World Music: A Very Short Introduction by Philip V. Bohlman

Author:Philip V. Bohlman [Bohlman, Philip V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192564450
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

The aesthetic and musical questions that must be answered to resolve the paradox of representing a nation transnationally are themselves vexing. Does one sing in a language all will understand, or in the language of one’s own nation, even when understood by relatively few Europeans (e.g. Latvian or Romanian)? What if there are multiple languages for a nation (e.g. Belgium and Spain)? Is a national song or dance form too folksy or unintelligible, or is it possible to transform transnational genres into national forms? The answers to such questions must resolve the tension between the national and the nationalist. Paradoxically, the formal constraints and internal repetition in Eurovision song style can be, and often are, primary sources of creativity. Creativity resides in the ways tightly formalized songs allow for national differences.

Critical to the ways popular-song form represents a nation in the three minutes allotted a Eurovision song are the many ways in which the middle section—the ‘bridge’—becomes a site of difference. The middle section shifts temporal registers to become the site of the political, potentially performing a call for nationalist action and protest. In ‘1944’, Ukraine’s winning song in 2016, it is in the bridge that Jamala switches from English to Crimean Tatar, thus making the reference to Russian annexation of Ukraine explicit (see below). When engendering national fantasy, individual Eurovision songs move from the non-representational to the highly symbolic, negotiating the borders between the national and the nationalist year after year.

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