Franco Fabbri & Goffredo Plastino (eds.), Made in Italy: Studies in Popular Music (original) (raw)
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Current Trends in Italian Popular Music Studies: Tale of a Research Colloquium in Hull
2015
March 2015. Let me clarify one fundamental thing before I start: the Colloquium was absolutely great, full of interesting papers and very well organised. I needed to make this clear in advance, because I would like to open with a negative comment, which is not really directed at the event itself, but rather at a general tendency that is diffused in academia and that, in this particular occasion, made us reach a rather paradoxical situation.
ATeM Archiv für Textmusikforschung
Many years ago, when poet, lyricist, and singer Umberto Fiori reviewed my early book on music and young audiences (Musica e pubblico giovanile, Feltrinelli, 1980; Odoya, 2014 2), he pointed out that my sociological analysis demonstrated, among other things, that a history of popular music could not be written; trying to write a history of popular music was akin to writing the biography of a Disney character. Fast-forward to the present. Do all the histories of Italian song and Italian popular music that are now in print contradict Fiori's statement? Yes and no, because the problem with writing a history of popular music (historiography is a peculiar Italian obsession; no other country has produced so many histories of national literature) is that popular music is, by and large, a horizontal landscape. There are peaks and valleys, but the greatest pop song is always mirrored in the worst pop song and the opposite is also true. Songs that were ignored upon their release may resurface and become canonical overnight (all it takes is a good cover, as it happened to Leonard Cohen's "Halleluiah"). The process is much faster and unpredictable than whatever may occur in other departments (literature, film, the arts, etc.). Italy has always been bent on strong canons, and the canon of Italian popular music is indeed as strong as the literary one. No one can dispute the cultural pre-eminence of the cantautori (singer-songwriters) from the second half of the 1950s to the 1990s, regardless of the many other styles and genres that thrived in the same years. The emergence of the new Italian song, starting with Domenico Modugno in the mid-1950s, was immediately accompanied by a large amount of social conversation. The intellectuals were slow to catch on, but ultimately, they did, and the cultural/political 'debate about music' (dibattito sulla musica) never stopped until the mid-1980s. Jacopo Tomatis, who teaches popular music at the University of Turin, was therefore able to put together an impressive volume of more than 800 pages on the cultural history of Italian song; not a complete history (we would need to go back to the fourteenth century for that), but a narrative that starts in the nineteenth century, when songs became closer to what we call popular music today, and then moves quickly to the 1950s and beyond, with a short final section that summarizes what happened after the 1980s. After a short but poignant introduction on the anthropological traits of the Italian song, Tomatis leaves no stone unturned when it comes to dissecting the diverging positions taken by the Italian intellectuals-mostly on the left-on the political validity and use of this medium which was at the same time very old and very new. The story has been told many times (I was one of the first who tried to tell it), but no one matches the accuracy of Tomatis'
XXIV Liberation, Redemption, Autonomy: Contemporary Utopias in Southern Italian Popular Music
2020
Alongside the passionate interest, shown by Southern Italian intellectuals and artists, for the renegotiation of the official historical narratives (Messina 2015), the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy have at times reawakened the need to imagine a better future. These exercises in utopianism have constructed, from time to time, a future characterized by the liberation from the mafia, or by the bridge of the economic gap with the rest of the country, or even by the overcoming of national unity towards autonomy or independence-based solutions. Taking Conelli’s (2013) and Polizzi’s (2013) works on Southern Italy (aka Mezzogiorno) and postcoloniality as fundamental premises, this work seeks to interpret this phenomenon in the light of the theoretical tools provided by postcolonial studies, and in particular by the concept of postcolonial utopia, formulated, among others, by Ashcroft (2012). A key element is memory, whereby historical chronicles become, ...
Italian popular music abroad: marketing and consuming Italy’s popstars in the UK 1958-1978
La Valle dell'Eden, 2021
In November 2016, a new album of Italian popular music was released on the UK market: Bruno Tonioli: An Italian Romance featured three CDs of ‘popular Italian classics’, ‘Italian movie themes and composers’, and ‘Italian opera arias and chilled classics’, curated by choreographer and celebrity Bruno Tonioli (most famous with UK audiences as a judge on BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing). Significantly, though, the Italian classics here are not the original songs performed by the Italian singers who Italian audiences would associate with these tracks; rather, they are covered by singers like Dean Martin, Doris Day and Engelbert Humperdinck. It is almost as if, in order to ensure the success of such a CD in the UK, the audience requires a trusted intercultural mediator to curate and explain the significance of these songs, which are presented, often in translation, by singers that the audience already recognise and value. Without such cultural translation, Italian singers seemingly cannot be appreciated by English listeners. The marketing strategy behind the Tonioli collection thus sheds light on the apparent musical parochialism present in the UK: as music journalist Lucy Todd has argued, ‘while other European countries and America have traditionally been more open to music in languages other than their own, the British charts have been fairly resistant to anything not in English’ (2018). Yet despite this apparent resistance, Italian popular music has been present in the UK since the establishment in the 1950s of la canzone italiana. Aside from performances on Eurovision, televised by the BBC from 1956, Italy’s popstars featured on several popular programmes from the 1960s onwards: Rita Pavone appeared in 1966 on the popular Saturday night variety programme The Val Doonican Show and in 1967 on the children’s series Crackerjack. Mina performed in 1968 on the Saturday light entertainment programme, The Rolf Harris Show. And the launch in 1966 on BBC2 of the series International Cabaret, hosted by comedian Kenneth Williams, saw repeat performances on UK television by Pavone and Mina, alongside Domenico Modugno, Claudio Villa, Umberto Bindi, and Milva. Italian artists also released LPs for the English-speaking market in this period, including Modugno’s eponymous album in 1959, Pavone’s Rita Pavone: The International Teen-age Sensation in 1964, Mina’s Bellissima in 1968, and Lucio Battisti’s Images, released on the US and UK market in 1977. This article aims to analyse the presence in the UK of these Italian popstars between 1958 and 1977, exploring how they were ‘translated’ for the UK market, how their music was marketed, and how they were consumed by the UK audience across different media platforms. The article analyses in particular the television performances and UK album covers of these singers, in order to shed light on the processes of cultural translation required to launch an Italian singer on the UK market, and the strategies by which television, radio, and the music industry in fact encouraged the consumption of Italian pop music in the UK in this period.
“ Are we playing like Music-Stars ? ” Placing Emerging Artists on the Italian Music Scene
2016
The Italian emerging bands chase success on the footprint of popular artists by playing rhythmic danceable and happy songs. Our finding comes out from a study of the Italian music scene and how the new generation of musicians relate with the tradition of their country. By analyzing Spotify data we investigated the peculiarity of regional music and we placed emerging bands within the musical movements defined by already successful artists. The approach proposed and the results obtained are a first attempt to outline rules suggesting the importance of those features needed to increase popularity in the Italian music scene.
Contemporary music in central Italy: an overview of recent decades
2012
The present article tries to make thematic the geographical plan of the present volume, by examining the major focal points of Contemporary Music in Central Italy which act as centres disseminating compositional trends through a long-established interest in recent music, as well as didactical structures and important teachers. Clearly, Rome is a more infl uential centre than Florence (where the endemic tendency of Florentine culture towards a sense of order, the settlement there of Dallapiccola, and the rise of a pioneering activity in the fi eld of electronic music since the '60s are noteworthy); this is due to the teaching-through different generations-of Petrassi, Guaccero, Donatoni, Corghi and now Fedele, as well as the presence of many musical institutions, and the availability of artists and writers involved in exchanges and collaborations with composers. For this reason, many composers who were educated or active in Rome developed an outstanding-often prophetic-predilection for mix-media or theatrical works. After Bussotti, Guaccero, Macchi and Bertoncini, Giorgio Battistelli is a pivotal fi gure representing this trend in the next generation of composers; nonetheless an aptitude for it can be perceived also in other composers from both generations (Clementi, Pennisi and Renosto; Sbordoni, Lombardi, Rendine, D'Amico and De Rossi Re), including among the younger ones Silvia Colasanti, Roberta Vacca and Francesco Antonioni. In parallel, electronic music has been cultivated by Evangelisti and Branchi, as a way of renewing musical thought and language from their foundations: researches in the musical application of digital processing have been remarkable in Rome, along with experimentation in real time sound-generation and-transformation (Nottoli, Lupone, Di Scipio). On the whole, the generation born in the 1950s seems to tend (in aesthetics as well as in poetics) towards a change of thinking about musical form, integrating paradigmatic (structural) categories, typical of serial music, with syntagmatic (fi ctional) ones. Such an integration is perceivable as early as in the works of Donatoni, which have widely infl uenced many younger Italian composers, whether they have studied under him or not. The compositional horizon in Central Italy will be examined, with a special focus on that generation, with regard to two issues: 1) Has this change been determined (or helped) by post-modernism? Before post-modernism became widespread during the 1980s, some composers from Rome had already elaborated a language which included heterogeneous sound materials and playing with musical codes, even if they did not deny the necessity of historical progress of musical language. Furthermore, postmodernism doesn't suffi ce to explain the music of many composers, for whom the stratifi cation of musical language and the sphericity of internal relationship inside a work is a result of the theory of complexity. 2) What is the aesthetical and poetical tendency in the youngest generation of composers, since a radicalization between a fi ctional and a visionary approach seems to have been established in their music?