I intended to watch the Eurovision song contest last night, but after listening to preview clips of some of the songs, I decided not to.
Every year it baffles me that the UK, and indeed other countries, can’t find a skilful songwriter to write them something appealing and memorable. Over the years I have got sick of one country after another offering us variations on the same relentless beat and tired formulas. There is far too much emphasis on the visual side of things. Often you can pick out the likely winners just from the eye-catching qualities of their costumes and ‘stage business’.
I spent some enjoyable minutes imagining what would happen if a competitor quietly stepped forward one year and sang a Schubert song – for example ‘An die Musik’, one of his loveliest (here in an orchestral arrangement with Gerald Finley and the Berlin Philharmonic. I chose an orchestral version to make it easier to imagine such a thing as part of Eurovision).
‘You lovely art/ In how many grey hours/ when I was entangled in life’s wild circle/ have you kindled my heart with warm love/ have you transported me to a better world!’
How would the audience react? Would they jeer because it was so old-fashioned and gentle, or would a sudden hush fall on the auditorium as people were smitten by the beauty of the music?
Wouldn’t it be great to give Schubert a belated chance to win Eurovision!
I think Eurovision makes more sense from a European perspective where the standard of indigenous pop music has always been on that level. The great names of pop are almost all British or American, so it comes as a bit of a shock for us to suddenly be bombarded with such inanities. Indeed they take it much more seriously over there, and I believe Terry Wogan once had to flee town overnight to escape popular fury over his irreverent remarks! Echoes of Brahms making a similarly speedy exist from Copenhagen after saying the problem with their greatest art gallery was that it wasn’t in Berlin. He was clearly living down to his usual standards of tact on that occasion…
I am not convinced the Eurovision ultimately has much to do with music these days. There are obviously advocates for this competition but I am not sure whether fans of pop music are genuinely that interested in it. It is rare for me to listen to pop music yet I think that Eurovision is not really offering music that is within the current mainstream. For me, it is more celebration of camp. Every time I read an article like this I am reminded of the debate on the BBC Fo3 forum which considered the idea of of music being either art or product. In the case of Eurovision, it is clearly “product.”
I do think that Schubert would be too much of a shock for Eurovision but it would be funny if the people voting were duped if the song was dressed up in a pop arrangement. This has happened often enough since at least the 1930s with classical works being converted in to pop songs without the uninitiated realising . I think the most obvious example was Debussy’s “Reverie” but it is very common. Pachelbel’s canon has been frequently used as a contra-fact for pop tunes.
I attended the jazz festival at Vienne between 2001 and 2019 as this music is my main love. The festival increasingly featured music by pop acts and I felt that this was an eye-opening experience. Many of the artists are great musicians and I came away with a lot of respect for acts like “Earth, Wind & fire”, Niles Rodgers and Al Green. There are others like Seal who I just felt was pretty ordinary. However, all the artists are superior to Eurovision. In the first two instances, it struck me that these were jazz musicians who wanted to play pop. Not sure that Eurovision has ever been inspired to reach these kind of standards. Rodger’s soundcheck entailed him playing two Thelonious Monk tunes which instantly made me a fan. (He studied jazz guitar with Ted Dunbar.) There is a “genuine musician” element in pop music albeit I would suggest that this is very much diminished with Eurovision.