Another Song for Europe

Music, Taste, and Values in the Eurovision Song Contest

Ivan Raykoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000245660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Eurovision Song Contest is famous for its camp spectacles and political intrigues, but what about its actual music? With more than 1, 500 songs in over 50 languages and a wide range of musical styles since it began in 1956, Eurovision features the most musically and linguistically diverse song repertoire in history.

Listening closely to its classic fan favorites but also to songs that scored low because they were too different or too far ahead of their time, this book delves into the musical tastes and cultural values the contest engages through its international reach and popular appeal. Chapters discuss the iconic fanfare that introduces the broadcast, the supposed formulas for composing successful contest entries, how composers balance aspects of sameness and difference in their songs, and the tension between national genres of European popular music and musical trends beyond the nation's borders, especially the American influences on a show that is supposed to celebrate an idealized pan-European identity. The book also explores how audiences interact with the contest through musicking experiences that bring people together to celebrate its sounds and spectacles. What can seem like a silly song-and-dance show offers valuable insights into the bonds between popular music and cosmopolitan values for its many followers around the world.

From dance parties to flashmobs, parodies to plagiarisms, and orchestras to artificial intelligence, Another Song for Europe will be of particular interest to Eurovision fans, critics, and scholars of popular music, popular culture, ethnomusicology, and European studies.

1Prelude

The anticipation builds most in the minute just before 21:00 Central European Time, the official starting time of the Eurovision Song Contest. Inside the host city arena, where thousands of fans are gathered for the semi-finals or grand final of the contest, the audience excitedly counts down the final seconds to the top of the hour as they await the iconic visual logo and musical fanfare of the European Broadcasting Union’s Eurovision television network. The logo and music signal that the show is now going live to millions of television and online viewers across the European continent and around the world. An enthusiastic cheer erupts from the audience at this moment; in the hall one can feel an almost electrifying thrill in being at the center of a global connectivity. These 15 seconds of music that announce each Eurovision broadcast create an evocative and unifying moment replete with a rich symbolism. As Johan Fornäs suggests, this melody evokes “some kind of pleasure and desire, at least in a general sense of musical luster,” and for some listeners it provokes “sublime shivers of enjoyment.”¹ What does this music mean in terms of the history and underlying values of the Eurovision Song Contest, the world’s largest and longest-running televised popular music show?

The Eurovision fanfare, or network “ident,” is the first eight measures of the Marche en rondeau prelude to the grand motet Te Deum in D major, H. 146, by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704). Charpentier was a prolific French Baroque composer during the reign of Louis XIV, the great “Sun King” of Versailles. This Te Deum dating from the end of the seventeenth century is scored for a small orchestra of violins, violas, flutes, oboes, trumpets, basso continuo with organ, and timpani. The music recalls aristocracy and royal ceremony with its resplendent ancien régime aura; it also connotes religion, specifically Christianity and Roman Catholicism, considering the work’s title and its sacred text “Te deum, laudamus” (O God, we praise Thee). This work may have been composed in honor of the French victory at the Battle of Steinkirk in August 1692, a battle in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) that Louis XIV fought against the Holy Roman Empire in Europe and also in colonial North America, where it is called King William’s War or the first of the French and Indian Wars. The composer himself considered the key of D major to be “joyous and very warlike” (joyeux et très guerrier).²

With these connotations of royalty, religion, and militarism, this famous fanfare lends a historicizing high-culture patina and an official-sounding pomp to a competition that actually intends to celebrate the uniquely twentieth-century, modern, postwar, and secular ideals of a peaceful pan-European cooperation and a global cosmopolitanism. Dafni Tragaki questions how this music reflecting the political and religious agendas of “a Europe of multiple exclusions” can stand for the ostensibly more inclusive values of the modern Eurovision project. “How is the liberal Europe that is purportedly advocating religious freedom today represented in the sounds of a Christian (Catholic) hymn?” she asks, and “how is the ecumenical, multicultural, ‘new Europe’ of democracy, liberties and civility embodied in the sounds of the authoritarian, colonial past?”³ One answer is that this music has come to represent a careful balance of conflict and cooperation in an annual ritual of pan-European belonging.⁴ Perhaps this ideal was expressed when host Åse Kleveland sang words to this melody to introduce the contest in Bergen, Norway, in 1986 (Fig. 1.1); indeed, Europe might consider itself to be “the best” at striking this balance, with the song contest a prime example of this ideal.

Figure 1.1Lyrics added to the Eurovision fanfare to introduce the 1986 song contest.

Eurovision’s fanfare could evoke Europe’s long history, but it also represents the history of the contest itself, which was established over six decades ago in 1956. For Eurovision fans this music might trigger memories and feelings associated with watching the show over the years with family at home, with friends at parties, or in various cities across Europe. Philip Bohlman discusses the “chronotopes”— the cycles of time and place—that Eurovision enacts, from a song’s internal structures of musical time to the contest’s external time structures and temporal contexts. The fanfare’s historical heft enacts the quality of “monumental time,” situating the music within hierarchies of power and rituals of memorialization (such as Catholicism, absolute monarchy and aristocracy, European colonial expansion, as well as the founding of the Eurovision Song Contest during the twentieth-century Cold War), while its deployment at the beginning of each year’s broadcast enacts the sense of “ritual time.” “Eurovision ritual time unfolds locally in counterpoint with the EBU technoculture rituals that unfold transnationally,” Bohlman explains, “and the communities that calibrate their lives with it make selective use of Eurovision song practices to draw their communities together.”⁵

The Eurovision fanfare begins the broadcast at 21:00 CET no matter where the contest is hosted. (In 2012, when Eurovision was held in Baku, Azerbaijan, the show started at midnight.) This music facilitates a communal experience of the present moment through its real-time liveness, thus it encourages a feeling of collective bonding for viewers across the continent and around the world. But to be more precise, the fanfare that opens every Eurovision broadcast is a prerecorded signal for a punctual switch into mediatized liveness. In Philip Auslander’s definition, the “mediatized” event involves the transmission of a live performance—via television, for example—as the ideal and defining experience of the event; “the live event exists at least as much to serve as the basis for a mediatized representation as to be an end in itself.”⁶ With elaborate technological systems that control every aspect of the broadcast from sound levels to camera angles, the song contest is designed for viewing and listening on television and computer screens; indeed, the broadcast, not the live stage show in the contest arena, offers the optimal sights and sounds of the show transmitted to an audience spread far and wide. Each year the contest producers find creative ways to transport viewers from the world “outside” where they watch the show into the more intimate “inside” world of the auditorium or arena, the temporary and televisual spectacle of the stage where the singers perform.

The Eurovision fanfare also delineates the geographical location of this event, which is Europe broadly conceived. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), an organization of national public service broadcasters founded in 1950, established the Eurovision television network in 1954 as a way to exchange shared programming. The EBU includes nations in the European Broadcasting Area, which is bounded geographically to the south by latitude 30° N (across North Africa) and to the east by longitude 40° (east of Moscow), and it extends even further to the southeast to include Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Syria, and Iraq. In 2007 the European Broadcasting Area was expanded to include Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, countries not usually considered to be part of the European continent. This broad geographical compass reflects the historical spread of media technologies from telegraphs to radio and television, as well as political histories such as the legacy of French colonialism in North Africa and British involvement in the Middle East.⁷ Since 2015 Eurovision has expanded further to include distant Australia as a participant as well; there fans can watch the live broadcast at 5:00 am on a Sunday morning as their “breakfast TV.”⁸

What Fornäs calls the “musical luster” of the EBU fanfare is the sound of the symphony orchestra. As a deeply ingrained and widely recognized cultural emblem, the orchestra signifies European history (especially the Enlightenment and the Romantic revolutions), the aesthetics of “high art” classical music, the organization of socio-economic class, the power of ritual, and the authority of tradition. The collective ensemble led by the conductor is also a metaphor for political power and social control. The symphony—literally, “sounding together”—can produce a unified and concentrated sound, together greater than the sum of its individual parts. This symphonic sound provides an analogy for the cooperation and communal union that the Eurovision Song Contest aims to represent. The live orchestra was an integral part of the song contest during its first four decades, accompanying the competing singers and performing the overture music as well as the interval acts, so Eurovision’s symphonic fanfare was consistent with the overall sound-world of the show back then. Even after the live orchestra was eliminated from the contest in 1999, replaced by prerecorded backing tracks, the Eurovision ident retains its symphonic sound, a musical memento of a deeply meaningful cultural past.

The anthem of the European Union, the “Ode to Joy” melody from the fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (composed in 1823), is another very familiar tune from the symphonic repertoire hearkening back to the past as it represents Europe in the present. While Beethoven’s and Charpentier’s melodies are separated by different national contexts and more than a century of history, there is a notable similarity between the two in their contour and phrasing: the Prelude embellishes the stepwise motion of the Ode (F♯–F♯–G–A–A) with intervals of a third and fifth (F♯–D–A), holding the high note (A) a bit longer, and adding quicker eighth-note movement in the second half of the phrase. Through six decades of Eurovision broadcasts, Charpentier’s prelude has become an unofficial but very recognizable European anthem in itself. According to Thomas Betzwieser, it seems ironic that “a few bars of an unknown piece of a forgotten composer should produce an almost symbiotic relationship of music and symbol, which was the hope invested in the European anthem, but which ultimately was never achieved.”⁹

The Eurovision Song Contest has occasionally featured the “Ode to Joy” European anthem over the years. For the 1987 contest hosted in Brussels, Belgium, the special performance during the vote tallying process (the “interval act”) was “Variations on the European Anthem” for solo flute and orchestra. The announcer made a point of the fact that the contest was taking place on May 9, Europe Day, which commemorates the historic speech by the French foreign minister Robert Schuman on that date in 1950 proposing a supranational European Federation, one of the early steps toward the formation of the European Union. Marc Grauwels was the solo flutist for this performance while the audience watched a film showing scenes from across the continent: people dancing, acting in a theater production, sailing on the sea, hiking in the mountains, riding a tractor in the countryside, looking out from a lighthouse, and flying a jet plane—all as the large gold stars of the European Union flag circle around in the sky overhead. Grauwels later admitted he had no artistic control over this production, which became a bit of “a horrible sausage,”¹⁰ but these variations composed by Willy Mortier and Grauwels are one attempt to adapt the classical repertoire to the Eurovision show. Beethoven’s “Ode” also played a role in the 2014 grand final interval act as the Danish theater company Momoland performed their song “Joyful,” a resetting of the tune with new lyrics by Neill Furio, with the singers climbing up and balancing atop towering white ladders in a visually stunning scene.¹¹

Television

The EBU chose this melody as the musical signature for its Eurovision network in 1954, but Charpentier and his compositions were little known, even in the world of classical music, before the revival of interest in the composer and his works in the 1950s. In 1943 Guy Lambert, a music e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Prelude
• 1a Anthem
• 2 Musicking
• 2a Flashmob
• 3 Formulas
• 3a Parody
• 4 Sameness
• 4a Europop
• 5 Difference
• 5a Aesthetics
• 6 Values
• 6a Coda
• Selected bibliography
• Index of names and titles
• Index of song titles