Papers by Jacopo Tomatis
Sin dalla loro iniziale definizione in seno all’accademia anglofona, i popular music studies hann... more Sin dalla loro iniziale definizione in seno all’accademia anglofona, i popular music studies hanno avviato un fertile dibattito con gli studi di genere, nel più ampio contesto degli studi culturali. In Italia, tuttavia, raramente questo dibattito è stato preso in considerazione fino a tempi recenti, e ancor più raramente le vicende della popular music italiana sono state lette attraverso i paradigmi messi a disposizione dai gender studies.
Questo intervento si propone di indagare come la nascita e lo sviluppo della figura del cantautore italiano, a partire dai primi anni Sessanta, sia inevitabilmente collegata a questioni di genere.
Da un punto di vista storico, è evidente come il canone della canzone d’autore italiana sia composto quasi esclusivamente da musicisti maschi, con le donne quasi sempre relegate al ruolo di interpreti di brani altrui. Il caso di Maria Monti o Daisy Lumini – cantautrici che incidono per le stesse etichette e negli stessi anni di Gino Paoli, Giorgio Gaber e degli altri esponenti della prima generazione dei cantautori italiani – è emblematico: escluse dal canone dei cantautori, abbandonano ben presto la carriera di cantautrici per divenire “semplici” cantanti.
Da un punto di vista critico, la costruzione dell’immagine del cantautore passa inoltre attraverso strategie connesse con la mascolinità del performer, ora esaltata in chiave “machista” o misogina, ora negata e rappresentata come “debole”. In entrambi i casi, la mascolinità del cantautore è interpretabile come strategia di autenticazione, come mezzo funzionale alla costruzione della sua immagine di personaggio “vero”, “autentico”.
La performance della mascolinità (esaltata o negata) è dunque centrale nella codificazione delle convenzioni del genere dei cantautori, e nella costruzione dell’immagine del cantautore così come la conosciamo ancora oggi.
Popular music histories have paid close attention to the connection between the rise of rock’n’ro... more Popular music histories have paid close attention to the connection between the rise of rock’n’roll in the United States in the 1950s, and a wave of “moral panic” (Cohen 2002) spread by media all around the world. Yet, the way the meanings linked with the new rock’n’roll were “translated” into different music scenes and national cultures, and acknowledged by local audiences, deserves more consideration.
The Italian case offers a meaningful example. The paper will analyse how rock’n’roll was introduced to the Italian public by the media around 1956, in association with images of youth, rebellion, and violence, before the music itself (i.e.: rock’n’roll records, rock’n’roll movie soundtracks, etc.) was made available in Italy. The impact of rock’n’roll on Italian popular music – as well as the general process through which new music genres spread worldwide – cannot be fully understood without considering paradoxes as such.
Popular music studies rarely consider genres as cultural concepts both historically and socially ... more Popular music studies rarely consider genres as cultural concepts both historically and socially contingent. From a diachronic perspective, music journalistic discourse can be used to examine how music categories are created, named and negotiated between music industry, musicians, critics and fans, either for practical or aesthetic purposes. Italian teen pop magazines in the mid-1960s provide a valuable case study. This article will focus on two Italian teen publications, Ciao amici and Big, between 1964 and 1967, and will connect the rhetoric they used to the rise of youth community in the same period. The genre of musica nostra (music of our own) was introduced to describe the music teenagers were listening to, and suggested the pride of belonging to a community of peers. In the last section I will outline how such an ideology of youth community was connected to authenticity and to specific aesthetic values.
Musica/Realtà, 94, marzo 2011, Lim, Lucca. ISBN: 978-88-7096-640-4, Mar 2011
Popular Music Worlds, Popular Music Histories, IASPM 15th International Conference Proceedings, 13 - 17 July 2009 Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, edited by Stahl, Geoff and Gyde, Alex, pp. 438-452., 2012
IASPM@ Journal, Jan 2011
Il caso dei cantautori italiani è esemplare di come etichettiamo e valutiamo, attraverso processi... more Il caso dei cantautori italiani è esemplare di come etichettiamo e valutiamo, attraverso processi di selezione ideologica, i fatti musicali. I cantautori, probabilmente il genere musicale più determinante nella storia della popular music italiana, nascono alla fine del 1960, negli anni del boom dell'Italia postbellica, e costruiscono la loro identità in opposizione alla tradizione della canzone, guadagnando da subito una supremazia estetica sugli altri generi che dura ancora oggi. Questo articolo si propone di analizzare l'origine del neologismo "cantautore" e la sua rapida diffusione attraverso i media. La parola ha un ruolo fondamentale nella definizione e codificazione del genere.
Book Chapters by Jacopo Tomatis
Sounds, Societies, Significations Numanistic Approaches to Music, edited by Rima Povilionienė
The article aims to outline some key features of Italian popular music in the context of the nati... more The article aims to outline some key features of Italian popular music in the context of the national commercial broadcasting system, which had developed in Italy since the 1980s, and was fully established by the early 1990s. Issues regarding both music production and consumption will be considered. Also, some methodological concerns in the study of popular music history will be raised. The case study presented here (the pop band 883) offers a valuable illustration of new trends in Italian music and media, in addition to some related methodological questions.
• La memoria delle canzoni. Popular music e identità italiana, a cura di Alessandro Carrera, Punto a Capo editrice, Novi Ligure 2017, pp. 212-234. ISBN 978-88-6679-083-9.
In La memoria delle canzoni. Popular music e identità italiana, a cura di Alessandro Carrera, Pun... more In La memoria delle canzoni. Popular music e identità italiana, a cura di Alessandro Carrera, Punto a Capo editrice, Novi Ligure 2017, pp. 212-234. ISBN 978-88-6679-083-9.
The article aims to outline some key features of Italian popular music in the context of the national commercial broadcasting system, which had developed in Italy since the 1980s, and was fully established by the early 1990s. Issues regarding both music production and consumption will be considered. Also, some methodological concerns in the study of popular music history will be raised. The case study presented here (the pop band 883) offers a valuable illustration of new trends in Italian music and media, in addition to some related methodological questions.
il primo (quasi) cantautore JACOPO TOMATIS Umberto Bindi è il meno ascoltato dei primi cantautori... more il primo (quasi) cantautore JACOPO TOMATIS Umberto Bindi è il meno ascoltato dei primi cantautori, il più diverso, il più difficile da razionalizzare secondo la nostra idea di cantautore. Nato a Bogliasco -e dunque sulla carta perfetto rappresentante della cosiddetta «Scuola genovese», composta perlopiù da genovesi nati altrove -è stato iscritto nella storia della canzone d'autore italiana come un'anomalia. Da un lato, sfogliando la ricca pubblicistica sul genere, si ha a volte l'impressione che ci si senta quasi costretti a «canonizzarlo» vicino ai Paoli e ai Tenco. Lui che, tecnicamente parlando, componeva solo le musiche delle sue canzoni, affidandosi a parolieri (per quanto di riconosciuto valore come Giorgio Calabrese). Dall'altro, a fronte di migliaia di pagine scritte sui primi cantautori, Bindi risulta decisamente sottoindagato 1 . Alcuni collegano la sua «diversità» con l'omosessualità prima negata e poi pudicamente nascosta, e che favorì sicuramente il suo isolamento artistico, e l'allontanamento dagli spazi televisivi e discografici. Discriminato da un sistema musicale che mai ha brillato in quanto a progressismo, quasi sicuramente. Ma il cantautore, nel senso comune, è associato ad un'immagine maschile (talvolta maschilista: basta pensare a molte classici della canzone d'autore) molto più di quanto comunemente si pensi, o si voglia pensare. In Italia, i cantautori omosessuali dichiarati sono rari, e altrettanto rare -fino a tempi recenti -sono state le cantautrici. Molti ricordano Bindi come musicista dotato e raffinato, di studi classici, l'unico vero musicista fra i primi cantautori, perlopiù descritti come artisti naïf dediti all'abuso del giro di do. È questo da sempre un grande paradosso di chi ha scritto della canzone d'autore italiana come se fosse poesia, fino a passaggi che suonano come veri e propri lapsus: «È improprio definirlo un cantautore perché era più esattamente un musicista», scrive ad esempio Jachia (1998, p. 55). Altri ancora, ad esempio Leonardo Colombati (2011, p. 775) riportano di come Bindi, in mezzo ad amici appassionati di Kafka e Rimbaud, fosse l'unico a non essere un «lettore forte». Vista la tradizione della pubblicistica sulla canzone d'autore in Italia, scrivere di Bindi -non potendolo trattare come un poeta -è più difficile: bisogna parlare di musica, o di altro.
La musica folk, a cura di Goffredo Plastino, 2016
La musica folk, a cura di Goffredo Plastino, 2016
Il folk music revival in Italia, a cura di Goffredo Plastino, 2016
The Singer-Songwriter in Europe: Paradigms, Politics and Place, edited by Stuart Green and Isabelle Marc, 2016, pp. 79-91.
The singer-songwriter has been the focus of most discourses on aesthetic values in Italian popula... more The singer-songwriter has been the focus of most discourses on aesthetic values in Italian popular music since his appearance in the early 1960s; an ideology of authorship has shaped the way audiences have made sense of popular music in Italy since then. The perceived connection between the canzone d’autore genre and literature authenticated the former as the quintessential Italian “art song”, and the cantautori (singer-songwriters) as “true poets” (Tomatis, 2013). Authorship as a form of authentication is not to be found in Italian popular music only. Yet, its centrality in the history of Italian canzone convincingly points it out as a national peculiarity.
Despite the existence of a feminine counterpart to the cantautore, both in the Italian language and Italian popular music (the cantautrice), the canzone d’autore has always been a men’s genre. Male singer-songwriters are unquestionably the norm in the canzone d’autore, while female are deviations from that norm. Even if a small number of records by female singer-songwriters were released during the 1960s and 1970s, a tradition of women’s canzone d’autore only established itself in the last decades, and cantautrici are still a minority.
Although the canzone d’autore is arguably the most common topic in the field of Italian popular music studies, no attention at all has been paid to this imbalance.
This chapter should not be read neither as a (possibly poor) attempt of writing a feminist history of the canzone d’autore, nor as an (even poorer) effort to provide a feminist account on Italian popular music history. Yet, analytical tools developed by feminist historians can be usefully employed for the purpose of a more attentive and conscious methodology for the study of popular music histories (Scott, 1988), and especially to shed light on how gender plays a role in the way people organize music, also through the formulation of value judgements which are gender-biased. Genre conventions (Fabbri, 2012) can be structured around gender, and include gender positions.
Made in Italy. Studies in Italian Popular Music, edited by Plastino, Goffredo and Fabbri, Franco, Routledge, pp. 87-99. ISBN: 978-0-415-89976-5, 2013
Conference Presentations by Jacopo Tomatis
Accademia Musicale Chigiana, 2020
Music and images, seeing and hearing have always been inextricably linked. Even when more autonom... more Music and images, seeing and hearing have always been inextricably linked. Even when more autonomous concepts of music developed at various times through the centuries, they arguably served to keep at bay the ever-present visual dimensions of the act of listening. When we listen to music, do we just listen? When we see a painting, or anything else, do we just watch?
The last few decades, however, have witnessed the advent of an ever more pervasive visuality. From the development of technology to social media to special effects, seeing is foregrounded like never before. What does this mean for music? How do music’s materialities answer to the materialities of visual objects and arts? Do these new developments affect our listening and performance experiences? What categories are particularly useful to explain the connections between musical and visual domains? How are different musical traditions, from “classical” music and opera to jazz, popular and folk music being re- envisaged?
The aim of the conference Re-envisaging Music: Listening in the Visual Age is to explore the new scenarios created by these questions and how they inevitably change the dimension of spectatorship, the way we associate music with sites of performance, how the bodies of the performers act, the act of listening, and how we understand traditions and moving images.
The program is available at the following link: https://journal.chigiana.org/conference2020/
Pre-recorded videos of the individual papers are available on CHIGIANA DIGITAL, the digital platform of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana.
Access to CHIGIANA DIGITAL is free but it is necessary to register at the following link: https://digital.chigiana.org/sign-up-chigiana-conference-2020/
The live sessions will take place on Zoom and will include discussions with the authors of the papers and the presentation of the keynote speaker. It will be possible to post questions in advance. The live discussions will also be accessible from the CHIGIANA DIGITAL.
This paper aims at outlining some key innovations in Italian popular music in the early ages of n... more This paper aims at outlining some key innovations in Italian popular music in the early ages of national commercial broadcasting, taking into account both music production and consumption. Most of these tendencies still to this present days affects the way Italian popular music is made and consumed.
The case of pop band 883 offer a valuable exemplification of such new trends, developed since the 1980s. Leaded by singer and songwriter Max Pezzali, 883 debuted in 1992. The band immediately reached a great success and became a youth phenomenon, thanks to the support of commercial broadcasting: 883 were produced by famous DJ and entrepreneur Claudio Cecchetto, head of Radio Deejay, a private station associated with TV channel Canale 5. 883’s songs featured linguistic innovations, offered an innovative worldview, and contained constant references to 1980s popular culture and music, later including a sort of “generational nostalgia”. These features will be connected to the transformations of Italian society that occurred during the 1980s and early 1990s, and to the renovated system of Italian media.
After having being labelled as “trash pop” for years, 883 are nowadays honoured by younger musicians (among them, rappers), as a part of late-20th century revival.
Key-words: Italy; popular music; media; commercial broadcasting;1980s-1990s.
Il ruolo decisivo della chanson francese nella formazione culturale dei cantautori italiani dei p... more Il ruolo decisivo della chanson francese nella formazione culturale dei cantautori italiani dei primi Sessanta è ampiamente documentato, ed è forse alla base della tendenza a ritenere la canzone d’autore una forma di poesia cantata. Tuttavia, se calato nel contesto della popular music coeva, il riferimento esplicito ad esempi francesi già culturalmente accreditati (soprattutto in virtù del loro legame con la letteratura) si tramuta innanzitutto in una inedita rivendicazione del possibile valore artistico della «canzonetta», e cela talora una marcata adesione a modelli musicali americani.
I protagonisti di questa «riforma», lungi dall’essere degli asociali poeti underground francofili, esplodono come fenomeno discografico di massa nel 1960; vanno a Sanremo e sulle copertine dei rotocalchi.
L’ipotesi da cui muove questo paper è che nella costruzione dell’immagine dei primi cantautori come «artisti» (e nella loro ricezione come tali) entri in gioco un uso strumentale della loro ispirazione francese, che tiene insieme un fascio di stereotipi nazionali, dalla bohème ai poeti maledetti, dall’esistenzialismo ai trovatori medievali. Questi cliché di «francesità» proiettano intorno ai cantautori un’aura ora di raffinatezza e trasgressione, ora di autenticità e di impegno, che viene incanalata e sfruttata. O, al contrario, politicamente elusa: non è un caso se il termine chansonnier, in uso in Italia per indicare gli autori-cantanti sul modello di Brassens (con una variazione significativa rispetto all’uso francese), viene rapidamente accantonato per il più «rassicurante» cantautore.
Can the way we classify and qualify music, and the way we make sense of such recognition – in a h... more Can the way we classify and qualify music, and the way we make sense of such recognition – in a highly globalized music world – be based on “global” musical genres? Leading rock-focused models and anglocentric categories are sometimes poor in describing other musical scenes, where local articulations of musical genres seem to prevail in the discourses about music.
The way Italian “indie” music – and most notably “indie rock” (“rock indipendente”: a true musical genre?) is conceived by Italian interpretive communities can provide a valuable case study.
Italian popular music has been following the international agenda of music industry since the end of the 1950s. Yet, since 1960 – before the mass import of British music – Italian canzone has been characterised by a strong ideologisation of the auteur’s role, perfectly embodied by its main character: the cantautore. In Italy, authenticity-based aesthetics, whose key role in evaluating music is noted by most authors – are thus mostly linked to the role played by an auteur. In the last decades, the rise of the category of “indie” music, mainly influenced by anglo-american models, set an ideology of authenticity based on the value of “being independent”, which works side-by-side with the auteur ideology.
Since its invention in 1960, the neologism “cantautore” (contraction of “cantante-autore”, i.e. “... more Since its invention in 1960, the neologism “cantautore” (contraction of “cantante-autore”, i.e. “singer-songwriter”) has conveyed more than a denotative meaning: being a cantautore meant singing “authentic” songs, opposing the traditional clichés, even in spite of being a proper singer-songwriter. Nowadays, the concept of “canzone d’autore” (“auteur song”), which spread since 1974, has been attracting to its semantic domain other musical events “of quality” and other genres, like hip hop, rock, etc. As a form of national “song culture”, canzone d’autore has been asserting its position within the official cultural system; the cultural prestige it gained has established an auteur-based aesthetic of canzone, which still affects artistic, expressive, semantic and economic strategies of Italian popular music.
This paper - drawing on a five-year long research into music magazines, press releases, press photos, lp sleeves and covers, letters, etc. for my undergraduate thesis and subsequent M.A. project - aims to trace back the origin of the concepts of “cantautore” and “canzone d’autore” in Italian popular music discourse since 1960s, and to follow the diachronic development of the related auteur ideology. The genre of canzone d’autore can thus be considered an Italian peculiarity, and provides a useful perspective to question the way we qualify and classify music, in order to progress beyond the limits of a rock-focused viewpoint.
Uploads
Papers by Jacopo Tomatis
Questo intervento si propone di indagare come la nascita e lo sviluppo della figura del cantautore italiano, a partire dai primi anni Sessanta, sia inevitabilmente collegata a questioni di genere.
Da un punto di vista storico, è evidente come il canone della canzone d’autore italiana sia composto quasi esclusivamente da musicisti maschi, con le donne quasi sempre relegate al ruolo di interpreti di brani altrui. Il caso di Maria Monti o Daisy Lumini – cantautrici che incidono per le stesse etichette e negli stessi anni di Gino Paoli, Giorgio Gaber e degli altri esponenti della prima generazione dei cantautori italiani – è emblematico: escluse dal canone dei cantautori, abbandonano ben presto la carriera di cantautrici per divenire “semplici” cantanti.
Da un punto di vista critico, la costruzione dell’immagine del cantautore passa inoltre attraverso strategie connesse con la mascolinità del performer, ora esaltata in chiave “machista” o misogina, ora negata e rappresentata come “debole”. In entrambi i casi, la mascolinità del cantautore è interpretabile come strategia di autenticazione, come mezzo funzionale alla costruzione della sua immagine di personaggio “vero”, “autentico”.
La performance della mascolinità (esaltata o negata) è dunque centrale nella codificazione delle convenzioni del genere dei cantautori, e nella costruzione dell’immagine del cantautore così come la conosciamo ancora oggi.
The Italian case offers a meaningful example. The paper will analyse how rock’n’roll was introduced to the Italian public by the media around 1956, in association with images of youth, rebellion, and violence, before the music itself (i.e.: rock’n’roll records, rock’n’roll movie soundtracks, etc.) was made available in Italy. The impact of rock’n’roll on Italian popular music – as well as the general process through which new music genres spread worldwide – cannot be fully understood without considering paradoxes as such.
Book Chapters by Jacopo Tomatis
The article aims to outline some key features of Italian popular music in the context of the national commercial broadcasting system, which had developed in Italy since the 1980s, and was fully established by the early 1990s. Issues regarding both music production and consumption will be considered. Also, some methodological concerns in the study of popular music history will be raised. The case study presented here (the pop band 883) offers a valuable illustration of new trends in Italian music and media, in addition to some related methodological questions.
Despite the existence of a feminine counterpart to the cantautore, both in the Italian language and Italian popular music (the cantautrice), the canzone d’autore has always been a men’s genre. Male singer-songwriters are unquestionably the norm in the canzone d’autore, while female are deviations from that norm. Even if a small number of records by female singer-songwriters were released during the 1960s and 1970s, a tradition of women’s canzone d’autore only established itself in the last decades, and cantautrici are still a minority.
Although the canzone d’autore is arguably the most common topic in the field of Italian popular music studies, no attention at all has been paid to this imbalance.
This chapter should not be read neither as a (possibly poor) attempt of writing a feminist history of the canzone d’autore, nor as an (even poorer) effort to provide a feminist account on Italian popular music history. Yet, analytical tools developed by feminist historians can be usefully employed for the purpose of a more attentive and conscious methodology for the study of popular music histories (Scott, 1988), and especially to shed light on how gender plays a role in the way people organize music, also through the formulation of value judgements which are gender-biased. Genre conventions (Fabbri, 2012) can be structured around gender, and include gender positions.
Conference Presentations by Jacopo Tomatis
The last few decades, however, have witnessed the advent of an ever more pervasive visuality. From the development of technology to social media to special effects, seeing is foregrounded like never before. What does this mean for music? How do music’s materialities answer to the materialities of visual objects and arts? Do these new developments affect our listening and performance experiences? What categories are particularly useful to explain the connections between musical and visual domains? How are different musical traditions, from “classical” music and opera to jazz, popular and folk music being re- envisaged?
The aim of the conference Re-envisaging Music: Listening in the Visual Age is to explore the new scenarios created by these questions and how they inevitably change the dimension of spectatorship, the way we associate music with sites of performance, how the bodies of the performers act, the act of listening, and how we understand traditions and moving images.
The program is available at the following link: https://journal.chigiana.org/conference2020/
Pre-recorded videos of the individual papers are available on CHIGIANA DIGITAL, the digital platform of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana.
Access to CHIGIANA DIGITAL is free but it is necessary to register at the following link: https://digital.chigiana.org/sign-up-chigiana-conference-2020/
The live sessions will take place on Zoom and will include discussions with the authors of the papers and the presentation of the keynote speaker. It will be possible to post questions in advance. The live discussions will also be accessible from the CHIGIANA DIGITAL.
The case of pop band 883 offer a valuable exemplification of such new trends, developed since the 1980s. Leaded by singer and songwriter Max Pezzali, 883 debuted in 1992. The band immediately reached a great success and became a youth phenomenon, thanks to the support of commercial broadcasting: 883 were produced by famous DJ and entrepreneur Claudio Cecchetto, head of Radio Deejay, a private station associated with TV channel Canale 5. 883’s songs featured linguistic innovations, offered an innovative worldview, and contained constant references to 1980s popular culture and music, later including a sort of “generational nostalgia”. These features will be connected to the transformations of Italian society that occurred during the 1980s and early 1990s, and to the renovated system of Italian media.
After having being labelled as “trash pop” for years, 883 are nowadays honoured by younger musicians (among them, rappers), as a part of late-20th century revival.
Key-words: Italy; popular music; media; commercial broadcasting;1980s-1990s.
I protagonisti di questa «riforma», lungi dall’essere degli asociali poeti underground francofili, esplodono come fenomeno discografico di massa nel 1960; vanno a Sanremo e sulle copertine dei rotocalchi.
L’ipotesi da cui muove questo paper è che nella costruzione dell’immagine dei primi cantautori come «artisti» (e nella loro ricezione come tali) entri in gioco un uso strumentale della loro ispirazione francese, che tiene insieme un fascio di stereotipi nazionali, dalla bohème ai poeti maledetti, dall’esistenzialismo ai trovatori medievali. Questi cliché di «francesità» proiettano intorno ai cantautori un’aura ora di raffinatezza e trasgressione, ora di autenticità e di impegno, che viene incanalata e sfruttata. O, al contrario, politicamente elusa: non è un caso se il termine chansonnier, in uso in Italia per indicare gli autori-cantanti sul modello di Brassens (con una variazione significativa rispetto all’uso francese), viene rapidamente accantonato per il più «rassicurante» cantautore.
The way Italian “indie” music – and most notably “indie rock” (“rock indipendente”: a true musical genre?) is conceived by Italian interpretive communities can provide a valuable case study.
Italian popular music has been following the international agenda of music industry since the end of the 1950s. Yet, since 1960 – before the mass import of British music – Italian canzone has been characterised by a strong ideologisation of the auteur’s role, perfectly embodied by its main character: the cantautore. In Italy, authenticity-based aesthetics, whose key role in evaluating music is noted by most authors – are thus mostly linked to the role played by an auteur. In the last decades, the rise of the category of “indie” music, mainly influenced by anglo-american models, set an ideology of authenticity based on the value of “being independent”, which works side-by-side with the auteur ideology.
This paper - drawing on a five-year long research into music magazines, press releases, press photos, lp sleeves and covers, letters, etc. for my undergraduate thesis and subsequent M.A. project - aims to trace back the origin of the concepts of “cantautore” and “canzone d’autore” in Italian popular music discourse since 1960s, and to follow the diachronic development of the related auteur ideology. The genre of canzone d’autore can thus be considered an Italian peculiarity, and provides a useful perspective to question the way we qualify and classify music, in order to progress beyond the limits of a rock-focused viewpoint.
Questo intervento si propone di indagare come la nascita e lo sviluppo della figura del cantautore italiano, a partire dai primi anni Sessanta, sia inevitabilmente collegata a questioni di genere.
Da un punto di vista storico, è evidente come il canone della canzone d’autore italiana sia composto quasi esclusivamente da musicisti maschi, con le donne quasi sempre relegate al ruolo di interpreti di brani altrui. Il caso di Maria Monti o Daisy Lumini – cantautrici che incidono per le stesse etichette e negli stessi anni di Gino Paoli, Giorgio Gaber e degli altri esponenti della prima generazione dei cantautori italiani – è emblematico: escluse dal canone dei cantautori, abbandonano ben presto la carriera di cantautrici per divenire “semplici” cantanti.
Da un punto di vista critico, la costruzione dell’immagine del cantautore passa inoltre attraverso strategie connesse con la mascolinità del performer, ora esaltata in chiave “machista” o misogina, ora negata e rappresentata come “debole”. In entrambi i casi, la mascolinità del cantautore è interpretabile come strategia di autenticazione, come mezzo funzionale alla costruzione della sua immagine di personaggio “vero”, “autentico”.
La performance della mascolinità (esaltata o negata) è dunque centrale nella codificazione delle convenzioni del genere dei cantautori, e nella costruzione dell’immagine del cantautore così come la conosciamo ancora oggi.
The Italian case offers a meaningful example. The paper will analyse how rock’n’roll was introduced to the Italian public by the media around 1956, in association with images of youth, rebellion, and violence, before the music itself (i.e.: rock’n’roll records, rock’n’roll movie soundtracks, etc.) was made available in Italy. The impact of rock’n’roll on Italian popular music – as well as the general process through which new music genres spread worldwide – cannot be fully understood without considering paradoxes as such.
The article aims to outline some key features of Italian popular music in the context of the national commercial broadcasting system, which had developed in Italy since the 1980s, and was fully established by the early 1990s. Issues regarding both music production and consumption will be considered. Also, some methodological concerns in the study of popular music history will be raised. The case study presented here (the pop band 883) offers a valuable illustration of new trends in Italian music and media, in addition to some related methodological questions.
Despite the existence of a feminine counterpart to the cantautore, both in the Italian language and Italian popular music (the cantautrice), the canzone d’autore has always been a men’s genre. Male singer-songwriters are unquestionably the norm in the canzone d’autore, while female are deviations from that norm. Even if a small number of records by female singer-songwriters were released during the 1960s and 1970s, a tradition of women’s canzone d’autore only established itself in the last decades, and cantautrici are still a minority.
Although the canzone d’autore is arguably the most common topic in the field of Italian popular music studies, no attention at all has been paid to this imbalance.
This chapter should not be read neither as a (possibly poor) attempt of writing a feminist history of the canzone d’autore, nor as an (even poorer) effort to provide a feminist account on Italian popular music history. Yet, analytical tools developed by feminist historians can be usefully employed for the purpose of a more attentive and conscious methodology for the study of popular music histories (Scott, 1988), and especially to shed light on how gender plays a role in the way people organize music, also through the formulation of value judgements which are gender-biased. Genre conventions (Fabbri, 2012) can be structured around gender, and include gender positions.
The last few decades, however, have witnessed the advent of an ever more pervasive visuality. From the development of technology to social media to special effects, seeing is foregrounded like never before. What does this mean for music? How do music’s materialities answer to the materialities of visual objects and arts? Do these new developments affect our listening and performance experiences? What categories are particularly useful to explain the connections between musical and visual domains? How are different musical traditions, from “classical” music and opera to jazz, popular and folk music being re- envisaged?
The aim of the conference Re-envisaging Music: Listening in the Visual Age is to explore the new scenarios created by these questions and how they inevitably change the dimension of spectatorship, the way we associate music with sites of performance, how the bodies of the performers act, the act of listening, and how we understand traditions and moving images.
The program is available at the following link: https://journal.chigiana.org/conference2020/
Pre-recorded videos of the individual papers are available on CHIGIANA DIGITAL, the digital platform of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana.
Access to CHIGIANA DIGITAL is free but it is necessary to register at the following link: https://digital.chigiana.org/sign-up-chigiana-conference-2020/
The live sessions will take place on Zoom and will include discussions with the authors of the papers and the presentation of the keynote speaker. It will be possible to post questions in advance. The live discussions will also be accessible from the CHIGIANA DIGITAL.
The case of pop band 883 offer a valuable exemplification of such new trends, developed since the 1980s. Leaded by singer and songwriter Max Pezzali, 883 debuted in 1992. The band immediately reached a great success and became a youth phenomenon, thanks to the support of commercial broadcasting: 883 were produced by famous DJ and entrepreneur Claudio Cecchetto, head of Radio Deejay, a private station associated with TV channel Canale 5. 883’s songs featured linguistic innovations, offered an innovative worldview, and contained constant references to 1980s popular culture and music, later including a sort of “generational nostalgia”. These features will be connected to the transformations of Italian society that occurred during the 1980s and early 1990s, and to the renovated system of Italian media.
After having being labelled as “trash pop” for years, 883 are nowadays honoured by younger musicians (among them, rappers), as a part of late-20th century revival.
Key-words: Italy; popular music; media; commercial broadcasting;1980s-1990s.
I protagonisti di questa «riforma», lungi dall’essere degli asociali poeti underground francofili, esplodono come fenomeno discografico di massa nel 1960; vanno a Sanremo e sulle copertine dei rotocalchi.
L’ipotesi da cui muove questo paper è che nella costruzione dell’immagine dei primi cantautori come «artisti» (e nella loro ricezione come tali) entri in gioco un uso strumentale della loro ispirazione francese, che tiene insieme un fascio di stereotipi nazionali, dalla bohème ai poeti maledetti, dall’esistenzialismo ai trovatori medievali. Questi cliché di «francesità» proiettano intorno ai cantautori un’aura ora di raffinatezza e trasgressione, ora di autenticità e di impegno, che viene incanalata e sfruttata. O, al contrario, politicamente elusa: non è un caso se il termine chansonnier, in uso in Italia per indicare gli autori-cantanti sul modello di Brassens (con una variazione significativa rispetto all’uso francese), viene rapidamente accantonato per il più «rassicurante» cantautore.
The way Italian “indie” music – and most notably “indie rock” (“rock indipendente”: a true musical genre?) is conceived by Italian interpretive communities can provide a valuable case study.
Italian popular music has been following the international agenda of music industry since the end of the 1950s. Yet, since 1960 – before the mass import of British music – Italian canzone has been characterised by a strong ideologisation of the auteur’s role, perfectly embodied by its main character: the cantautore. In Italy, authenticity-based aesthetics, whose key role in evaluating music is noted by most authors – are thus mostly linked to the role played by an auteur. In the last decades, the rise of the category of “indie” music, mainly influenced by anglo-american models, set an ideology of authenticity based on the value of “being independent”, which works side-by-side with the auteur ideology.
This paper - drawing on a five-year long research into music magazines, press releases, press photos, lp sleeves and covers, letters, etc. for my undergraduate thesis and subsequent M.A. project - aims to trace back the origin of the concepts of “cantautore” and “canzone d’autore” in Italian popular music discourse since 1960s, and to follow the diachronic development of the related auteur ideology. The genre of canzone d’autore can thus be considered an Italian peculiarity, and provides a useful perspective to question the way we qualify and classify music, in order to progress beyond the limits of a rock-focused viewpoint.
Nel divismo dei trap boys, nuove «icone pop»3 per molti adolescenti italiani4, è proprio la costruzione di self-narratives sulle piattaforme social a rappresentare l’elemento di mag- giore novità, insieme caratterizzante e problematico: caratterizzante perché appare ubiqua la dimensione della narrazione del sé, in un hic et nunc costantemente raccontato e mostrato, e che è sempre in prima persona, reso attraverso la soggettiva rovesciata dell’auto-inqua- dratura (fig. 1); problematico soprattutto in relazione al fatto che molte di queste digital identities prevedono la rappresentazione di stili di vita definiti e stigmatizzati, di volta in volta, come “pericolosi”, “antisociali”, “materialisti”, “sessisti”.
Il presente articolo si propone come studio preliminare di un genere musicale ancora ampiamente sottoindagato, ma che si è già imposto come centrale nel panorama mediale
dell’Italia di oggi. Dopo un tentativo di prima storicizzazione delle convenzioni di genere5 e di filogenia del concetto di “trap” nel nostro Paese (paragrafo 2), si metterà in luce la natura cross e transmediale6 di questa forma musicale (paragrafo 3), evidenziandone, in relazione al concetto di self-medialità, la dialettica tra “autentico” e “inautentico” con particolare riferimento alla messa in scena del sé dei trap boys italiani, sia attraverso le canzoni, sia attraverso i social media (paragrafi 4-5).
Popular music studies rarely consider genres as cultural concepts both historically and socially contingent. From a diachronic perspective, music journalistic discourse can be used to examine how music categories are created, named and negotiated between music industry, musicians, critics and fans, either for practical or aesthetic purposes. Italian teen pop magazines in the mid-1960s provide a valuable case study. This article will focus on two Italian teen publications, Ciao amici and Big, between 1964 and 1967, and will connect the rhetoric they used to the rise of youth community in the same period. The genre of musica nostra (music of our own) was introduced to describe the music teenagers were listening to, and suggested the pride of belonging to a community of peers. In the last section I will outline how such an ideology of youth community was connected to authenticity and to specific aesthetic values.
The 1980 edition of Sanremo marked a turning point in the history of the Festival: for the first time, there was no orchestra, the singers’ performances were lip-synced, the stage was designed like a disco, and the Festival re-invented itself as a TV show. The narrative that Sanremo presented of itself was contradictory: on the one hand, it celebrated the “spirit of the 1980s” with a “futurist” attitude; on the other, it nostalgically recalled its own traditions. Thanks to the re-launch of the Festival, and to its new international appeal, many songs which entered the competition during the decade are now part of the canon of the Italian canzone. This presents some interesting questions, given that most of these songs are considered as an epitome of music kitsch, as quintessential bad music.
The Sanremo Festival of the 1980s sits within a network of complex cultural dynamics, and can be understood only in the context of the changing Italian mediascape, and through an intermedial perspective. The songs must be considered as “objects” circulating around different media and contexts, from clubs to the TV, to radio and records. The di- alectic between the media context and the collective imagination of the 1980s offers the possibility to go beyond the opposition between “apocalyptical” and “integrated” posi- tions, which until now has characterized interpretations of the decade.
Keywords: Sanremo Festival, Italian popular music, media, nostalgia, Italianness