Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest ed. by Dafni Tragaki (review)

This informative new collection of essays on the Eurovision Song Contest is a welcome addition to the growing field of Eurovision studies, a field that has found its place on the broader spectrum of popular music studies during the past couple years. The book’s title reveals the rich conceptual juxtaposition at the core of this collection. In her introduction Dafni Tragaki notes that Eurovision engages two complementary concepts of empire: the geopolitics of the supranational state and the economics of the global culture industry (p. 2). If the prelude to Charpentier’s Te Deum, the musical motto of the song contest broadcast, evokes the long-ago empire of ancien régime splendour, Eurovision itself engages a newer empire of mediascapes, a ‘virtual Europe’ transmitted through television and the Internet across the Continent and beyond every year. ‘Eurovision’s Europe is a complex nexus of existing and imagined places, real and virtual platforms’ (p. 59), Andrea F. Bohlman and Ioannis Polychronakis explain in their chapter on the fieldwork opportunities the contest presents. When the show’s emcees shout ‘Hello Europe!’ we can recognize ‘television’s ability to assert an imagined Europe, effectively shared amongst all participants and viewers across existing geographical, political, and cultural borders’ (p. 65). With its webcasts too, this mediated Eurovision empire has become increasingly global, accessible, and immediate.

Song is the other keyword from the collection’s title, and a few contributors make a point of discussing the meaning of the music and lyrics of songs we hear in the contest, claiming that scholars too rarely consider the sonic aspect of the Eurovision phenomenon. As Philip V. Bohlman notes, ‘it has been customary at times to circumvent the questions about the music itself, separating the political and historical from the sound of song’ (p. 37). Luisa Pinto Teixeira and Martin Stokes emphasize that Eurovision songs are not merely ‘mute ciphers’ of cultural or political meaning but active sonic signifiers in culture (p. 225). Despite this intent, however, there are not many analytical discussions of the sounds of Eurovision songs in the volume. One would have welcomed more passages that invited close listening to the songs discussed, as Teixeira and Stokes accomplish when they contextualize two songs that framed Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution: the country’s Eurovision entry, ‘E Depois do Adeus’, and the labour movement protest song ‘Grândola, Vila Morena’ (pp. 231–5). Germany’s entry in 1999, ‘Reise nach Jerusalem’, receives some detailed attention for its sonic interplay between the familiar and exotic in the concluding chapter by Andrea F. Bohlman and Alexander Rehding (p. 291). One can follow a thread of such musical analysis across the three chapters that deal with Scandinavian countries and the song contest: Annemette Kirkegaard (‘The Nordic Brotherhoods’) mentions, but then rejects, the assumption that ‘a certain Nordic sound is audible’ across various songs (p. 79), Karin Strand (‘On Topos in the Swedish Preliminaries’) touches upon the musical ‘folk’ markers in a song from the Melodifestivalen (p. 145), while Alf Björnberg offers a network of stylistic trends across numerous songs to show ‘The Musical Construction of National and European Identities’ through Swedish Eurovision entries since the 1960s (pp. 207–15).

Tony Langlois, however, takes a different stance on the music issue in his chapter on Ireland’s Eurovision winning streak during the 1980s and 1990s. He asserts that ‘it is irrelevant to evaluate the music of the ESC according to criteria outside the competition. Somewhat like the Esperanto language, Eurovision music is an outworking of grand, even noble cultural aspirations, but its level of signification should not be compared to the dense polysemy of musical traditions enjoyed in any other context’ (p. 264). It wasn’t a shift in musical tastes, Langlois suggests, that caused ‘the previously effective “Johnny Logan” formula’ of a romantic ballad or torch song...