16/04/25    

Musicians Initiative Orchestra

Conducted by Alvin Arumugam

Victoria Concert Hall
Singapore

Thus Dreamt the Anthems reflects on the cyclical, fragile, and often paradoxical nature of social change. It does so through the quotation and transformation of well-known social anthems and protest songs from across the globe. As cultural artefacts, these songs carry shifting symbolic meanings that evolve alongside the societies that inherit them. Originally conceived as calls for justice, resistance, or collective hope, they are gradually reinterpreted, repurposed, or reclaimed by successive movements and generations, accumulating layers of meaning as they are displaced in time.

The piece incorporates motifs from five iconic social anthems: We Shall Overcome, Bella Ciao, La Marseillaise, This Land Is Your Land, and El pueblo unido jamás será vencido (The People United Will Never Be Defeated). These songs were chosen because, while some have been co-opted as rallying cries for new movements, others have been used by groups against those who originally created them, and some have been drained of their revolutionary force, repackaged as feel-good background music. This shift highlights the gap between their original calls for change and their contemporary commodification, adapting them into products of a non-confrontational mainstream culture. This process of decontextualisation reshapes our collective memory of struggle and resistance.

In this work, these anthems do not appear as triumphant, static symbols, but as dreamlike echoes—suspended in a state of flux, with their identities perpetually in transition. The structure of the piece mirrors this ever-shifting quality, with motifs that are fragmented and reassembled throughout the work, always present, yet never fully realised.