Premise:
“For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing!”, wrote Jacques Attali, who specified: “Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world”.
This course moves from this theoretical and methodological premise – shared by a long list of social thinkers, sociologists, economists and, more recently, media and popular culture scholars – to offer a different look on Italy.
WEEK 1: 1 – 3 September
Music, Culture and Society: some introductory concepts
How music means and relates to national character. Basic functions of the musical language. Music in history: three major stages, from folk to art to mass society. Production, consumption, the music business and its changing features: world and domestic markets, technological developments, global and local genres. Music as a source to understand Italian culture, history, and society. What is Italian music, its place within the international context, past and present. A look from the outside: accounts from foreign visitors and observers.
WEEK 2: 8 – 10 September
Historical and geographical background
Becoming familiar with Italian music: providing a basic knowledge of Italy’s history and geography, emphasizing the cultural and artistic dimensions, the evolution of taste, and the birth of the main genres. The three universes: folk, classical and popular music.
Folk music
Vernacular and local repertoires, a geography of traditional song from North to South. From national anthems to protest songs. World War I and the making of a national songbook. From Resistenza to students’ movements: partisan songs to new political chants. Bella ciao, a song of rebellion that reached the world. La Notte della Taranta and the pizzica revival.
WEEK 3: 15 – 17 September
Opera and operatic pop
Bel canto singing: an Italian trademark, dating back to the Renaissance. Opera and national character: the ethnic music of the Italian people. The system of opera between art and industry: a globalized art involving singers, conductors, composers and librettists. Opera, cinema and pop songs between elitist and popular culture, from Enrico Caruso to Andrea Bocelli.
WEEK 4: 22 - 24 September
Neapolitan song
Naples and the blooming music business in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Neapolitan song: the first form of popular music produced in Italy and the first one to travel around the world. Neapolitan: a lingua franca for Italians, a second home for Italians abroad. Migrant music: diaspora and the spread of stereotypes. Shaping Italian American culture: record labels, artists, venues.
WEEK 5: 29 September – 1 October
The Sanremo Song Festival
The antecedent of all talent shows, going back to the 19th century, with the Piedigrotta Festival in Naples, followed by the Festival of the Roman Song. Origins of the most important tv program in the history of Italian media, from the beginnings as a radio show, to its boom in the Sixties. Sanremo as a national craze, a major boost for the recording industry and an international showcase for domestic songs.
WEEK 6: 6 - 8 October
National icons: Mina and Celentano
A portrait of the two most significant singers in the history of Italian song, whose careers begun in the late Fifties and still goes on nowadays, with increasing success. Through their recordings, TV and film participations we will shed a closer light on the media system, the music business and the taste evolution of three generations.
National-popular stars: icons of Italy abroad
Laura Pausini and her following in the Hispanic world. Al Bano & Romina and Toto Cutugno, a cult in Eastern European countries. Domenico Modugno: the first Grammy winner. Gianni Morandi and Korean cinema. Maneskin, from Rome to global fame. Andrea Bocelli, hosted by President Obama and King Charles III.
WEEK 7: 13 - 15 October
7.2. Course review
7.2. Mid-term exam
WEEK 8: 20 – 22 October
Jazz in Italy and Italian jazz
The contribution of Italians to the birth of jazz in America. Its import and impact on Italian society. From a mimicry phase to an original contribution. Italian musicians and the international jazz community. Umbria Jazz and other festivals. Jazz, rock and canzone: the multifaceted scene of nowadays.
Avant-garde and experimental music
Italian instrumental music in the European context. Avant-garde in the early 20th century. Futurism and the ‘art of noise’. Electronic and experimental music from the Post World War II to date: major figures and works. Politically committed music and radical criticism. A comeback to tonality: post-minimalism, crossover and its relationship with popular music.
WEEK 9: 27 - 29 October
Cantautori and the renewal of Italian pop song
The rise of singer-songwriters: popular songs as poetry and as social message. Renovating Italian song, focusing on a more artistic claim and a more informal singing style: Lucio Dalla, Luigi Tenco, Franco Battiato, Paolo Conte, Francesco Guccini and Francesco De Gregori.
Case study: Fabrizio De Andrè
The “Italian Bob Dylan”: aesthetics and ethics musing around the most loved of Italian singer-songwriters. From his early days as an exponent of the Genoese School to his rise to fame as a major contributor to Mediterranean world music. Setting to music Edgars Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology.
WEEK 10: 3 - 5 November
In class presentations
A five-minute-long multimedia work where you are asked to present the topic you will explore in the final research paper, making use of slides, pictures, short videos and/or anything else that could help to better understand your idea.
WEEK 11: 10 - 12 November
Cover records: localizing the global
The easiest way to import songs from abroad was through cover records, i.e. Italian versions of hits sung in English, French, Spanish, etc. This habit has a long story in the music industry but during the Sixties it became a sensational fad, allowing the young generation to tune in with the latest sounds and rhythms
WEEK 12: 17 - 19 November
Film music
From silent to sound movies. Cinema under the Fascist regime: tenor stars and the pre-eminence of canzone (song). Musicarelli and the vogue of hit songs, romance and teen-stars. Award winning composers: Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota and their reception from Hollywood to the world. Other major figures: Ortolani, Umiliani, Piccioni, Piovani.
Gender, identity, and subcultures
Articulating images of masculinity and femininity within musical practices. Mondine (riceweeders): an early female subculture. From divas to starlets: women in Italian music (classical to rock). A female look at the record industry: Caterina Caselli, entrepreneur and talent scout. Queer pop: untold stories of forgotten talents. Urban subcultures: negotiating group and local identity from Beats to neo-Melodics.
WEEK 13: 24 - 26 November
Global genres: rock, dance, rap, trap
The impact of American music, between reception, assimilation, and rejection: jazz and Latin American dances, rock & roll. Hippy counterculture and the international opposition to Vietnam War exported rock music to Italy. Rise and fall of pop festivals: the denied utopia. Punk and New Wave: Italian underground speaks English. In the Eighties it was disco fever. Eventually, the hip hop subculture took over while Italian pop tended to sound global
WEEK 14: 1 - 3 December
Today’s soundscape
What Italian music sounds like today: current hits and popular artists in major genres. Markets, industries, habits. The recent revival of mainstream pop songs as launched by the Sanremo Festival and the lure of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Final course review
THIS IS A PROVISIONAL LIST OF READINGS TO BE ASSIGNED FOR DURING THE COURSE
Roberto Agostini, “Sanremo Effects: the Festival and the Italian Canzone (1950s-1960s)”, in Fabbri-Plastino 2014
Gianmarco Borio, “Music as Plea for Political Action; the presence of musicians in Italian protest movement”, in B. Kutschke and B. Norton (eds), Music and Protest in 1968, Cambridge Un. Press, Cambridge 2013.
Guendalina Carbonelli, “Fabrizio De André’s La buona novella: A Social Revolution in Disguise!” In La memoria delle canzoni. Popular Music e identità italiana, ed.by Alessandro Carrera, Pasturana: Puntoacapo, 2017.
Alessandro Carrera, “Italy’s Blues. Folk music and popular song from the Nineteenth century to the 1990’s”, in THE ITALIANIST 21-22, 2001-2002.
Anna Harwell Celenza, Jazz Italian Style. From Its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra, Cambridge Un. Press, Cambridge 2017.
Iain Chambers, “Some Notes on Neapolitan Song: From Local Tradition to Worldly Transit”, in THE WORLD OF MUSIC, Vol. 45, No. 3, Cross-Cultural Aesthetics, 2003.
Clarissa Clò, “Dagli Appennini alle risaie: Italian Glocal Soundscapes, Memory, History, Performance in the Voice of Women”, in Graziella Parati and Anthony Julian Tamburri (ed.by), The Culture of Italian Migration. Diverse Trajectories and Discrete Perspective, Farleigh Dickinson Un. Press 2011.
Clarissa Clò, “Disco Fever: Italian and American Diasporic Journeys”, in ITALIAN AMERICAN REVIEW vol. 8 (no. 2), 2019.
EPMOW 2017: Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Genres: Europe vol. XI, Bloosmbury: London-New York, 2017 – eds. Paolo Prato & David Horn
Franco Fabbri & Goffredo Plastino, Made in Italy: Studies in Popular Music, Routledge: London-New York, 2014.
Franco Fabbri, “Five Easy Pieces: Forty Years of Music and Politics from Bella Ciao to Berlusconi”, in FORUM ITALICUM Vol. 49 (no. 2), 2015.
Simona Frasca, excerpts from Italian Birds of Passage. The Diaspora of Italian Musicians in New York, Palgrave MacMillan 2014.
Rachel Haworth, “Mina as a Transnational Popular Music Star”, in MODERN LANGUAGES OPEN 2018 (no. 1), 25
Rachel Haworth, “Mina Celentano: Le Migliori. Popular Cultural Icons in Contemporary Italy”, in The Last Forty years of Popular Culture in Italy, ed. by Enrico Minardi & Paolo Desogu, Cambridge Un. Press, 2020.
Paolo Magaudda, “Disco, House and Techno: rethinking the local and the global in Italian Electronic Music”, in Practising Popular Music, 12th Biennial IASPM International Conference, Montreal 2003 Proceedings.
Tony Mitchell, “Paolo Conte: Italian ‘Arthouse Exotic’”, in POPULAR MUSIC vol. 26 (3), 2007
Goffredo Plastino, “Inventing Ethnic Music: Fabrizio De Andre’s Creuza de Ma and the Creation of Musica Mediterranea in Italy”, in Goffredo Plastino (ed.) Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds, Routledge 2003.
Goffredo Plastino and Joseph Sciorra (eds), Neapolitan Postcards: the Canzone napoletana as transnational subject, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham-Boulder-NY 2016.
Paolo Prato, Exporting Naples: Geopolitics and Transculturality from ‘Io te voglio bene assaje’ to Caruso, in CHIGIANA JOURNAL III, 4, 2022.
Paolo Prato, “Pop goes the Pope: religion and popular music in Italy”, in CHURCH, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE vol. 6 no.2, 2021
Paolo Prato, “Santa Claus is Coming to Italy: Updating the Debate on Americanization”, in The Last Forty years of Popular Culture in Italy, ed by Enrico Minardi & Paolo Desogu, Cambridge Un. Press 2020.
Paolo Prato, “Selling Italy by the Sound: Cross-Cultural Interchanges through Cover Records (1920s-to date)”, in POPULAR MUSIC 26: 3, 2007.
Jason Pyne, The Art of Making Do in Naples, Un. of Minnesota Press 2012.
Marco Santoro, “The Tenco Effect: Sanremo, Suicide and the Social Construction of Canzone d’autore”, in JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES, vol. 11 (no. 3), 2006.
Marco Santoro, “What Is a “cantautore”? Distinction and Authorship in Italian (popular) Music”, in POETICS 30, 2002.
Jacopo Tomatis, “Rediscovered Sisters: Women (and) Singer-Songwriters in Italy”, in The Singer-Songwriter in Europe, ed. by Isabelle Marc and Stuart Green, Ashgate 2016.