160063 UE The Eurovision Song Contest as a Global Phenomenon - Methodically Updated Approaches (2021W)

Goals:
- To get to know historical and sociological methods of current popular music research using the Eurovision Song Contest as an example.
- Historical and media-theoretical classification of the Eurovision Song Contest as a meanwhile global phenomenon.
- To get to know and apply research methods for approaching diversity aspects (gender, nation, age, class, ethnic groups) in the production and reception of the contest.

Content:
In this course, different methods of approaching and researching the Eurovision Song Contest, founded in 1956 in Switzerland, will be described and applied.

Methods: preparatory reading, research between block sessions; group work in different formats, discussions, question rounds, input sequences by the teacher; exchange via common pinboards and blogs on content-related sub-areas of the course;

In times of globalization and digitalization, hardly any musical event is as overtly national in character as the Eurovision Song Contest. Given the fact that the contest, especially in the editions of the last decade, has explicitly embraced diversity in all its intersectional facets, these nationalisms may come as a surprise and form the content-related starting point of the course.
The aim of this exercise is to grasp historiographies of the Eurovision Song Contest since its inaugural edition in Switzerland in 1956 in institutional terms and thus, among other things, in their overtly or covertly transnational and national dimensions. Innovations with regard to presentation, selection and judging procedures will also be a topic, which in most cases can be related to current political contexts, if not to specific changes in the conception of music as a potential expression of national belonging. In addition, it will be asked to what extent the Euovision Song Contest can be meaningfully placed in European traditions of song contests.
On the other hand, efforts to overcome or expand European boundaries will be addressed on the basis of the contributions from Israel and Australia, and thus an increasingly global relevance and scope of the competition will be discussed. This will be done on the basis of phenomena of change in national contributions, superordinate changes in the demands on the media presence of musical contributions, but also on the basis of concrete individual contributions analyzed in detail.
In addition to a decentering of historical musicological approaches into globality, current methods and approaches of popular music research as well as the analysis of multimedia music phenomena will be central mediating subjects of the course. On the basis of current literature, the negotiation of gender role images will be related to those of nation, language and form of state. In addition, the rich media presence of the competition accessible online - from print to virtual media to parodies - will be evaluated as an ideal starting point for reflections on and applications of reception-analytical approaches from history and sociology.