The Moment of National Song

National songs come into being long before the nation. First sounded through oral tradition, they gather diverse melodies and lyrics, to which multiple identities coalesce, together with the metaphorical power of collectively representing the nation in song. Along its journey to represent a modern political collective national song relies on the malleability of song itself, not just to undergo change but also to effect change. Song lyrics initially address the local, relying on textual and melodic dialect, but in the course of transmission lyrics become standardized as literary forms, at successive stages elevating local meaning to the symbolic level of the nation. It is the end of the sonic journey that I call the “moment of national song” in this chapter. I take as my case study the national anthem of Israel, “HaTikva” (Hope), which circulated widely and in various contexts long before it was adapted by early Zionists at the beginning of the twentieth century and then as the national anthem at the time of Israeli statehood in 1948. Accompanying the empirical study of “HaTikva” are theoretical sections in which I establish the conditions of song prior to the moment of national song. Such conditions, I argue, characterize the transformations that accompany music as it comes to represent the nation and nationalism.