Within the past half hour Germany has won the 55th Eurovision Song Contest with a song called “Satellite” and performed by a previously unknown artist – “Lena”.
Germany picked up points from most of the countries voting, so even though many gave 12 points to their traditional neighbouring recipients, eventually they could not be caught.
German television has shown live scenes from Hamburg with a crowed of 70,000 people celebrating the win.
Here is the winning song:
German not only has a few extra letters of the alphabet (ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü and ß), it also has different names for musical notes as well.
This was something I first discovered many years ago whilst visiting a school in Willich near Düsseldorf, when spotted something labelled as “H” in the music room.
It came as a shock, as I had always assumed that any country using the standard 5-stave notation also called the notes by the letters A to G as well. But Germany does not, it uses A to H.
My question back then was “what is H?” And the answer is quite simple really: it’s B.
But in the German system this is also a ‘B’ – and this is the B flat.
Other notes have their own names as well. When referring to a sharp, the note below has an ‘is’ attached to it. F sharp (F#) is therefore ‘Fis’, C sharp (C#) is ‘Cis’.
For flats, an ‘es’ is added to the note above, so D flat (Db) is ‘Des’, although E flat (Eb) becomes ‘Es’ and A flat (Ab) becomes ‘As’.
But why is ‘H’ so an exception? Well, according to Wikipedia this is a result of changes made to musical notation in the 12th Century. At this time there were two ways to write a note on the stave, with the angle of the lines denoting a note to be played at the normal pitch or a half-pitch deeper.
These two forms of writing a note later evolved into the sharp and flat signs that we know today, but in the case of B something special happened. The sign of B-flat looked so much like a ‘b’ that it was written simply as a single letter. With the lines slanting in the other direction, for a normal ‘B’, the note resembled an ‘H’ and when printed music arrived it continued to be referred to as such.
Hence a scale in C major contains the notes C-D-E-F-G-A-H-C’, a scale in F major contains F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F’.
Another musical difference is that whilst it may be common in English speaking countries to tune an instrument to “middle C”, German orchestras prefer to use “Kammerton A” which is exactly 440Hz and the A above middle C.
In Austria, you can even tune an instrument using your telephone. To do this, you dial special telephone number and you can hear a 440Hz tone. This even works from outside the country, so if you want to try it for yourself, dial +43 1 1507 – but remember that international call rates will apply, so a tuning fork might be cheaper!
GEMA stands for Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte.
The GEMA is responsible for managing the rights of composers, songwriters and music publishers. As such, it is responsible for collecting the royalties from users of music and re-distributing them to its members, similar to the Performing Right Society (PRS) in the UK.
Using music that is GEMA-registered, eg. at an event or on a website, requires the usage to be registered and paid for. This is usually straight forward for “traditional” events, however some circumstances are more complicated, as we found out last year in the Monday Podcast.
To hear a simple explanation and a short discussion in German, listen to the podcast:
(Press the “play” button to listen to the podcast)
Please click on ACCEPT to give us permission to set cookies [more information]
This website uses cookies to give you the best browsing experience possible. Cookies are small text files that are stored by the web browser on your computer. Most of the cookies that we use are so-called “Session cookies”. These are automatically deleted after your visit. The cookies do not damage your computer system or contain viruses. Please read our privacy information page for more details or to revoke permission.