16/04/25    

Musicians Initiative Orchestra

Conducted by Alvin Arumugam

Victoria Concert Hall
Singapore

Thus Dreamt the Anthems contemplates the cyclical, fragile, and often paradoxical nature of social change and progress, symbolised by social anthems and protest songs. The piece explores the idea that history is not a linear progression but rather an endless repetition of events, where the struggles and triumphs of one generation are inevitably revisited, redefined, and sometimes lost by the next.

 

At the heart of this composition is the notion that social anthems, as cultural artefacts, carry the symbolic weight of this continuous cycle. Originally conceived as calls for justice, resistance, or hope, they can become tools of nostalgia—reinterpreted, repurposed, or even reclaimed by different movements and generations as they are recontextualised over 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 Thus Dreamt the Anthems, 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.

 

If history repeats, as Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence suggests, and if these anthems exist in a dreamlike state—haunting yet incomplete—what does that say about the struggles they once embodied? Are they echoes of past fights, or unfinished calls to action?