2019 - Music and Criticism toward the 1980s.pdf

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.

Volume!, 2017

This collection of seventeen essays constitutes a fundamental contribution to Italian popular music studies outside of the Italian-speaking community. It is edited by Franco Fabbri and Goffredo Plastino, two leading voices in popular music studies and important figures for IASPM. The volume is part of Routledge’s Global Popular Music Series, also edited by Fabbri and Plastino, which aims to provide specialist and non-specialist audiences alike with a well-informed and up-to-date introduction ...

This book is about Italian popular music. But how would its subject be referred to in Italy? Which terms do Italians use to designate the concept usually referred to, in English, by the expression "popular music?" A minority of Italian speakers actually uses the English term: academics and students (not all of them), music critics (not all of them), musicians and people in the music business (just a few). But it can be said that the number of Italians who understand the meaning of this expression-as intended by popular music scholars around the world-is increasing. "Popular music" began to appear in Italian in the 1980s and 1990s, when the first wave of international popular music studies found its way into Italian journals such as Musica/Realtà, and when some early "classics" were translated into Italian. The proceedings of the Second International Conference of IASPM (Italian version) were published in 1985, with the title What Is Popular Music? 41 saggi, ricerche, interventi sulla musica di ogni giorno; the translation of Richard Middleton's Studying Popular Music was published in 1994 as Studiare la popular music; a collection of essays by Philip Tagg, which came out the same year, was titled Popular Music. Da Kojak al rave; and the 2002 second edition of Franco Fabbri's Il suono in cui viviamo was subtitled Saggi sulla popular music. Of course, at least since the 1960s many Italians had been aware that "pop music" (in Italian: musica pop) was an abbreviation of "popular music," but they understood it as a foreign genre that some Italian musicians were copying. Starting from the 1970s, and especially during the 1990s and early 2000s, there was an attempt to use the expression musica popolare, a literal translation of "popular music," to designate the same semantic area covered by the English term-a symptom of the growing influence of Anglophone music journalism and popular music studies. Yet musica popolare had been widely used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to refer to folk music (orally transmitted, traditional music), and as such it had been appropriated by folklorists and ethnomusicologists. 1 To avoid possible semantic and academic conflicts, the term musica popolare contemporanea was introduced, and enjoyed some support by music critics and politicians. It was used in the text of a legislative proposal presented to Italian Parliament, aiming to modify existing regulations on the public

There must be music Italians listen to. Stereotypical representations of Italians in Hollywood films or TV soaps almost invariably place music in the background: arias, mandolins, and the unavoidable accordion spreading its sound around a Baroque fountain, in immortal Rome. Yes, Italy is famous for its theatres, for its operatic singers (from Enrico Caruso to Beniamino Gigli to Luciano Pavarotti), for its conductors (

Ph. D. dissertation defended at the University of Huddersfield, U.K. A commentary on my publications on 1) Music and Society in Italy; 2) A psychoanalytical interpretation on myths on the origins of music, and the minimalist turn of the 1980s; 3) Bob Dylan and American culture; 4) Italian singer-songwriters; 5) Popular music as a planetary experiment.

Popular Music, 2007

In this essay I propose an analysis of the Sanremo Italian Song Festival from 1964 to 1967, to which is added an introduction about its history and musical, social and cultural features. The aim of the essay is not only to propose a different perspective on the songs presented at the Festival in the 1960s, but also to re-configure our understanding of the popular music mainstream and the mechanisms of musical change in our mass-mediated and industrialised societies, as well as the question of identifying the peculiarities of the Italian canzone.

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 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.

In the United States, the recent twenty years have seen the emergence of what might be defined as a " flat world " (Thomas L. Friedman) of musical styles – a reshaped cultural environment in which many listeners and scholars no longer view classical music as more sophisticated than other styles. The highbrow/ lowbrow distinction that once made the engagement with classical music a marker of cultural and intellectual superiority has been largely replaced by a sense that any style of music may be interesting and sophisticated in its own ways. The result of this flattening of the hierarchies of musical prestige places the meaning of the term " popular music " in question. This article traces the historical conditions in which the highbrow/lowbrow distinction arose in the United States, how distinctions in musical styles were developed, and how advances in digital technology have hastened the flattening of stylistic hierarchies, rendering the term " popular music " increasingly useless except in a historical sense. In his 2005 bestselling book, The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman posits the idea of an emergent " flat world " created by digital technology and increased globalization. In the United States, the recent twenty years have also seen the emergence of what might be thought of as a flat world of musical styles – a reshaped cultural environment in which many listeners and scholars no longer view classical music as necessarily more sophisticated than other styles. The highbrow/lowbrow distinction that once made the engagement with classical music a marker of cultural and intellectual sophistication (and even superiority) has been largely replaced by a sense that any style of music may be interesting and sophisticated in its own way. The result of this flattening of the hierarchy of musical prestige places the meaning of the term " popular music " in question. Chronically hard to define, " popular music " arose as a label not so much because of what the music was, but more importantly because of what it was not – classical

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, ...