The 2nd Song competition of the week
The 2nd Song competition of the week
Liedl 1 Song Competition - Potsdam-Drewitz
Visiting Jacobi in Potsdam this week I was surprised to come across another song competition very similar to the Aortas Song Competition (pictures here) - open only to writers of German lyrics, I was intrigued to see how it would be judged. As with the Song Competition, the audience were given voting slips; as with the song competition, there was no provision for people arriving late (how are you supposed to give a fair vote if you miss the first couple of acts?). Where the voting differed was that it asked the audience to assess different aspects: instrument, voice, lyrics, presentation/interaction. So far so good. What I discovered, or discovered had been missed, was that in assessing these things separately, there was no option to assess several quite important factors
Let’s take the ‘instrument’ criterion: how well someone plays (and Stephan Bienwald had a fantastic touch on his acoustic guitar) can often be inversely proportional to the use of harmony (although, again, Stephan’s harmony was pretty good) - an excellent guitarist/pianist can overpower a song with ‘too much’ harmony, or play something very well that is uninspiring. That’s not to say simple/well-played/effective is not valid (Samuel the ‘Ukelele Preacher’ proved that with some stomping Led-Zep-style riffage, which contrasted nicely with previous songs featuring longer chord progressions), just that ‘harmony’ was missing - Joern Huehnerbein (Leipzig) used similar chord voicings (open E and B strings with chords played in different positions on strings 3,4,5), and the first two chords of his first two songs seemed to have the same relationship with each other - nice, but a bit samey - but there was nice simple contrast between parts in terms of melody and harmony; while other performers cycled through the same four or six chords throughout, with no change in dynamics or harmonic rhythm, playing a “Liedermacher” equivalent of I / 5 / 6m / 4 (i.e. 1m / 4m / 7 / 5 or any combination thereof arpeggiated slowly in 4:4) relying instead on beautiful voices. Which brings me to the next thing missing:
Voice
There’s no substitute for a great melody - give me gravel and bum notes, strain and breathlessness, but with hooks and a good mix of scale and interval over a pure true voice singing an impenetrable or forgettable melody any day. Voice is important, particularly for performance, but melody was missing big time from the voting slips!
The Song
What we as songwriters need to achieve is sales - if we reach the end of a set, and the audience has no title or melodic or lyrical hook in their heads they won’t be moved to buy our product (assuming we have one) - they might have enjoyed it, and might make the effort to come and tell us so, but a sale usually means a return customer, or, if they’re particularly evangelical about the music, several return customers. For me the songs that stood out most were “Berlin-Warschau Express” (and that might not be the name), Ukelele Praediger’s “Happy” song, and Millionschulze’s “Mann faengt ja von unten an”, whose performance had the audience laughing throughout through strong repetition and great audience rapport.
Songwriter - Job Description?
To me, all this begs the question: How do our songs make the listeners feel? Are they uplifted, or are they brought down? Do we show them the light or just the tunnel? Do they leave with a song in their hearts, or troubles on their mind? Have we made them laugh or dance, have their hearts beaten faster? Have we shown them something beautiful, or given them strength? Or have we just spilled our own guts? What’s our job description?
Anyway, I had three favourites: Ukelele Preacher, Millionenschulze, and Stephan Bienwald. My favourite lines were in Millionenschulze’s song, and the Country Proverbs poem by the lyrics winner Masha Potempa: “life is like the chicken coop steps: short and shitty” (although I think that line is trad. arr. rather than original? :D ) - the overall winner was Viktor Hoffmann.
The song competition was great - it was really interesting to see it from an audience perspective, albeit one where the audient in question is himself a songwriter and teacher. The prizes were worth winning (“art for art’s sake, money for god’s sake!”, as the organiser Gunter Hornberger quipped).
More interestingly to german-language writers, the competition was just the conclusion to a day of workshops in stagecraft, voice and (guitar) arrangement, in which all the competitors had participated - during the break, we talked about the similarities between our activities and the possibility of exchange, which I’m looking forward to discussing. You can find their press release with links here.
Cheers
Dan Plews
Saturday, 19 October 2013