Jury Notes And Vocal Capacity: The Jury Criterion That Must Be Scrapped Written by Ben Robertson on May 7, 2022 | 1 Comment

I’ve watched this moment back probably around a hundred times.

It’s the Jury Final on Friday night in Rotterdam at last year’s Eurovision Song Contest. Up eleventh on the night was the song from Switzerland, ‘Tout l’univers’, performed by Gjon’s Tears.

As we’ve already seen from the Semi Final, Gjon’s Tears is a fantastic vocalist with an astonishing range and clarity of tone that makes his performance on stage one of the most anticipated. And ‘Tout l’univers‘ uses each and every ounce of that voice to mesmerising effect.

Or so we thought. Just as the final chorus began and Gjon’s Tears was in full flow with his huge falsetto he turned it into overdrive. On this night there was an extra surprise for the thousands in the Ahoy and the 200 jurors that could vote on his act – an extra note even higher pitched than the one that got him all the plaudits.

I wouldn’t say he nailed it. This was the vocal equivalent of throwing the kitchen sink at a melody and Gjon’s Tears pushed his voice to its absolute limit on that Friday night performance. When it came back a day later for the Grand Final that note was back to its comfortable old self – and ever since any live performance hasn’t seen this reappear.

Yet that Friday night performance did, and it aided Switzerland in their quest to win the jury.

The Perfect Set of Data

There is a chain of events that occurred in Rotterdam last year that helps us to analyse the exact impact of just that extra note that Gjon’s Tears inserted into his Grand Final jury performance.

Firstly, we can compare how jurors ranked Switzerland from the Second Semi Final where they qualified from to the Grand Final. Secondly we can compare how the Swiss song ranked relative to other songs that qualified from the same semi final. As the jurors are identical from the semi final to the final we can see how the jurors’ ranking changed from one to another.

Most fascinatingly, we have the unique situation of the perfect control group from the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest. The performance of Iceland. Sadly the Icelandic group in last year’s contest had to perform in Eurovision via use of their rehearsal clip due to receiving a positive covid test. This is perfect for us to analyse because we now have a performance that did not change at all from the Wednesday night broadcast to the Friday.

The other perfect fact about comparing these two songs is that both of them did really well with juries. In the Semi Final Switzerland placed 1st and Iceland 3rd, with the latter nation only dropping to a ranking of 5th with the juries in the Grand Final. That means that despite Switzerland’s runaway success with the juries the two are comparable.

Heading to the data, in total we can look at data from 90 jurors from 18 different countries. I want to assess purely how the jurors ranked this head to head, so I ignore all the other nations and look purely at how the jurors ranked Switzerland and Iceland.

In the Semi Final a grand total of 52 jurors ranked the Swiss entry above the Icelandic number, with 38 jurors placing ‘10 Years’ above ‘Tout l’univers’. Taking just those same jurors in the Grand FInal the raw data shows that 53 jurors had ‘Tout l’univers’ higher than ‘10 years’.

At this point you should be turning to me and questioning why I am even writing this article as that is an insignificant difference. There are a few peculiarities worth mentioning. Firstly this wasn’t just one juror who changed their mind. Of the ninety jurors 15 switched their opinion about which one was the best of the two performances, with 7 re-evaluating that Daði Freyr’s rehearsal footage was the better show, compared to 8 swing voters switching to Gjon’s Tears.

However there’s a nuance in that in almost all of the examples the switch was only one juror in each country changing their relative placing. The two outliers here include the United Kingdom, where the jurors gave Iceland a 5-0 win in the Semi Final which tightened to a 3-2 victory over Switzerland after the Grand FInal performance.

However that switch is far less extreme than the Polish jury. The five people in Warsaw originally had this matchup as a 5-0 victory for Switzerland in the Semi Final, but that swung to a 4-1 swing for Iceland in the Grand Final. The Polish jurors each ranked Iceland in the Semi Final ranked 13th, 8th, 7th, 8th and 7th, middle of the pack. In the Grand Final those numbers switched to 2nd, 1st, 4th, 1st and 4th.

Now it is not my place to speculate on the rationale here but such a huge positive switch for Iceland suggests an influence outside the performances…as Iceland’s performance was identical each of the times it was judged. Similarly Portugal rose up from a 10th place ranking in the Semi Final from Poland to ranking 3rd overall in the Grand Final. Greece won the Polish jury vote in the Semi Final, with no juror ranking ‘Last Dance‘ lower than 4th, but in the Grand Final Greece didn’t score a single Polish point, with two jurors ranking Stefania as low as 19th.

My inclination is that based on how incredibly huge the splits are from the Semi Final to the Grand Final with the Polish vote that this is an anomaly which should be removed from this data set. Removing the Polish jury would make this a 8 to 3 difference in favour of Gjon’s Tears.

In conclusion, while I will be the first to say that the data is weak and that we would need to analyse more than ninety people to have a sufficient amount of data, I do think this shows that Gjon’s Tears jury performance did help to bring in more votes on the Friday night. And this trend of jurors rewarding vocals that push the artist to their limit is nothing new.

What The Juries Look For

In the section about the jury voting at Eurovision on the official website, the following information is given about what juries are looking for.

“All jury members are music professionals. They are being asked to judge:

• vocal capacity
• the performance on stage
• the composition and originality of the song
• the overall impression by the act”

The idea is that each juror, one of five in each country, will use these criteria to help them choose who to rank 1st, 2nd, 3rd….all the way down to last place.

It’s no easy task. The criteria are presumably intentionally left vague and with potential to contradict each other. An act may leave a good impression, but not be very original. The composition of the song may be good, but the performance was not, and so on.

While none of these criteria are weighted and have more merit than the others, I note that vocal capacity takes pride of place at the top of the list. Vocal capacity is a loaded term. Things that have a capacity have a certain volume, a size, a quantity. This isn’t a phrase which means vocal quality, or vocal ability, but the choice of the word to actively encourage a capacity of the voice implies something else.

I would even dare argue that the whole notion of so-called ‘jury notes’ (narratively vision pop song – because they are constantly rewarded by juries across the continent.

Two examples come to mind in recent years, Dami Im’s ‘Sound of Silence’ and Cezar Sampson’s ‘Anyone But You’. These songs won the jury vote in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2016 and 2018 respectively and, while they lie at different ends of the mid-tempo pop music spectrum, the performances have much in common.

In particular what I want to highlight is how both of the singers opt as the song reaches its finale to ditch the melody completely. Instead the singers leave the main melody to the backing singers while they ad lib some vocal gymnastics that offers no more storytelling than showing just how well they can sing.

Juries overegg these numbers compared to how the public vote – with wild disparity. If I just take the numbers from last year’s Grand Final I note how all the songs that did feature such showboating vocals were, predictably, jury hits. Switzerland we’ve already mentioned, and their 267 points from the juries were matched by just 165 points from televoters. Others that stand out include Malta (208 to 47) and Israel (73 to 20) where the most memorable parts of each song are not just the vocals, but particularly just a couple of stellar notes from amazing vocalists.

What I will say about all five of these tracks I name is that those memorable vocals that each of them brought to the table were impressive for their capacity more than their quality. It’s a wonderful thing that Eden Alene can hit a B6, but such a whistle was impressive for its range less its timbre. Similarly, while footage doesn’t exist of the 2016 Jury Final, I remember commenting on the ESC Insight podcast that night about how Australia’s performance felt just a wee bit screechy – Dami made the notes but my goodness reaching them meant she had to give it all.

And I feel the same about Gjon’s Tears’ epic vocal rise last year. On one hand the emotion is wow that he made it, which is stunning by itself, but on the other there’s a desperation with forcing the note out that from a purely technical perspective struggles. Indeed in interviews Gjon’s Tears has commented how he felt he “really, really failed” his jury performance. And while these comments are in answer to the visual elements rolling across stage more than the vocal, that do-or-die note wasn’t enough of a save for Gjon’s Tears to be happy with the performance, and backstage he asked the EBU team to allow him to perform once more, a request that was denied.

Yet the performance that the artist wasn’t happy with was rewarded with 1st place that night.

What Criteria Should We Have?

I have an issue with this word capacity. It is becoming too much of a well-worn thing that vocal gymnastics get to showcase their thing in a cynical quest to score well with the Eurovision juries. Acts like Gjon’s Tears are now saving their capacity for the Friday night and an audience of 200 jurors, rather than the Saturday performance to millions. The jury show has equal importance on the scoreboard but shouldn’t be the pinnacle of the week’s performances.

If we would like jurors to look at the vocals of a song then a more artistic word should be used. ‘Quality’ is an obvious suggestion to find a good singer. ‘Accuracy’ would be a scientific approach to how well somebody sang. ‘Ability’ would be a somewhat loaded term much like capacity, but wouldn’t purely be waited towards the range an artist can demonstrate in their three minutes of song.

However perhaps looking for vocals isn’t what should be looked for. After all, we now have a Eurovision Song Contest world that has pre recorded backing vocal. Masking much of the assessment that can be done to vocals in the live performance. At the end of 2021 I wrote a piece for ESC Insight comparing the modern day Eurovision Song Contest to the Nobel Literature Prize. The criteria for the Nobel Literature Prize is much more deliberately vague than we have at the Eurovision Song Contest – “the most outstanding work in a literary direction.”

I would be delighted, if we are to trust our faith in juries and a 50/50 system of selecting our winner, to give a similar scope to our jurors to select who is best or not. Could the jurors be given the simple criteria to find the most outstanding song? Outstanding songs can be because of what they offer to the vocalist to shine but also to lyrics, to production, to staging – but this would leave the juror to make that jump to have to work out for themselves what that means.

I would hope that would follow the pattern that the Nobel Prize for Literature has seen in that the jurors actively reward pieces that display a sense of newness.

Of the two blocs of Eurovision voting, the juries and the televoters, generally it is the latter group which is perceived as being the old-fashioned alternative. Måneskin brought pizzazz to good old rock’n’roll last year and have bounced to global success on the back of the platform the Song Contest provided. The juries had them fourth. A more fluid criteria should result in jurors acting on their instincts, enjoyment and what impresses them more, and should hopefully reduce the difference between juries and televotes.

Reducing the difference between juries and televoters is desirable – currently the correlation between the placements of jury songs compared to the televote is weak at best. That does little for the integrity of the Song Contest when the scoring is so different and so vividly on display with the voting presentation

But, to any jurors who end up reading this article before you set your points this week. Remember that a great voice isn’t just made of a huge range. A great voice has a gravity that means you have to stop and listen. A great singer connects with you so you feel every word that they are singing. A great winning Eurovision song isn’t defined by a bunch of sterile criteria but is instead is an art form that is so fantastic that should it win it would inspire other singers and songwriters to take paths in that direction.

Each juror has in total close to 1/1000 of the total points on offer at the Eurovision Song Contest. Use that power wisely.