Call for Papers: Romanticism in Pop Music

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 ...

Embracing calls for inclusivity, music studies scholars have increasingly challenged the persistent investment in 19th-century art music and aesthetic values. While some claim that romantic works have been irreparably tarnished by generations of supremacist interpretations and associations, others contend that they remain relevant for contemporary politics because of the emancipatory promises they offer. This graduate course enters this debate by examining how contemporary musicians and artists can give new creative life to canonic works by investigating their historical aesthetic goals within the context our socio-political moment. By approaching romantic music from the perspective of both theory and praxis, students will study the disparate tactics used to adapt, restage, and reimagine 19th-century symphonic, ballet, opera, and chamber music.

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

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

Vox Popular: Journal of the Italian Branch of IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music), 2019

The author recalls the events and the social climate that fostered his approach to popular music criticism toward the end of the 1970s, which ushered in the publication of Musica e pubblico giovanile (1980 and 2014), the first attempt to outline a comprehensive critique of the impact of British and American pop, rock, jazz, and avant-garde experiments on the rapidly changing youth culture in Italy. The music of those years is revered today, but what is missing is the immediate relevance that music had in the lives of pretty much everyone back then, when music was the facebook of an entire generation. However, there were hard lessons to learn in the capitulation of rock to pop. Because artistic hierarchies mean little in pop, transmutations from indifferent pop songs to relevant artistry are always within reach. There is an almost anonymous, tapestry-like subjectivity operating the transition from, say, the original recording of Vangelis and Jon Anderson’s «State of Independence» to Donna Summer’s majestic reworking of the same song. Pop music does not need to be avant-garde in order to be at the forefront of what is happening.

The essay addresses the complexity of Romanticism in music as a single movement: while history tends to establish Romantic music as an artistic current with its specific features and its inner developments, the paper aims to show and explain how the aesthetical grounds of this current are diverse, at times rather opposite. The main musical/philosophical positions are treated: from Schumann to Berlioz, from Liszt to Wagner, from Debussy to Hanslick. Although the approach used is historical, particular attention is given to the aesthetical purposes of each discussed composer or philosopher.

Institute of Social Sciences, 2019