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My name’s Philip Sheppard and I am a composer and a cellist. And for the 2012 Olympics it
has been my job to rearrange all of the national anthems of the world for the medal ceremonies.
In all there were 205 countries that I had to rewrite the anthems for. They are designed
to work for when the flag is raised for the Gold medal winner. And you’ve got a window
of 60 to 90 seconds. Now of course music doesn’t really work in the same way as cutting bits
of fabric. You know things have to resolve, they have come to a certain accord. So there’s
obviously kind of a massive range of styles that you are dealing with. The cliché is
that a national anthem is sort of a brass band and it’s a march. Actually there was
a surprising number of anthems which are little waltzes or which are songs.
[That’s the Bhutanese national anthem there.] I mean you’ve got maybe an anthem like Uganda’s
which is 16 seconds long. And so you have to build a set of variations to make it last
longer. Whereas Uruguay is massive. It’s 6 minutes 50. So it’s a case of deciding
what to leave out without offending anybody at all.
So this is the UK anthem. And it is slightly different. We had Jonathon Edwards the triple
jumper come in and play that note there on the symbols. Gold medal cymbal crash there!
There is quite an arduous process of getting each anthem approved. Which luckily my job
sort of stops at that point in as much as I kind send it off and its then dealt with
by what can only be described as a diplomatic team I suppose. If there are changes that
need to be made then it’s great I normally know exactly what needs to be done. Quite
often an anthem has changed maybe fundamentally from when we recorded it to when it’s actually
being used in the Games. And that’s been the case with a few of them. We’ve actually
had to re-write them as new pieces of music. Music has always been a fundamental part of
the Olympic Games, particularly in the modern Olympics, the arts in the whole have actually
run as a parallel festival and a parallel competition actually since the modern Olympics
were introduced. And I think that’s changed in as much as now it’s a celebration of
music, art, theatre, film everything. Whereas I think particularly in the early 20th century
it was actually a major competition. For instance for composers- had I been around then I would
have been frantically composing a symphony to enter for an Olympic medal. Which seems
quite extraordinary. But I suppose at the same time we were awarding medals here in
the first London Olympics for sheep shearing, jumping through hoops and rolling barrels.
So you know- it’s evolved. And I think music rightly is not a competitive venture. These
days I think music is something that’s a completely open field. And my working day
will involve say working with a classical orchestra, working with a dance act. I write
with a group called Uncle, I’ve been writing with the Chemical Brothers... but at the same
time I’m also working with rock musicians too. I mean for me that’s just normal because
it is just music. And we are all using the same twelve notes anyway.