Another Song for Europe
Another Song for Europe

Author: Ivan Raykoff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1000245667

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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.

A Song for Europe
A Song for Europe

Author: RobertDeam Tobin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1351577999

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The world's largest and longest-running song competition, the Eurovision Song Contest is a significant and extremely popular media event throughout the continent and abroad. The Contest is broadcast live in over 30 countries with over 100 million viewers annually. Established in 1956 as a televised spectacle to unify postwar Western Europe through music, the Contest features singers who represent a participating nation with a new popular song. Viewers vote by phone for their favourite performance, though they cannot vote for their own country's entry. This process alone reveals much about national identities and identifications, as voting patterns expose deep-seated alliances and animosities among participating countries. Here, an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, including musicology, communications, history, sociology, English and German studies, explore how the contest sheds light on issues of European politics, national and European identity, race, gender and sexuality, and the aesthetics of camp. For some countries, participation in Eurovision has been simultaneously an assertion of modernity and a claim to membership in Europe and the West. Eurovision is sometimes regarded as a low-brow camp spectacle of little aesthetic or intellectual value. The essays in this collection often contradict this assumption, demonstrating that the contest has actually been a significant force and forecaster for social, cultural and political transformations in postwar Europe.

A Song for Europe
A Song for Europe

Author: Ivan Raykoff

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780754658795

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The world's largest and longest-running song competition, the Eurovision Song Contest is a significant and extremely popular media event throughout the continent and abroad. Here, an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, explore how the contest sheds light on issues of European politics, national and European identity, race, gender and sexuality, and the aesthetics of camp. Eurovision is sometimes regarded as a low-brow camp spectacle of little aesthetic or intellectual value. The essays in this collection often contradict this assumption, demonstrating that the contest has actually been a significant force and forecaster for social, cultural and political transformations in postwar Europe.

The Eurovision Song Contest as a Cultural Phenomenon
The Eurovision Song Contest as a Cultural Phenomenon

Author: Adam Dubin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-07-08

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1000614972

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Drawing from the wealth of academic literature about the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) written over the last two decades, this book consolidates and recognizes the ESC's relevance in academia by analysing its contribution to different fields of study. The book brings together leading ESC scholars from across disciplines and from across the globe to reflect on the intersection between their academic fields of study and the ESC by answering the question: what has the ESC contributed to academia? The book also draws from fields rarely associated with the ESC, such as Law, Business and Research Methodologies, to demonstrate the contest's broad utility in research, pedagogy and in practice. Given its interdisciplinary approach, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in cultural, media, and music studies, as well as those interested in the intersections between these areas and politics, law, education, pedagogy, and history.

Empire of Song
Empire of Song

Author: Dafni Tragaki

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2013-07-11

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0810888173

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The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is more than a musical event that ostensibly “unites European people” through music. It is a spectacle: a performative event that allegorically represents the idea of “Europe.” Since its beginning in the Cold War era, the contest has functioned as a symbolic realm for the performance of European selves and the negotiation of European identities. Through the ESC, Europe is experienced, felt, and imagined in singing and dancing as the interplay of tropes of being local and/or European is enacted. In Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest, contributors interpret the ESC as a musical “mediascape” and mega-event that has variously performed and performs the changing visions of the European project. Through the study of the cultural politics of the ESC, contributors discuss the ways in which music operates as a dynamic nexus for making national identities and European sensibilities, generating processes of “assimilation” or “integration,” and defining the celebrated notion of the “European citizen” in a global context. Scholars in the volume also explore the ways otherness and difference are produced, spectacularized, challenged, or even neglected in the televised musical realities of the ESC. For the contributing authors, song serves as a site for constituting Europe and the nation, on- and offstage. History and politics, as well as the constant production of European subjectivities, are sounded in song. The Eurovision song is a shifting realm where old and new states imagine their pasts, question their presents, and envision ideal futures in the New Europe. Essays in Empire of Song adopt theoretical and epistemological orientations in their exploration of “popular music” within ethnomusicology and critical musicology, questioning the idea of “Europe” and the “nation” through and in music, at a time when the European self appears more fragmented, if not entirely shattered. Bringing together ethnomusicology, music studies, history, social anthropology, feminist theory, linguistics, media ethnography, postcolonial theory, comparative literature, and philosophy, Empire of Song will interest students and scholars in a vast array of disciplines.

Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest
Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest

Author: Dean Vuletic

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-01-25

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 147427627X

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Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest examines how the Eurovision Song Contest has reflected and become intertwined with the history of postwar Europe from a political perspective. Established in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest is the world's largest popular music event and one of the most popular television programmes in Europe, currently attracting a global audience of around 200 million people. Eurovision is often mocked as cultural kitsch because of its over-the-top performances and frivolous song lyrics. Yet there is no cultural medium that connects Europeans more than popular music, the development of which has always been tied to cultural, economic, political, social and technological change – making Eurovision the ideal tool to explain the history of Europe in the last sixty years. This book uses Eurovision as a vehicle to address topics ranging from the Cold War, liberal democracy and communism to nationalism, European integration, economic prosperity and human rights. It analyses these subjects through their cultural, political and social relationships with Eurovision entries as expressed through lyrics and music, as well as by examining public debates that have accompanied the selection of the entries and the organisation of the contest itself. Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest also considers how states have used Eurovision to define their identities in a European context, be it to assert their national distinctiveness, highlight political issues or affirm their Europeanism or Euroscepticism in the context of European integration. Based on original sources, including hitherto unpublished archival documents from international broadcasting organisations, this is a novel historical study of interest to anyone keen to know more about the postwar history of Europe and its cultural history in particular.

Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe
Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe

Author: Philip V. Bohlman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-09-13

Total Pages: 534

ISBN-13: 1136920501

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Two decades after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and one decade into the twenty-first century, European music remains one of the most powerful forces for shaping nationalism. Using intensive fieldwork throughout Europe -- from participation in alpine foot pilgrimages to studies of the grandest music spectacle anywhere in the world, the Eurovision Song Contest -- Philip V. Bohlman reveals the ways in which music and nationalism intersect in the shaping of the New Europe. Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe begins with the emergence of the European nation-state in the Middle Ages and extends across long periods during which Europe’s nations used music to compete for land and language, and to expand the colonial reach of Europe to the entire world. Bohlman contrasts the "national" and the "nationalist" in music, examining the ways in which their impact on society can be positive and negative -- beneficial for European cultural policy and dangerous in times when many European borders are more fragile than ever. The New Europe of the twenty-first century is more varied, more complex, and more politically volatile than ever, and its music resonates fully with these transformations.

Eurovision!
Eurovision!

Author: Chris West

Publisher:

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9781911545552

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Do you think the world of the Eurovision Song Contest, with its crazy props, even crazier dancers and crazier still songs has nothing to do with serious European politics? Think again. It has been a voice of rebellion across the Iron Curtain, an inspiration for new European nations in the 1990s and 2000s, the voice of liberation for both sexual and regional minorities. Eurovision charts both the history of Europe and the history of the Eurovision Song Contest over the last six decades, and shows how seamlessly they interlink - and what an amazing journey it has been.