Gozh ma zadou" - Breton anthem, and "Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau" - Welsh anthem. MMs was "Flower of Scotland".

My three all have the same title "Old land of my fathers" in their respective languages of Kernowec, Brezhoneg and Cymraig.

Ditto to what Gil said here. 
- Except that I wouldn't have any idea of the meaning of the words.

Green George wrote:

Paul :
Not sure which you can't see. Mine were, successively, "Bro goth agan tasow" - Cornish anthem. "Bro Gozh ma zadou" - Breton anthem, and "Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau" - Welsh anthem. MMs was "Flower of Scotland".

My three all have the same title "Old land of my fathers" in their respective languages of Kernowec, Brezhoneg and Cymraig.

 
Gil:
Of course you are right. Getting older (now more than three quarters of my expected lifetime of 100), I many times in my hurry am confused by the first picture I see, and that was the Scottish video of MM, I see now. (perhaps I have that immediate focusing on the first picture I see already from my childhood on).
It is this video I can't see. Now I sought it on the internet:
And I suppose MM, that it is this one:



Again my excuses for the quick unintentional reaction.

Kind regards from Paul.

AntonitoTO wrote:

Classical music had a great impact on mida. Thanks to the songs I heard with my father, I became fond of music. The music of childhood make us who we are.

 
Antonito,

On me too, the songs I heard with my father had a great impact during my childhood and afterwards. He and his brothers (five) could also sing very well (and they could all nearly sing with a tenor voice) Just after WWII it were still the songs from the great opera arias mostly in Italian and Spanish and translated to Dutch or songs on the same tune with Dutch words.
Sadly I can't sing and I am a bit envious on MM overhere and perhaps (GG (Gilgamesh)) too. That wouldn't say I can't appreciate the former great songs of my father and especially the great tenors of the opera as a Caruso, Gigli, Lanza, Pavarotti to call but some.

My father sang that many times a song, that remained  etched in my memory, especially as it was on the exact tunes of "Torna a Surriento"



Also from Elvis Presley



In fact it was an anti-war song from immediately after WWI in Dutch on the exact tune of Torna a Surriento.

I have here the exact words, but sadly the song on the site is wrong and the tune and text is according to another song.
I have the original 78 tours record at home that I can play on an old gramophone and the torna a surriento tune is still there and nearly inaudibly with al the cracks in the sound, the original text of the anti-war song "Oorlog aan den oorlog" (War to the war)
http://www.wreed-en-plezant.be/wrdprs/2013/06/oorlog-aan-den-oorlog/



I have a grand-cousin? (son of my cousin and grandson of my uncle), who is "professional" and has the same voice I recognize from my father and uncles. He is a professional voice immitator and sings also in apart performances "Elvis Presley" (as he was on a Presley contest in the US and won a top price overthere as one of the best immitators)

I asked him to sing on a CD, the first part a part of the text from Torna a Surriento and the second part a part of the text of Oorlog aan de oorlog. He did it. But I was a bit surprized about the price. Even as a "prix d'ami" it was still 800 Euro. But now I realize how pricy it has to be to sing in a proffesional sound room and with professional sound accompaniment...
How is that in your case?

Kind regards from Paul.

The Scottish anthem, 'Flower of Scotland', is somewhat different to the other national anthems and patriotic songs mentioned above, in that while it commemorates the Battle of Bannockburn of 1314 (when the Scottish army under Robert the Bruce, King of Scots defeated Edward II, King of England and so ended the English rule of Scotland) the song and melody was only composed comparatively recently in the mid-1960s by Roy Williamson of the folk group The Corries. I don't think this, nor indeed any of the other anthems we've discussed here, have actually changed history (as per the OP) but rather they have only commemorated events which have since been seen as highly significatant in a people's or a region's history.

Similarly again, although it didn't change history, the anthem of Catalunya also commemorates an important historic event. The Catalan anthem is known as 'Els Segadors' (The Reapers) and although the current words and melody were only standardized in the 1890s the song, in various forms, dates from about 1640 and so from the time of the events that it describes.



The words in English are:

Catalonia triumphant
shall again be rich and bountiful.
Drive away these people,
Who are so conceited and so arrogant.
Chorus:
Strike with your sickle!
Strike with your sickle, defenders of the land!
Strike with your sickle!
Now is the time, reapers.
Now is the time to stand alert.
For when another June comes,
Let us sharpen our tools well.
Chorus
May the enemy tremble,
upon seeing our symbol.
Just as we cut golden ears of wheat,
when the time calls we cut off chains.
Chorus

In June 1640 rioting broke out in Sant Andreu de Palomar and later Barcelona, with local farm workers fighting against the Spanish authorities over various grievences, including Spanish troops being forcibly billetted on the locals and the resulting damage to property and assaults on people. This rioting eventually developed into a full scale rebellion, known as the Reapers' War or the Catalan Revolt, where the Catalans (encouraged and aided by France) rebelled against the Kingdom of Spain, as part of the wider confict of the Thirty Year's War between Spain, England, France and Austria (1618-1648). However the revolt ultimately ended in disaster from the Catalan viewpoint, for not only was the uprising crushed, but in the subsequent Treaty of the Pyrenees which ended hostilities between France and Spain (1659), the County of Roussillon and the northern half of the County of Cerdanya were ceded to France, thus splitting these northern Catalan territories off from the rest of the Principality of Catalonia which remained under Spain rule.

Another "localist" song. Again, this one seems much later than the events described. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXv1vpziL8

Would this one count?, The Finlandia Hymn, by Sibelius, written when Finland was still part of the Russian Empire:

Meles meles wrote:

In June 1640 rioting broke out in Sant Andreu de Palomar and later Barcelona, with local farm workers fighting against the Spanish authorities over various grievences, including Spanish troops being forcibly billetted on the locals and the resulting damage to property and assaults on people. This rioting eventually developed into a full scale rebellion, known as the Reapers' War or the Catalan Revolt, where the Catalans (encouraged and aided by France) rebelled against the Kingdom of Spain, as part of the wider confict of the Thirty Year's War between Spain, England, France and Austria (1618-1648). However the revolt ultimately ended in disaster from the Catalan viewpoint, for not only was the uprising crushed, but in the subsequent Treaty of the Pyrenees which ended hostilities between France and Spain (1659), the County of Roussillon and the northern half of the County of Cerdanya were ceded to France, thus splitting these northern Catalan territories off from the rest of the Principality of Catalonia which remained under Spain rule.

MM, did some research for the County of Roussillon and the northern half of the County of Cerdanya, as I suppose there is your "exploitation".

I had some difficulties with Roussillon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roussillon
From the wiki:
When the Catalans rose against the Spanish Crown in 1641, Louis XIII of France entered the conflict on the side of the former. After a protracted war, the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) secured Roussillon and part of the Cerdanya (Cerdagne) to the French crown, creating the French province of Roussillon.
The next fifty years saw a concerted effort by Louis XIV both to ensure the political allegiance of his new subjects and to alter their cultural identity. He was successful in the former but failed in the latter. Outside the capital of Perpignan, Roussillon remained distinctly Catalan in outlook and culture until the late nineteenth century, when industrialization began to replace Catalan identity with French.
During the French Revolution, the Ancien Régime province of Roussillon was abolished and a new department, the Department of Pyrénées-Orientales, was created instead. This department corresponds roughly to the old Roussillon, with the addition of the comarca of Fenouillèdes. Pyrénées-Orientales is the name by which this department is officially known in France. The old name of Roussillon did contribute to the French région of Languedoc-Roussillon.

During the reign of Louis XIV it was called then "Roussillon"?
During the French revolution it was then called: "Département des Pyrénées-Orientales"?
And now I see also: "région Languedoc-Roussilion"?
And nowadays you are living in the official département des Pyrénées-Orientales?


MM, I read in the wiki:
"Outside the capital of Perpignan, Roussillon remained distinctly Catalan in outlook and culture until the late nineteenth century, when industrialization began to replace Catalan identity with French"
MM, is it still the case that your region is still distinctly Catalan?


And to come back on your Catalan anthem...
I am not against national or regional anthems, but you know me, if they start to fight against other regions in the name of that anthem and flag, I have always some bad memories about it.
As in the Yugoslavian Civil war. The war between the Serbs and the Croats or vice versa. No one was better than the other. I studied in the time in depth that war. The Serbian and Croat language are nearly the same. Only the first is written in Cyrillic and the other in Latin letters. And after the fight during their nation building they started to seek for more words that were before the same in the two languages, to call them otherwise.


A bit the same as in the Spanish Catalunya...


Here in Belgium, it were different Romance and Germanic languages and of course their they make even more a separate entity of it.


The Belgian one...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9u_Ituu2Q8

I see that the German minority (of some 60,000 Belgians) is placed second after the French language and before the Dutch language one. All to say how cosy our German minority is in Belgium  ...

The Flemish one...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WERBwKzwcHQ
During the 19th century sparked during the myth forming by the battle of the golden spurs.
This battle was one of the first where a peasant's army had won against the cavalery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Golden_Spurs
But the worth was quickly altered by the French in the Battle of Westrozebeke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Roosebeke

The Walloon one...
From the reaction against the Flemish nationalism in the 19th century there emerged a Walloon nationalism in the 20th century...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4cjOXu4AV8
But I have the impression that the Walloon feelings are less extremely expressed than the Flemish ones...but it can be an impression...

I feel first as an inhabitant of the Low Countries (the nowadays Benelux) then as an European (including the UK    ) and then as a citizen of the world...

Kind regards from Paul.

In 2019 PaulR wondered whether opera/musicals were the ultimate combination of performed art. Certainly as a combination of music, poetry, theatre, dance and spectacle, opera is uniquely able to tell a clear story in a compelling way, drawing attention to its message by visual drama and making it memorable through catchy songs and compelling music. Hardly surprising then that operas, while not necessarily in themselves changing history, have often be in the forefront at critical times, commenting on social injustice and egging on the revolutionaries. To mention just three examples: Mozart's 'Marriage of Figaro' was banned in pre-revolutionary France for its dangerous mocking of the then strict social order; Verdi's 'Nabucco', with its setting of exiled Hebrew slaves in Egypt, escaped Austrian censure (probably saved by the Viennese over-riding love good opera) but was it was nevertheless widely seen as a provocative mirror to the plight of Italians suffering under Imperial Hapsburg occupation; and Wagner's Teutonic epics gave deliberate encouragement to German nationalism and reunification, and many years after Wagner's death were, with their subtext of anti-semitism, co-opted in support of the Nazis. Opera has always presented a commentary - often a critical one and not always a palatable one - of current society, politics, religion, social strife and injustice.

Admittedly opera has rarely actually changed history but one such opera, or rather a particular operatic duet in it, did at least trigger important events ... and I'm rather surprised Paul never mentioned it since it effectively launched the Belgian Revolution of 1830.

In August 1830 William I, King of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, was celebrating the 15th year of his reign. However the people of the south of his country in what is now Belgium, were mainly Flemings and Walloons who were traditionally Roman Catholic in contrast to the Protestant-dominated (Dutch Reformed) people of the north. In the south there were high levels of unemployment and industrial unrest, and many regarded King William I's rule as despotic.

Nevertheless as part of the festivities for the King's reign the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels chose (and more surprisingly was given permission) to put on a performance of the opera 'La muette de Portici' by Daniel Auber. This had premiered in Paris in February 1828 and had been favourably received. It was quite innovative in that it included dance and expressive mime (the central figure, La Muette of the title, is a dumb girl); incorporated several very popular songs of the time but arranged for an impressively large orchestra; and it included some spectacular stage effects. The opera had seen its first performance in Brussels in 1829 with William I in attendance who is said to have enjoyed it despite it being dangerously set during the 1647 uprising of Masaniello against Spanish rule in Naples. The 1829 Brussels performance had been followed by a run of several more, until nationalist disturbances occurred during a performance around the time of France's Bastille Day and the opera had been temporarily banned. The ban however was lifted for the 25 August 1830 performance when it was intended to conclude the three-day festival of fireworks, feasts and processions in honour of the king.

However the Belgians were in little mood to celebrate and in addition to widespread protests and demonstrations there were open calls in the press for revolution. However despite the public mood the King's only concession to public safety and the maintenance of order was to cancel the fireworks and procession on the final night, which left the opera as the last public event in the king's honour. There are some disagreements about when in the opera matters escalated however the most commonly cited moment is immediately following the second act duet, "Amour sacré de la patrie" (Sacred love of the Fatherland) whereupon the audience exploded with enthusiastic cheers for the singers and then stormed outside to join demonstators in the nearby streets. Fired up by the crowd from the theatre the mob stormed the City Hall, looted government buildings, occupied factories and destroyed machinery, and fought running street battles against Dutch troops, meanwhile army units recruited from southern districts saw widespread desertions. The Dutch forces were driven from the city and the States-General in Brussels voted in favour of secession before promptly declaring independence.

Here's that revolutionary duet. I don't find it anywhere near as rousing as say 'La Marsaillaise' but it's the patriotic words and the setting within the opera that made it a powerful call to arms. Such is the power of opera.



In the aftermath a National Congress was assembled. King William refrained from future military action and appealed to the Great Powers. The resulting 1830 London Conference of major European powers recognized Belgian independence with Leopold I being installed as "King of the Belgians" in 1831. The Dutch finally accepted the decision of the London conference and Belgian independence in 1839 by signing the Treaty of London.

The Treaty of London (supported by a campaign to support ""gallant little Belgium") was the proximate cause for Britain's involvement in the Great War.

Green George wrote:

The Treaty of London (supported by a campaign to support ""gallant little Belgium") was the proximate cause for Britain's involvement in the Great War.

Which in 1914 the German ambassador to Britain, Heinrich von Bülow, dismissed as a mere "scrap of paper".

However to return to the subject of this thread about music's influence on history ...

The Belgian Revolution was triggered by an operatic performance at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels on 25 August 1830. Coincidentally the words to the Belgian national anthem, 'La Brabançonne', were written by a French actor working at the same theatre when the revolution started and who was killed in the subsequent fighting - Jenneval by his stage name, a Frenchman, whose real name was Alexandre Dechet. A friend of Jenneval/Dechet, François van Campenhout, set the words to music using the tune of a French song called 'L'Air des Lanciers Polonais' (the tune of the Polish Lancers), which had been written by the French poet Eugène de Pradel and whose melody was itself an adaptation of the satirical song, 'L'Air du Magistrat Irréprochable' (the song of the impeccable magistrate) first published in 1811 in Paris as part of a collection of popular drinking songs, aimed unashamedly at French Napoleonic soldiers and military veterans, called 'La Clé du Caveau' (The key to the cellar).

The Brabançonne was first performed, to general acclaim, in September 1830 just a few weeks after the events in the theatre (which had also precipitated its author's death) but it wasn't formally adopted as Belgium's national anthem until 1860 and even then only once the then prime minister, Charles Rogier, had diplomatically edited out lyrics specifically attacking the Dutch Prince of Orange. The original words were in French but were soon translated into an official Flemish version ... and thence more recently into German too, since Belgium has a small officially-recognised German-speaking region.

Meles meles wrote:

Certainly as a combination of music, poetry, theatre, dance and spectacle, opera is uniquely able to tell a clear story in a compelling way, drawing attention to its message by visual drama and making it memorable through catchy songs and compelling music.

There's a cut-and-paste meme currently doing the rounds online which claims that Sir Isaac Newton only ever went to one opera and then left halfway through. It also says that he called poetry 'a kind of ingenious nonsense' and that he dismissed sculpture as 'stone dolls'.

The meme is inaccurate and misleading on all 3 points. With regard to the opera claim – the reverse is in fact the case. The physician and historian William Stukeley (who like Newton was also a Lincolnshireman and a Fellow of the Royal Society) relates in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life (1752) that Newton was ‘fond’ of ‘musick’ and ‘delighted with harmony’. Newton told Stukeley that he considered operas to be 'very fine entertainments; but that "there was too much of a good thing; it was like a surfeit at dinner." Newton said that when he went to the last opera "The first act gave me the greatest pleasure, the second quite tired me: at the third I ran away." In other words, far from having only ever attended 1 opera, Newton was so familiar with the medium and attended so many operas that he was able to vote with his feet when the occasion arose.
 
In describing poetry as ‘ingenious nonsense’ did not mean that Newton was disdainful of poetry. Stukeley tells us that Newton ‘readily enterd himself a member of the literary society … made them a present of books: desirous of incouraging every laudable attempt to promote learning, in any branch.’ In other words in Newton's view, poetry may have been ‘nonsense’ in mathematical terms, but it was still ingenious.

On the dismissing of sculpture as ‘stone dolls’, then the story goes that Newton described Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke (who had an extensive collection of statues) as ‘a lover of stone dolls’. This was more of a comment on Herbert than anything else. The Earl of Pembroke (a leading supporter of William of Orange) had briefly held the office of President of the Royal Society for a few months following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. His election was seen as a political expediency by the Society rather than a reflection on any academic standing which he might have had. By contrast, Newtown himself would later serve as President of the Society for 24 years, a longevity of tenure surpassed only by Sir Joseph Banks who a hundred years later would be elected President of the Royal Society to serve a staggering 42 years. When he was president, Newton commissioned sculptor David Le Marchand to sculpt a bust of himself. So proud was Le Marchand of this commission by such an illustrious patron that when Le Marchand in turn had his own portrait painted, he chose to pose in it holding the bust of Newton.
 


(Portrait of David Le Marchand by Joseph Highmore. It’s not recorded whether or not Highmore subsequently commissioned an artwork of himself holding his painting of Le Marchand holding the bust of Sir Isaac Newton.)
 
Going back to the question of Newton and the opera, then it’s intriguing to try to work out exactly which opera it was he ran away from during its third act.  Stukeley says that the conversation he had with Newton on this took place on 20th February 1720. The opera, therefore, had to have been performed before that date. One candidate is George Frederick Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula starring the Neapolitan castrato Nicolini. The opera enjoyed a successful run in London between 1715-17. The suggestion is that the lifelong bachelor Newton found the music of Handel (also a lifelong bachelor) too moving and, therefore, perhaps too close to the bone.

If this was the opera, then it’s possible that having fled the theatre in 1717 Newton then threw himself into his work that autumn producing a seminal report for the Treasury in his role as Master of the Royal Mint. This report effectively saw Great Britain move from the Silver standard to the Gold standard that year. This later helped ameliorate the worst financial consequences for the Treasury when the South Sea Bubble burst 3 years later which event nevertheless saw Newton himself lose heavily.

Following this, Newton also found time for a third edition of his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. This third edition of the work, published just before his death, included a new addition to the Regulae Philosphandi which had appeared as appendages to the second edition published in 1713. That edition had given 3 ‘rules of philosophy’ believed to be written by Newton in response to criticism of his perceived lack of reasoning in the first edition. They effectively amount to simple disclaimer which effectively neutralised some of his critics. The fourth Regula, however, which appeared in the 1726 third edition stated that:

In philosophia experimentali, propositiones ex phaenomenis per inductionem collectae, non obstantibus contrariis hypothesibus, pro veris aut accurate aut quamproxime haberi debent, donec alia occurrerint phaenomena, per qua aut accuartiores reddantur aut exceptionibus obnoxiae.

In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.
 
This can be taken as a further disclaimer but is also a possible prediction of quantum field theory which would not be developed in physics for another 300 years.



(Sento la gioia from the Third Act of Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula. Is this the music which inadvertently led to the British Empire joining the Gold standard for the first time and also to Sir Isaac Newton predicting the advent of quantum theory?)

Than you for that aria. The splendid  gems that you and MM find and bring here always enrich my day - nay, my life. Thank you again, P.

If Handel's 'Amadigi di Gaula' was indeed the opera that Newton walked out of halfway through, then maybe it wasn't the music he disliked so much as the the ludicrous premise of the story or its unusual presentation. Handel's opera, 'Amadigi di Gaula', is the story of a mythical King of Gaul who falls in love with and eventually marries Oriana the daughter of the King of England, albeit that their way to an eventual happy union is repeatedly thwarted by the increasingly preposterous machinations of an evil gender-fluid scorcerer/sorceress who wants Amadigi for themself. It is perhaps rather like Mozart's 'Magic Flute': overall it's an unbelievably ridiculous fantasy, yet because it was set to brilliant music it still managed to get the all-important bums on seats. 

Or was it the unusual singing that put Newton off? For its time 'Amadigi di Gaula' had an unusually small and very limited vocal cast. There are just five principal roles, and four of these were originally intended to be sung by women with only the solo lead male - Amadigi himself, who somewhat bizarrely for the role of the macho hero is sung by a castrato - being the only male voice. There was also no sung chorus, the 'continuo' musical backing being supplied throughout by the orchestra alone and as written all the singing throughout the entire opera was in the upper registers with no voice lower than a female contralto. Nevertheless the music is instrumentally and structurally very rich and was described at the time as being especially "colourful".

Which description leads neatly onto another aspect of Newton's appreciation, or otherwise, of music.

In his book "On Opticks" (first published 1704) in which Newton detailed his experiments in using glass prisms to 'split' a ray of light and thus show that white sunlight was made up of a spectrum of colours, he drew a clear parallel between light and musical pitch by metaphoricallly equating the colours of the rainbow with the notes in a musical octave. In this he was drawing on very ancient philosophical ideas, in particular those of the ancient Greek Sophists who held that the fundamental structure of the universe was manifest numerically within 'natural' forms in such diverse fields as geometry, astronomy and music. Until medieval times rainbows were generally held to be made up of five discrete colours (usually red, yellow, green, blue and violet, although opinions varied and even sometimes over the order in which these colours occurred); there were five known planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) which from the teachings of Pythagoras were each believed to have their unique celestial musical tone; and the musical octave was divided into five 'natural' notes, ie the pentatonic scale. Regarding Newton's interest in all this it should be remembered that - for all his undoubted brilliance as a practical scientist and mathematician - he was also a keen disciple of alchemy, numerology, astrology and ancient Hermetic metaphysics.

The 'natural' pentatonic musical scale has underpinned the music of nearly all cultures since deepest antiquity. Nevertheless although it had intuitively been known since the very beginings of music-making, it is Pythagoras who is generally credited with first realising that mathematically the pitch of a musical note is in inverse proportion to the length of the string, or length of pipe, that produces it, and that according the intervals between what are almost universally seen as harmonious couples of pitch are based on simple numerical ratios: 2:1 (the octave), 3:2 (the perfect fifth), 4:3 (the perfect fourth), 5:4 (the major third) etc. And further that if, for example, one simultaneously plays the two octaves plus the third and the fifth, it produces an agreeable harmonious sound (the dominant major chord in my specific example). The full octave of the five-note pentatonic scale is represented by all the black notes on a piano keyboard. The fuller heptatonic scale is a more recent (albeit still very old) construction and it is represented by playing all the white notes on a piano keyboard, or maybe think of Julie Andrews and those nauseating Von Trapp kids singing Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Te ... and so back to Do.

Anyway having successfully demonstrated that white sunlight was actually composed of a range of coloured light, for a metaphor Newton initially followed the Greek sophishists and proposed that the spectrum was made up of five discrete colours: red, yellow, green, blue and violet. However he soon modified this idea by adding two more colours - orange and indigo - so that in his words, the colours would be "divided after the manner of a Musical Chord", ie the seven-note, heptatonic scale used in most western music since at least the renaissance. Newton admitted that the division of colours was largely subjective and that he himself actually had trouble distinguishing between colours. Indeed what he called blue would now be termed cyan, while his indigo was closer to what would now be called blue. He also fully understood that the spectrum comprised a continuum from one end to the other and that the colours were not separate unifom bands of colour but rather they merged seamlessly one into the other (as indeed can a musical note be made to glide from one tone to the next). Furthermore although Newton did not realise it, the spectrum of visible light is just a very narrow band within the full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation which runs from gamma radiation, through X-rays, ultra-violet light, the visible spectrum, infra-red, micro-waves and so on to radio waves (and potentially even further).

Musical notes are the result of vibrations produced in the taut string of a guitar, harp or violin, or in the air column of a flute, oboe or trumpet, and so interestingly, by Newton equating light with musical pitch (albeit only metaphorically) it might be taken to suggest that he thought light behaved as a vibrating wave, as indeed had already been proposed by Newton's contemporary Christiaan Huygens. Newton however was firmly of the opinion that light was 'corpuscular' in nature and so composed of a stream of very small particles. In this he was (largely) wrong: light very definitely does have measurable wavelength, amplitude and a constant velocity (depending on the media it is propagated in) and often behaves exactly as a wave would, such as in how it can be diffracted and produce interference patterns. Other phenomena however, such as the photo-voltaic effect and indeed how it is refracted through a glass prism, are often more easily explained if light is thought of as composed of discrete, massless particles (photons). The wave-particle duality of light can in part be mathematically reconciled using quantum mechanics and modern atomic theory, and accordingly today's ideas bear only a minor resemblance to Newton's understanding of light. Nevertheless photons of light are still often envisaged as somehow being like 'bundles of vibration', which on a basic level is perhaps not that far from how Newton thought of light being akin to music.