Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Musical identity and social change in Italy

2006; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13545710600806706

1469-9583

Marco Santoro,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 The subject of recent historiographic interest: see Barbon (2000 Barbon, A. 2000. Aspetti della privacy di un dittatore. Mussolini e i musicisti del suo tempo, Milan: Angeli. [Google Scholar]) and Biguzzi (2003 Biguzzi, Stefano. 2003. L'orchestra del duce. Mussolini, la musica e il mito del capo, Turin: UTET. [Google Scholar]). 2 ISTAT (2003 ISTAT. 2003. Musica e spettacoli, Rome: ISTAT. [Google Scholar], pp. 9 – 11; but see also ISTAT 2000 ISTAT. 2000. La musica in Italia, Bologna: Il Mulino. [Google Scholar]). The data cited refer to persons above the age of eleven, interviewed in the year 2000. For a further consideration of the significance of data such as these, see Santoro (2002 Santoro, Marco. 2002. What is a cantautore? Authorship and distinction in Italian (popular) music. Poetics, 1 – 2: 111–132. [Google Scholar]). 3 I therefore limit myself to a reference to Gasperoni et al. (2004 Gasperoni, Giancarlo, Marconi, Luca and Santoro, Marco. 2004. La musica e gli adolescenti. Gusti, pratiche, educazione, Turin: EDT. [Google Scholar]), as well as the essay by G. Montecchi in this issue. 4 In a very extensive body of literature, I will make reference only to Nicolodi (1984 Nicolodi, Fiamma. 1984. Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista, Fiesole: Discanto. [Google Scholar]), Rosselli (1984 Rosselli, John. 1984. The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar], 1991 Rosselli, John. 1991. Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy, London: Batsford. [Google Scholar]), Morelli (1996 Morelli, G. 1996. “L'opera”. In I luoghi della memoria, Edited by: Isnenghi, Mario. Rome-Bari: Laterza. [Google Scholar]), Bianconi and Pestelli (1998 Bianconi, Luigi and Pestelli, Giovanni, eds. 1998. Opera Production and its Resources, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]), Waterhouse (2001 Waterhouse, John C. G. 2001. “Since Verdi: Italian serious music 1860 – 1995”. In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, Edited by: Baranski, Zygmunt G. and West, Rebecca J. 311–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]), and – as an example of a study that pays special attention to the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of the more learned and cultivated type of musical life – Stamatov (2002 Stamatov, Peter. 2002. Interpretive activism and the political uses of Verdi's operas in the 1840s. American Sociological Review, 67: 345–366. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). For a critical consideration, see Montecchi (2002 Montecchi, Giordano. 2002. Mentalità tradizionalista e cultura musicale. Il Mulino, 5: 918–929. [Google Scholar]). 5 Concerning the history of that heterodox (and very often politically charged) branch of musicology that is ethnomusicology in Italy, however, see Leydi (1991 Leydi, Roberto. 1991. L'altra musica, Florence: Giunti. [Google Scholar]) and Bermani (1997 Bermani, Cesare. 1997. Una storia cantata, Milan: Jaca Book. [Google Scholar]). 6 See, in general terms, for a reconstruction of the field with reference to Italy by one of its leading experts: Fabbri (2002 Fabbri, Franco. 2002. Canzoni e falsa coscienza. Perché occuparsi di popular music. Il Mulino, 5 [Google Scholar]). As a further indication of the changes that are now underway, allow me to mention that I am editing, with Goffredo Plastino, a special issue on Italy for the most respected international journal in this field, Popular Music, the first special issue devoted to Italian musical culture since the journal's foundation in 1982. 7 A separate case is that of the study of jazz, which in Italy can rely upon a close-knit network of passionate scholars, usually outside the academy, inclined to the writing of essays that oscillate between the erudite and the hagiographic, among which the most striking – with specific reference to Italian jazz – is certainly the recent work by Mazzoletti (2004 Mazzoletti, Adriano. 2004. Il jazz in Italia, Turin: EDT. [Google Scholar]). 8 See Servizio Opinioni RAI (1968 Servizio Opinioni RAI. 1968. “La cultura ed i gusti musicali degli italiani”. In Quaderni del servizio opinioni, Vol. 13, Rome: RAI. [Google Scholar]). The survey was based on a sampling of almost 5,000 individuals. The popularity of operetta was 34 per cent, compared with the 70 per cent of musica leggera.