Università Roma Tre

The course aims to provide students with theoretical and methodological tools to focus on popular music since its inception, as part of the industrial revolution, to our days. Starting from the very same definition of "popular music", the meaning of the expression itself will be clarified, especially in relation to the Italian use of the word "popolare" and to the other Italian terms utilized for music of this kind ("folk", "traditional" and the likes). Next to that, the context which gave birth to popular music will be explored (urbanization, technological development, the spread of mass media) to follow its history along the whole Twentieth century and the first decades of the new century in relation to the folk, jazz and classical tradition.
Given to the multidimensional nature of the object, the course adopts a multidisciplinary perspective, which necessarily needs not only musicological and ethnomusicological resources but also sociological and anthropological ones.
The programme, by means of audio and video materials (and with maps, records and music scores), will handle the different genres which make up popular music, both in the West and in the rest of the world, and with the environment in which they took place (theatres, café-chantants, cabarets). The relationship between oral and written music, the advent of recording, the birth of the microphone, the electrification and the amplification of musical instruments, the creative use of the recording studio, the relationship between music and noise will also be discussed: namely, all that makes popular music what it is today.
Lots of space will be given to the break-in of African American music genres, with their peculiar features and their lexicon (swing, groove, riff etc.) for the strong influence they had on rock music (a genre which will be analyzed in detail even in its spectacular component). Last but not least, we will be discussing the folk music revival, in its national variants, and with its evolution in what was called "world music".
Italian song will also be dealt with, including the "fracture" caused by the "cantautori" ("singer-songwriters").

Fabbri Franco, Storia della popular music, Utet, Torino 2016.
Mignogna Dino, La musica possibile, Arcana, Roma 2022.