The Italian Canzone and the Sanremo Festival: change and continuity in Italian mainstream pop of the 1960s

Abstract

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.

Parole nuove. Il neologismo “cantautore” e l'ideologia del genere nella canzone italiana degli anni Sessanta

“…I Premi Tenco, le Targhe Tenco e soprattutto la Rassegna della Canzone d'Autore, che si tiene annualmente dal 1974 a Sanremo in implicita contrapposizione con il Festival -luogo della canzone "tradizionale" (cfr. Agostini 2007, Borgna 1980e 1998 -hanno contribuito a una codificazione del genere che, con continui assestamenti, è valida ancora oggi (Santoro 2006 e 2010 per la "genesi" della canzone d'autore). La stessa neoformazione "canzone d'autore" è da attribuirsi a Enrico De Angelis, allora giovane cronista 3 e oggi direttore e fra i maggiori animatori del Club.…”

A many-headed beast: progressive rock as European meta-genre

“…For instance, while those countries each had a reasonably well developed club circuit, affording new rock bands a much-needed performance outlet and source of income, this was not the case in Italy. Instead, progressive rock bands gained exposure by performing at Italy's pre-existing songwriting competitions such as the San Remo Festival or, from 1971, at numerous open air festivals organised by left-wing student radicals and labour activists during a time of political upheaval and terrorist-style activities known as the Anni di Piombo (‘Years of Lead’) (Agostini 2007; Croce 2008). From the outset, Italian progressive rock was, as part of the Italian version of the counterculture, a much more politically focused genre than its counterparts in Britain or Germany, though this was more often demonstrated by the bands' participation in left-wing organised music festivals than by their lyrics 25 .…”

Processes of institutionalisation and ‘symbolic struggles’ in the ‘independent music’ field in Italy

“…If we exclude the exceptional episode of Adriano Celentano's Clan at the beginning of the 1960s, 2 which resulted from the successes of central institutions of the Italian music industry such as the Festival of San Remo or the Cantagiro (Agostini 2007), the first experiments in independent music production date back to the 1970s. The first independent Italian labels, in fact, emerged mainly from experiments of an explicitly political character -for example, L'Orchestra in the 1970s (Fabbri 2007) or the fortuitous sparkling moments of specific local youth music in the case of 'Italian Record' of Bologna (Magaudda 2002(Magaudda , 2007.…”