Today, we dive into the depths of Canadian identity through the lens of an anthem. This episode takes us on a remarkable journey exploring not only geography but also a rich cultural tapestry that defines this vast nation. We’ll unpack the fascinating history behind the anthem, from its poetic origins on through its evolution into the celebrated symbol of national pride it is today. Along the way, we'll touch on the complexities of dual language representation in a country that embraces both English and French, revealing how the sentiments expressed differ yet resonate deeply with the Canadian spirit. So, join us as we blend history, music, and a sprinkle of supposedly witty banter to uncover the story of "O Canada" and what it truly means to stand on guard for this great land.

1. https://www.avenuecalgary.com/city-life/how-gps-put-calgary-on-the-map/
2. http://britannica.com/place/Canada
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5. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/endemic-species-1.5597186#:~:text=They%20include%20mammals%20such%20as%20the%20eastern,longnose%20dace%2C%20Atlantic%20whitefish%20and%20Vancouver%20lamprey.
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13. http://www.solon.org/Constitutions/Canada/English/PreConfederation/qa_1774.html
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17. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/o-canada
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19. https://parl.canadiana.ca/view/oop.debates_HOC2602_11/458
20. https://archive.org/details/colombosalltimeg0000unse
21. https://web2.gov.mb.ca/laws/statutes/1993/c04393e.php
22. https://thewalrus.ca/the-strange-history-of-o-canada/
23. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/N-2/page-1.html
24. https://web.archive.org/web/20100620010135/http://americanhumanist.org/hnn/archives/?id=242&article=7
25. https://archive.org/details/destiniescanadia0000fran_c5a2
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27. https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/calixa-lavallee
28. https://web.archive.org/web/20090129084708/http://www.pch.gc.ca/pgm/ceem-cced/symbl/anthem-fra.cfm
29. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/augustin-lavallee-emc
30. https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/thesescanada/vol1/QMM/TC-QMM-53737.pdf
31. https://200.mcgill.ca/history/the-man-who-wrote-o-canada/
32. https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Lavall%C3%A9e,_Calixa
33. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/routhier_adolphe_basile_14E.html
34. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Our_Song/JcMNCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT11&printsec=frontcover
35. https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sir-adolphe-basile-routhier

Foreign.

Hello and welcome to the Anthems Podcast. I'm Patrick and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation.

Today we are going 7,040km or 4,376 miles and it's almost possible to drive this one, although the trip is much longer that way and the Darien Gap remains as a pretty effective wall against car traffic. But once you get into Panama, it's smooth 92 hours of driving, assuming similar traffic to right now.

So when Calgary based Nortek Systems bought the first commercially available receiver, it weighed about a thousand pounds. Note that now it is a fingernail sized chip in your cell phone. They were mapping oil fields with it.

But it also means that if you know where Calgary is, you know that that I'm about to tell you about Canada, officially known as Canada. Today we are headed to the country with the longest coastline on the planet at over 243,000 kilometers.

And they have around 60% of the lakes in the world. It's more than 2 million and it's more than all of the other countries combined. We're here because my kids said I should do it next. Why?

For the same reason I cited when I covered Russia. It's very large and they walk past my map a lot. I'm coming into this one with a large amount of incidental and superficial knowledge about Canada.

It and my country do share the longest land border and our pop culture situation blends together a little bit. There are a surprising number of things that are more North American than Canadian or United States based stuff.

Maybe it's a consequence of both countries being large English speaking former British colonies that are right next to each other. That said, now that I've learned a bunch about Canada, it seems way less like my country than it felt before.

Also, yes, we are again wading into an episode that is part of the downfall of colonialism. It's amazing and sad that it's still happening, but the fact that it is happening at all is a good reason for me to tell you about, oh Canada.

Almost certainly the Canadian food that most people know of is poutine, but the delicious combination of fried potatoes, gravy and cheese curds is not really what I'm into Today, the reading for this episode has taught me that my favorite Canadian food is actually Hawaiian pizza. It was invented by a Greek immigrant that was inspired by cooking at a Chinese restaurant in Ontario.

It's layers of interesting and maybe this song will be too Enjoy.

O Canada, Our home and native land True patriot love in all of us. Come back Sa. Glorious entry. O Canada, we stand on guard for thee O Canada Please stand on God O. For.

My initial reaction is enjoyment because this is at the very least an excellent performance done by some serious professionals. Stick around until the end of the show to hear who they are.

This song is another one that just sounds like an anthem written in that stately, not quite a march that many western countries have for their songs. It probably helps that I hear this one almost as often as the Star Spangled Banner because again, Canada is close.

Spangly stars are not what I want to see when I look up in the sky though. Despite enjoying them, what I'm most interested in is the Aurora Borealis, or Northern lights.

You've likely seen pictures of them if you are like me and have not gotten far enough north or lucky enough in the south to see them where you live. I'm not really a bucket list kind of guy, but I do want to see those swirling visions of pink, purple and green in the sky because they're amazing.

This show is the result of some seriously cool physics because they're disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field caused by coronal mass ejections, which is the stuff that the sun spits out with resultant increases in the solar wind that cause magnetosphere plasma to go through excitation cycles. It really lights up my inner physics nerd.

So where do we have to go to get a reliable view of this particularly stunning feature of the natural world? Like I said, Canada is very large, second largest country. In fact, unless you subtract the lakes and then it drops to fourth place.

They have something like 6 to 7% of all the available land on Earth, so it should not be hard to pin down. I think we have to assume that we know where the continents are, because we have to assume something.

So find North America and most of the northern portion of the continent is Canada, excepting the Alaskan Peninsula, which is the US State of Alaska, and the island country of Greenland that sits up in the northeast corner. The U.S. and Greenland are the only land border countries with a maritime boundary with France's St. Pierre Island.

The nearly 42 million people living there, in hugely varying population densities, enjoy a combination of urban areas and large swaths of essentially untouched land, although so much of the northern country is covered in snow and permafrost.

Even so, it still surprised me to learn that Canada has some serious biodiversity issues, with more than 800 of its 80,000 named and studied species at risk of extinction.

For the geology diversion today, I wanted to tell you about the Acasta gneiss because it contains the oldest rocks that we know about in a billion years of history, but the Canadian Boreal Forest is way cooler, so we're going to talk about that. It's the largest untouched patch of woods in the world. I don't know exactly how large it is in Canada.

Measurements are actually sort of spotty on that.

But the portion of it that's in that country constitutes about a third of the boreal forest in the world and can be thought of as a roughly 620 mile buffer in between the tundra and the rest of Canada. It's a mostly coniferous forest that exists north of the 50th parallel and is also called the snow forest in Canada.

Some 1.2 million square miles of the place is basically completely untouched by roads or industrial development of any kind of that does not mean no one lives there, and about 13% of the country's population does reside in the boreal region.

I'd be envious if I was not aware of winter existing, which leads me to a little bit of an aside before we get into the timeline for the episode, because Most of the 13% that live in the forest are indigenous people, meaning the people that lived there before Europeans came and essentially stole the potential history of developing nations.

Again, I do understand that my very existence depends on that happening, but also I don't get to talk about it a lot here because it happens before the heavy footsteps of colonialism were felt.

And I'm talking about anthems, so, you know, we generally get them when countries become fully independent or seeking to modernize or westernize or something. But all of those humans did exist and some of them had songs for their nations.

And someday I hope to have the time and the capability to tell you those song stories too. For now, we are restricted by the fact that I can only stretch the timeline of a particular anthem back so far.

In this case, we are Going to start the story of O Canada back with the first Europeans to land in what is now Canada. That is, if you don't count the Viking age.

And we can't bring the Vikings into this because that is too much tangent potential for me to handle and way too far back for it to make sense for the show. But they were the first people from the European continent to get to North America.

The details of his trips and other early European trips are not well recorded, but I do know that they were looking for the Northwest Passage, which you should look up. It's a real interesting story all by itself. Various European explorers from England to Spain to Portugal, made claims there.

This is a less terrible than the US relationship spilled out from the Canadian colonization with the people already there, but it's still terrible, mostly because of the inherent racism and assuming non European meant savage, which shouldn't be a big surprise to anybody listening to this moving on.

We've got a pretty detailed record here that I can get wrapped up in, but that's really going to mean that I'm leaping forward fairly liberally because this could be hours of narrative otherwise. Initially, that means a jump of about a century.

By then, the new French were well into building a presence on the river, but were having a stall in new settlers. So by the middle of the 18th century, the English and Scottish were 10 to 1 ahead in North American population.

This time, the French were forced to forfeit everything they had in North America, except for some fishing rights and the islands of Saint Pierre and Miguellon. The islands do not have a regional anthem of any formal or informal kind, so you may never hear me mention them again.

The British government gave the former French living there a surprising level of not punishment, and they were allowed to be Catholic and everything, which is actually sort of a big deal for a newly British acquisition. They also continued along with the not entirely terrible tradition in Canada of almost actually respecting the indigenous population.

Of course there is an enormous amount of context and narrative involved in that statement, and I need an entire research podcast to understand and relate that to you. But then the American Revolution happened and honestly, it had substantially less of an effect on Canada than it had the potential to.

We probably aren't going to hear about this on my show again, or we might. I actually have no idea.

And for Canadian purposes it means mostly nothing apart from enhancing the British appetite for cracking down on republicanism in the remaining colonies there.

Imagine that when Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers and he was even more staunchly conservative, sort of mean, and not mostly confined to political thought. So slightly different.

A year after losing election number two, he was appointed as a district judge in the Quebec Superior Court as he wrote his first anti liberal book under his pen name Francois Bonami.

He ruled with the clergy and was reversed at the Supreme Court level. Look up the details on your own court cases are complicated and confuse me.

Unfortunately, that many joined a minstrel troupe out of Rhode island and toward the US if you are not aware, minstreling is the first uniquely American art form and it is offensively racist enough that wearing blackface is a defining feature. And yes, no matter what anybody tells you, it is born entirely out of racism. Apologists for this stuff do exist.

Anyway, our composer won an instrumental competition in New Orleans and embarked on a South American violin tour. But it couldn't have been a long one because a couple years later he was in Baltimore, Maryland and then back in Rhode Island a year after that.

He returned to Quebec the next year and gave multi instrumental concerts in Montreal and he taught for some time.

He returned to Montreal and his patron paid for a trip to Paris to learn more piano and contribute to the study of the conservatory there. Little else is known of the rest of that trip.

Upon returning to Montreal, he opened a studio and gave performances leading to him being revered as a national glory of Quebec.

He would have gone on to have an interesting and even more widely influential musical life, but he was laid low by tuberculosis and he died at 48 in Dorchester. Another guy that died too young for my comfort because it's pretty close to where I am.

He was reinterred in Montreal 42 years later and his legacy in Canadian music continues to this day.

When Robert was an infant, but before his siblings, William Alexander Weir and Elizabeth Weir McLaughlin were born, he studied at the McGill Normal School, which is an antiquated term for a school to teach teachers. I have no idea why they call it that. And at just 19, he was appointed a principal for a large public school in Montreal, which is wild.

I did not read about it, and Robert could not have done that for very long because he died the same year, on August 20, leaving a legacy of jurisprudence and poetry that is well remembered in Canada.

To rejoin the timeline, we are going to leap ahead about 40 years from where the pin shall stay, presumably holding the north and south of Canada together. I am going to stay on topic, remember the song.

In it, Ruthie Air, the original poet, states that the composition was done first and the lyrics were written afterwards so that they had a suitable metrical and rhyme for the music.

In yet another episode of Quickly written and Patriotic Lyrics, Ruthie claims to have heard Lavalier perform the piece and then wrote all four verses for the following evening.

It was also fairly immediately translated into English a bunch of times, mostly pseudo translations. This is what really got it out and amongst the people writ large in Canada.

Musically speaking, this one seems quite formal in comparison to a lot of the stuff we hear on this show. It is a 28 bar march in common time, and it was originally composed as a mustoso e risoluto.

The last bit is a musical direction in Italian, meaning majestic and resolute. It indicates that the piece should be played with a palpable sense of grandeur and determination, which is quite fitting for an anthem.

Some sources claim the piece was originally in G major, and others claim F major, but they do agree that it was for a piano and four voices.

If I want to sound like I know what I'm talking about, or at least I have read things written by people who do, we can say that this is a late romantic diatonic harmony that has our old friend the 145 all over it with an occasional secondary dominant.

I have to read a bit to clarify exactly what that is, but it's a very I think it's a variation on the 5 chord that lets it resolve to something other than the one chord, which builds tension into the song.

This is close to a stepwise piece with clear four bar phrasing and a strong cadence, especially towards the end it it's also been firmly stuck in my head for a couple of weeks.

Lyrically speaking, we've got what you might call a sticky wicket because there are two official languages in Canada and that led to them having two official versions of O Canada. It was originally written in French by Ruthair, and the most popular English version was written by Weir, which went on to become the official one.

Importantly, though, Weir did not just translate and interpret Ruthair's original work. They have similar but definitely not the same sentiments. And honestly, they're really just two completely different poems.

To complicate things even further, they both get roughly equal usage that depends on the audience.

And on top of that, the one I played at the beginning of the show is actually a bilingual version that incorporates elements of both of them, but is played less commonly than either English or French version. But I wanted you to hear some of both because they're both good poems. So what is a national Anthem podcaster to do?

However, I'm going to break from my usual practice of reading the entire thing, including the parts that don't get sung at official events, and just read the stuff that gets sung at official events. This time is a surprisingly difficult decision for me.

But comparing, contrasting, and talking about two entire four verse poems and having it be coherent for a listening audience in an audio medium will run long, and it's something that's going to feel clunky to me. I also don't think it's necessary.

Both of these official versions are nine lines with the last line repeating in performances and the last two lines constituting the refrain in the full four verse poem.

First, the translation of the original French O Canada, land of our ancestors, glorious deeds circle your brow, for your arm knows how to wield the sword, your arm knows how to carry the cross. Your history is an epic of brilliant deeds, and your valor, steeped in faith, Will protect our home and our rights.

Will protect our home and our rights.

The English version O Canada, our home and native land True patriot love in all of us command with glowing hearts we see thee rise, the true north strong and free from far and wide O Canada, we stand on guard for thee God keep our land glorious and free O Canada, we stand on guard for thee O Canada, we stand on guard for thee Again, what does ring true of these songs is that from a lyrical perspective, they are actually quite different, especially since we know that French and English translate pretty cleanly in meeting, if not cadence, the anthem opens with an identical insipid those are the first few lyrics of a song and very similarly themed second line that both refer to Canada being the land that the people come from. It immediately checks some boxes for me, because I think that anthems should be songs of the country and of the people.

Then the general meaning and the intention of the pieces diverge into two different but appropriately phrased tones. The English version calls for the people to love the country patriotically, whereas the original reminds us of the glorious past deeds of the nation.

Similar ish, I guess, but Routier definitely has more of a formal sounding voice than we're in his writing.

Maybe it has something to do with the former ascribing to conservative ideals and the latter to liberal ones, but that might just be my thoughts about the modern political climate in my own country leaking in because they were also written nearly 30 years apart by similarly aged men, and that is definitely long enough to matter.

The next two lines are quite different in sentiment, with Ruthier pinning the glories of the country on martial prowess and the ability to bear a burden, while Weir was writing in a very different Canada and certainly for a different audience. So he writes about a free country that is indeed strong, but not Marshall so much as passionate and enthusiastic with its people.

The English version goes on to call for people from all over the country and those that came from all over the world to stand vigilant for the nation. So the writing is not militant, but not entirely devoid of martial tone. The French version continues to extol the virtues of the nation's history.

Now, I know I said that the last two lines were refrain, but that's really only true for Weir's writing, because Routhier uses the same form and general theme along with the repeated last line, but they are different in each verse of the poem. Between the two, though, here is where I think they most align in sentiment, because this is where Weir's writing is the most overtly religious.

There are undertones of that throughout the entire four verses, because as far as I know, he was a religious man. At least I read nothing to indicate otherwise, and it tracks for the time too.

Mostly, though, the English Anthem contains anthem stuff praising the land, the people, the values, and pledging loving protection for all of it.

But Ruthie Air, though he wrote far more devoutly than his later counterpart, with the formerly religious nature from far more ingrained in the original O Canada in terms of overall poetic real estate, this comes at the expense of talking about the country and the people. Not entirely though, because both men do so to good effect and manage a sound piece of writing that is very Canadian.

It's just that we've got to remember that context matters for these things, matters so much in an anthem, and that Canada is a big diverse country, so being Canadian means lots of different stuff. It makes it make sense that two similarly sentimental but different in tone songs that share a tune can both be the right one for their country.

This was a pretty informative anthem to read about because we ended up in a country with a fairly detailed and more importantly, largely accessible to me, historical record regarding the specific things that I'm trying to learn about. And with that, we've reached a good moment for me to let you know it's time for the credits.

The writing, recording and production for the show are done by me and I wrote and record the theme music and used it with my permission. Unless otherwise noted, the anthems I play are free to play.

I have reached out to the management team for the tenors, but as of this writing I have not heard anything back from them. My sources are in the show notes and they live@anthemspodcast.com I can be found on Facebook as the Anthems podcast.

I'll post about the show and the occasional anthem news. But mostly I'm asking you to help me by using the hashtag anthemspod.

Because the advertising budget is tiny, it would be cool if you shared this content and maybe it will lead to Canada providing some progress in reducing income inequality because the top 22% of earners control 70% of the economy there Hardly an efficient and ethical way to allocate resources, but it is far worse in other places.

Maybe you take walks around the office building during lunch and have also been gifted a very loud bluetooth speaker with which you are playing this very episode. This thus inspiring people to talk about national anthem facts.

But if even if you just listen to another one, I am still brimming with appreciation and enthusiasm for you to hear more. Until next time, please note that none of the writing for the show is done with generative AI. It's all my fault folks. Sam.