u/EphemeralOcean

They’re doing a world cup line of underwear. Apparently they need a vexillological consultant 😂

I recently discovered Andromeda by Lelek and was incredibly moved by the subject matter, music, and lyrics. I've seen quite a few reaction videos the last few days (I've been sick in bed this week and not doing much, frankly), and while there were some insightful things said by various singers and vocal coaches, none of them knew much about what the song was actually about, so I made a video about it. I'm not some big Youtube personality or anything, I'm just a regular guy (who happens to be Croatian-American and a professional composer).

https://youtu.be/hvkYVD1A-yE

Part 1 is about the historical context of the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans and what that actually means.

Part 2 discusses the lyrics. All of the translations I've seen so far don't seem to do it for me: either clunky idioms that don't quite scan in English, weird preposition choices, etc. so I crafted my own translation.

Part 3 discusses the musical principles that make this song incredibly effective, both in terms of vocal performance as well as music theory. This is an incredible effective example of combining two musical styles (traditional Balkan singing and modern pop music), which is quite difficult to do well.

And of course the most ridiculous thumbnail I could possibly muster.

Hope ya'll find it insightful/interesting!

For those who prefer written text to video, I'll summarize below:

Part 1: Historical context

-Ever since the split of the Roman Empire by Emperor Diocletian into East and West in the 200s, Croatia and its neighbors have found themselves at the boundary of east and west. Examples being Slavic migrations starting in the 7th century, the Schism of 1054 into Catholic and Orthodox, the the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans (which was probably the most consequential thing to happen in the Balkans in the last millennium), and then eventually Churchill's Iron Curtain.

-While there were some what I would consider positive cultural exports from the Ottoman Empire (food, music, etc.), the general verdict of people in the Balkans is that Ottoman occupation was a disaster. The Ottoman Empire invested very little into the infrastructure of the Balkans (besides Mosques) and was slow to adopt the printing press, so the entire Renaissance and Enlightenment basically skipped over the Balkans, and even in 1931, a literacy map of Yugoslavia bears striking resemblance to a map which shows how long territories were under Ottoman rule. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1atMt8vdjkbnE2LQLe0cgz5SJA8LtjvPi/view?usp=sharing

-And for countries like Croatia who weren’t totally occupied, they were basically the officially designed bulwark for the Austrian Empire to hold back the Ottomans, so were on and off at war with the Ottomans for like several centuries. Of course, a nation can’t thrive under the circumstances of perpetual war. Also the Austrian Empire was reluctant to truly invest into the civilian infrastructure of Croatia because it may fall to the Ottomans at any moment.

-On an individual level, life for Balkan peoples in the Ottoman Empire was rough as hell. They couldn’t own property, they couldn’t own horses, churches were torn down, and the Ottoman army would regularly pillage the towns, rape the women, and take their children, the girls going to a harem, and the boys going into the Janissary system, where they would basically become brainwashed soldiers for the Ottomans Army. Here’s where we finally get to the song. 

-There are parts of Bosnia that are predominantly Croat, and in those areas as well as in Dalmatia (which is a part of Croatia and yes that’s where Dalmatians are from), women would tattoo their children (mostly girls, but some boys too) using needles and a mixture of ash, charcoal, honey, and breastmilk. The tattoos were a mixture of pagan symbols into which were absorbed Christian symbols such as the cross. This was called sicanje, which means like “pricking.” The reason for this was that Muslims considered tattoos “impure,” thus meaning that the tattooed children could physically not be converted and were less desirable to be raped. If it came to it, they would at the very least be killed. Altogether pretty heavy stuff.

-Also let’s talk about the title of the song. In Greek Mythology, Andromeda’s mother Cassiopeia stated that her daughter was prettier than the sea nymphs, which pissed them off. They asked Poseidon to send a sea monster to attack, to which he obliged. The only way out of it was for Andromeda to be chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster to save her kingdom. Notably, Andromeda herself did nothing wrong and was just minding her own business this whole time. She’s chained to the rock, and then Perseus flies in at the last second, saves the day, kills the monster, and eventually Athena puts Andromeda into the sky as a constellation. 

Part II: Lyrics

As you light a candle, ask your grandmother: 
Why she gave birth to her daughters in fear,
Why so many chose the grave.
Our mothers did not suffer the pains of labor to birth slaves.

Our tears flow like a river
Why must history repeat itself yet again?
Our sons are not servants,
Do the cries from their cradles not haunt you at night?

Take me, oh Motherland,
My soul is yours.
To them I am but flesh. 

Lead me to the stars.
Far from shattered nests
Where amid screams, 
our sons are sent off as soldiers.
Lead me to the stars, 
Far from their gaze,
Andromeda.

The scars are carved to the bone.
No mother will ever forgive you.
On the table of shame lies gold from our necklaces
While you wash your hands with the blood of our wounds.

Traitors.

Now having the context, most of the lyrics are pretty self explanatory, with perhaps the exception of those last few lines. The typical word for necklace in Croatian is oglica or lančić, however they use the word Djerdan, which is a specific type of traditional necklace that women would wear made of gold ducats that was part of her dowry.

I think what they’re trying to say here is that when the necklaces are taken off and are no longer necklaces but are just gold, i.e. renouncing your faith, that this is the greatest shame. 

Back to Balkan history for a moment, remember how I talked about how the people living here were basically living in serfdom with basically no rights? Well that could all change if they were to convert to Islam. If they converted, then they would be able to gain all of those rights that they previously didn’t have. (it's worth noting that, for their time, the Ottoman Empire was considered more religiously tolerant than their contemporaries in Europe and elsewhere, which is less of a defense of the Ottoman Empire, and more of an indictment on their contemporaries.)

So many people, particularly people in Bosnia, where neither Catholicism nor Orthodoxy was as firmly established, did convert (for which, it's hard to blame them IMO, under the circumstances). To those people who stayed with the old religion, the converts were considered traitors. Which also makes sense though: you chose to make this huge sacrifice to live life as a 5th class citizen in order to stick to your strongly held beliefs, and your neighbor who was once your buddy did not, and now he’s the one telling the Ottoman soldiers who had kids in the last year to sell to slavery. Would make sense to think of him as a traitor. It's one of those thing that's just awful all around.

And this sense of betrayal and the resulting mistrust is one of the root causes of ethnic tensions, which would eventually explode in the early 1990s, particular in Bosnia.

It’s also worth noting that often times religious people that are near the borders of the territory of that religion are also the most devout and fervent. For people in France or somewhere, it’s easier to take religion for granted when it’s not under immediate threat. For Croats, many of them saw it as their obligation to protect Christendom in Europe, something they would fight and die for for centuries. Thus being Catholic is just a huge part of the identity of Croats. Even today, when, like the rest of Europe, it becomes less and less religious, it’s a big part of how many people see themselves even if they don’t actively practice. It’s kind of like the old joke in northern Ireland: a guy asks another guy if he’s Catholic or Protestant and he responds, oh I’m atheist, and the first replies, yes but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant Atheist?” The Balkans are kind of like that.

The song is most directly about identity and the suffering and sacrifices that women must make, particularly in wartime. It’s tempting to say, well that was all so long ago! Well, yes and no. Where I live in America we had chattel slavery for actually about the same time frame as the Ottoman Occupation of the Balkans, and this is not meant to be a “who had it worse thing” contest, but the effects of slavery still reverberate through society even today, especially in the South, just as the effects of Ottoman occupation still reverberate through society in places like Bosnia, which still struggles to overcome its history. 

And regardless, the suffering of a mother seeing her children die in wartime is not unique to the Balkans, it is something that is happening daily in places Iran, where a girl’s school was bombed and 160 girls were killed, and of course in Gaza the last two years. One of the lines in the song was, “Why must history repeat itself?” so it’s very timely.

The last thing I’ll say about the lyrics is that I think they way they invoke Andromeda is also really cool, because they work the double meaning into it. 1. Invoking her as an innocent person made to be an unwilling sacrifice, and 2.) in the lyrics about “lead me to the stars,” referring to Andromeda the Galaxy.

Part III: Music Theory

What really stands out to me about this song is how well it is able to combine two different styles, which in this case is a traditional Balkan style and a modern pop style. As a composer myself, this is REALLY hard to pull off well. My take is that it boils down to timbre, texture, and harmony.

1. Timbre.

There’s a certain timbre associated with a lot of female Balkan choral tradition that could be described as very focused, direct, even brassy. It has an edge to it. Which is very different than the Bel canto style of singing which arose from western art music and from which much of modern western music derives to some extent. Here’s a video of a traditional Bulgarian choir where you can hear this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVqrW-fPOQ0

In Andromeda, the singers don't quite "as far" as the Bulgarian choir in the video, but it's interesting how they reference it in their singing. They go back and forth between a more typical, modern, pop singer sound and this more traditional Balkan tone. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes the change happens gradually over the course of a phrase, depending on the singer and her approach, which was also really cool to observe.

2. Texture.

Just like the Bulgarian Choir video, the prechorus of Andromeda (Uzmi se Sebi, Kraljica Zemljo) uses a drone based polyphony, meaning that there's a melody voice on top and a drone voice below. HOWEVER, whereas in western music drone voices usually were just long held out notes, the drone voice in traditional Balkan music usually has the same rhythm as the upper voice, making it homorhythmic. By utilizing that texture, they're evoking this traditional Balkan way of singing. But also doing so that doesn't interfere with the overall chord progression and not making it as harmonically static as the folk music.

3. Harmony.

In that prechorus again, there's a very prominent use of parallel fifths. A fifth is a type of musical interval, or the distance between two notes (four notes in the scale away, like A to E for example). Parallel fifths are when you have two or more fifths right in a row. In the 900s to 1100s, there was quite a bit of chant music which was exclusively parallel fifths. In the 1600/1700s, composers like Vivaldi and Bach started writing music which we now called Baroque. That style of music was all the rage back then and so music theorists analyzed their music and basically said, "all right, if you want to write music that's in this style, you have to follow this long list of musical 'rules'." Principle among those rules was "NO PARALLEL FIFTHS," a rule that has haunted freshman music majors for the last 3 centuries. By having such prominent parallel fifths in this song, it's evoking a sense of either 1. incredibly old music or 2. a non-Western musical tradition.

There are also some other things that the composer/producer does that make this song incredibly effective:

1. Utilization of the leading tone:
   The leading tone is the note that is one half step below the tonic (aka our home base note), so if we're in the key of C, the leading is B. In every scale, each note has a place where it wants to go, a magnetic pull that drives the music in a certain direction. The leading tone has the strongest pull of any note, and it has a pull towards the tonic. The minor scale (which Andromeda utilizes), does not have a leading tone in its natural form, it would have a B-flat instead of a B, whose pull is in a different direction. Thus composers will often shoehorn B natural instead of B flat in order to have that really strong pull, because a big part of composing is setting up expectations and then either subverting them or fulfilling them, and having the strong pull of a leading lends itself to setting up those expectations. In Andromeda, the composer does NOT utilize the leading tone, but instead the lowered 7th, for the verses and in the first half of the pre-chorus. Then, finally, in the last chord of the pre-chorus we finally get a leading tone which then makes the transition in the chorus feel EPIC af.

2. Orchestration
   The chorus is incredibly well orchestrated, with a very rhythmically slow bass down below, the singers voices in the middle with a moderate level rhythmic activity, and then way up top the violins are very rhythmically active. By having these three components in three very distinct registers (high, medium, low) and also different levels of rhythmic activity, we are able to hear and process them simultaneously, rather than them competing with each other and creating a cluttered texture.

3. Energy arc
   All of the various elements of music (tempo, harmony, rhythmic, texture, timbre, etc.) come together to create a sense of energy. Faster, louder, higher is typically higher energy, whereas softer, slower, lower, is usually more low energy, for example. This song does a really good job of having a very strong and intentional sense of energy. Most pop music does not have huge variations in its energy level, which is why a lot of it sounds the same. This song has big energy spikes, with the beginning of the versus starting off pretty quiet, and the choruses being very dramatic. This is what makes this song feel like a fully realized story, complex narrative, like a movie trailer or something. It's clearly different than most pop songs you hear, and I think this more than anything else what is musically elevating it.

4. Subverting expectations
   The key change between the bridge and pre-chorus is ELECTRIFYING. One of the best key changes I've ever witnessed IMO. Leading up to it is this layered cluster chord which is very dissonant, and is harmonically new territory for this song (also I *think* the first time that we get more than 2 notes in the voices simultaneously). It creates a sense of harmonic ambiguity. Also when the voices come in, in the new key, they do so alone, without any accompaniment (bass, drones, strings, etc.), which really makes it stark, and then the bass comes in with the low F, establishing the new key, like a bag of bricks. The placement of the key change is also notable. It happens at the beginning of the pre-chorus, and usually the role of the prechorus is to gain energy and prepare us for the chorus, which is an arrival point. And that's what it does in the first chorus. This time however, the bridge gains energy, and the arrival point is at the BEGINNING of the prechorus, and the prechorus is not functioning like a prechorus but as part of the chorus. That's a great example of subverting expectations in a satisfying way. The key change, but putting everything a whole step higher, also puts the music in a more tense part of the singers' vocal ranges, which adds to the drama.

This song is I feel like quite different than most Eurovision songs which are usually lighter and more "fun," so not sure who well it will do, but I think this is truly a masterpiece of musical storytelling, so wishing it all my best!