Università Roma Tre

Songs have a central role in contemporary culture. Italy, in particular, owns a tradition ranging from Neapolitan Song (one of the first accomplished repertoires of Popular Music) to “canzone d’autore”, which from the ‘60s onwards, when the first “cantautori” (“singer-songwriters”) appeared, has transformed the language of a genre basically forged in the first decades of the 20th century and “re-invented” after World War II with the Sanremo Festival.
The course will investigate form and content of Italian song all along its history, first of all clarifying what we mean today when we speak of “songs” within the context of mass media and popular music studies, as the word “song” can refer to countless forms of artistic expression. The aim is mainly to show how big the teaching potential songs have, starting with their controversial relationship with poetry, to probe how they mirror and stimulate social change, to analyse the discursive network they generate and to verify their value as historical documents. We will not neglect, of course, neither the interaction of songs with other forms of art, especially with graphics and images, nor the role of music industry with its commercial strategies. Great attention will be given to the relationship of Italian song with the repertoires of Italian vernacular songs, which run parallel to it, and with rock and folk music, exploring the different performance practices, vocal styles and the ways arrangements and orchestrations are thought out.
As Italian song has always lived within a dense texture of interaction with the repertoires of other countries, notably France and the United States, we will meet those performers, those songwriters and those contexts that influenced it, soliciting its renewal especially with the “cantautori” of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The “canzone d’autore”, so, is going to be the core of the course, being aware that never as in that period Italian songs succeeded in conquering a space in the public sphere, a political relevance and a musical originality not to be achieved later, when the mass success of some “cantautori” reduced its liberating force and extinguished its innovative drive. It was in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, in fact, that youth culture burst out in Italy and adopted rock and “canzone d’autore” as tools to build a collective subjectivity, meant to affect the fate of a nation in a moment of deep mutation and strong social tension.

1) Marco Santoro, Effetto Tenco, Il Mulino 2010.
2) Gianni Borgna, Storia della canzone italiana, Mondadori 1992 (oppure, in alternativa, voce enciclopedica Treccani on line "La canzone d'autore in Italia" di Roberto Vecchioni e voce enciclopedica on line Treccani "Canzone, nazione, regione", di Marco Santoro, più un libro a scelta dalla bibliografia di riferimento).

The course will provide a wide overview of forms and contents that songwritng, or “art song”, holds in modern society. If song in itself has a central role in mass culture, art song delves mostly into formal and content research and is often a vehicle for intellectual dissent, being naturally tied to poetry, cinema, theatre, visual arts and folklore: from such connections (and always taking into account the role of the mass media and the dynamics of the music business), repertoires, authors and performers of particular relevance will be dealt with and songs related to history, politics and public debate will be discussed and analysed. Paying special attention to the music, especially but not only French, British, American and Latin-American songwriting will be inquired, not neglecting the Italian “canzone d’autore” and vernacular forms of art song like the Neapolitan song.

- Talanca Paolo, Il canone dei cantautori italiani, Rocco Carabba 2021 (o, in alternativa, Paolo Talanca, Musica e parole. Breve storia della canzone d'autore in Italia, Carocci 2024.
- Bernieri Claudio, Non sparate sul cantautore, Vololibero 2013 (Mazzotta 1978).