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Italian beat

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rock in Italy#

Italy is iconic worldwide for its mainstream “Neapolitan” melodic singing style, and historically, very xenophile but quite slowly receptive to musical influences from abroad. State (then monopolistic) radio and TV, and domestic show-business executives were lukewarm, or frankly hostile to the early rock’n’roll wave of the 1950s. Rock and roll was seen as a gimmick, or just noise for “teddy-boys” (actual term for young rogues) taste; only some mild-mannered “modern-style” singers (like Tony Renis of “When, when, when” fame) were allowed to be aired, publish records with main labels, and participate in the institutional “Festival di Sanremo” contest. The early pioneers of rock’n’roll (so-called urlatori) had some media coverage as novelties, but soon, those who wanted to pursue a career in music business had to switch toward the traditional mainstream. From 1961 to 1965, teenagers-oriented music was a mix of pretty-face pop, twist and French yé-yé influences. Situation changed slightly around 1965. Notably: Some visiting top acts, like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones The creation of “Whiskey-a-Go-go” or “Marquee” styled rock clubs (such as Rome’s Piper Club, Milan’s Paip’s, and Piper 2000 on the Tuscan Riviera), was soon imitated in smaller towns. The infamous “disc-eater”, a cheap 45 RPM player, that strongly boosted singles sales, and the massive diffusion of juke-boxes. The emergence of contests and festivals, friendly to new trends, like the Cantagiro, or Davoli Contest (sponsored by instrument manufacturers and distributors). The easy reception of powerful medium-wave foreign stations like Radio Luxembourg, Radio Montecarlo or Radio Koper allowed Italian youngsters to bypass the mediatic block, and stay updated to the latest anglosaxon trends (some radio enthusiasts even managed to catch the elusive Channel’s “pirate stations” like Radio Caroline, and German TV shows such as Beat Club). Under music executives’ pressure, the state broadcaster RAI reluctantly agreed to pay some attention to the “beat” hype, and the upcoming soul/R&B vogue.

Italian classical music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Plainsong#

Plainsong, also known as plainchant, and more specifically Gregorian, Ambrosian, and Gallican chant, refer generally to a style of monophonic, unaccompanied, early Christian singing performed by monks and developed in the Roman Catholic Church mainly during the period 800-1000 . The differences may be marginal—or even great, in some cases. These differences reflect the great ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity that existed after the fall of the Roman Empire on the Italian peninsula. Different monastic traditions arose within the Roman Catholic Church throughout Italy, but at different places and at older times. Even a musical non-specialist can hear the difference, for example, between the straightforward tone production in the Ambosian chants from Milan and the chants from Benevento, which display a distinct “eastern” ornamental quiver in the voice, reflecting the vocal traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church. Yet, in spite of the differences, the similarities are great. In any event, the formal Gregorian chant was imposed throughout Italy by 1100, although the music of Greeks rites continued to be heard at various places on the peninsula, especially in those places which Byzantium had once held, such as Ravenna or in the southern peninsula, which had been a refuge for those Greeks fleeing the great Byzantine iconoclast controversies before the year 1000. Obviously, where Greek rites were practiced, the chants were sung in the Greek language and not in Latin, as they were in the Roman Catholic liturgy.

Italian folk music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Italian folk revival#

The modern understanding of Italian folk music developed alongside the rise of ethnomusicology in the 1940s and 1950s and the resurgence of regionalism in Italy during that period. The Centro Nazionale di Studi di Musica Popolare (CNSMP), now part of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, was established in 1948 to document and archive musical traditions across Italy. In the 1950s, significant field recordings were conducted by American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and Italian scholars including Diego Carpitella, Franco Coggiola, and Roberto Leydi. Toward the end of the decade, special attention was given to the musical traditions of the Meridione (southern Italy), including an influential study by Carpitella and anthropologist Ernesto de Martino on the tarantella. The early 1960s saw the emergence of socially and politically conscious popular music, including numerous releases by the I Dischi del Sole label. Several notable groups were also formed at this time, including Cantacronache in 1958 and the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI) in 1962. The NCI brought together musicians and composers, including Giovanna Marini, and made its first major public appearance at the 1964 Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi. The group went on to produce a large number of recordings and live performances. The Italian folk revival gained momentum by 1966, when the Istituto Ernesto de Martino was founded in Milan by historian Gianni Bosio to promote oral culture and document traditional music. With the formation of the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare in 1970, a new model emerged in which ensembles focused on the music of specific regions—in this case, Campania. Many of Italy’s most recognized folk revival bands began during the following decade, including La Lionetta (1977), Tre Martelli (1977), La Ciapa Rusa (1978), Re Niliu (1979), Calicanto (1981), and Baraban (1983).

Italian hip-hop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

1980s#

In the early 1980s, hip-hop spread to Italy through posse cuts, which were popular in social centers, alternative centers where several left-wing young people regularly meet, and where the extremely influential Italian hardcore punk scene was flourishing, from which the Italian posse cut movement inherited its social conscious. The first star to emerge from this scene was Jovanotti, who would rap in otherwise standard Italian pop. While Jovanotti was discovered by the famous producer Claudio Cecchetto and quickly reached fame, in the underground Radical Stuff published the first Italian hip-hop street video Let’s Get Dizzy, featuring lo Greco Bros in 1989. Also that year, Marko Von Schoenberg of Stone Castle Records in Italy produced Dre’ n OG along with Andre Herring (now known as the King of Art) and Nathaniel Goodwin, with songs such as AK-47, Got Damn, Do Beat, and Spread Your Legs. But DRE and OG never received any payments for recordings. Underground hip-hop group Assalti Frontali, was founded in Rome in 1988. They are known for their left-wing politically and socially charged lyrics.

Italian jazz

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Origins#

James Reese Europe’s military concerts in France in World War I in 1919 are claimed to have introduced Europeans to a new, “syncopated” music from America. Yet, Italians had an even earlier taste of a new music from across the Atlantic when a group of “Creole” singers and dancers, billed as the “creators of the cakewalk” performed at the Eden Theater in Milan in 1904. The first real Italian jazz orchestras and ensembles, however, were formed during the 1930s by musicians such as Arturo Agazzi with his Syncopated Orchestra and Carlo Andreis with his Quartetto Andreis (CETRA, 1937-1941), enjoying immediate success. In spite of the anti-American cultural policies of the Fascist regime during the 1930s, American jazz remained popular. (Even Romano Mussolini, Benito’s son, was a great jazz fan and then prominent jazz pianist.) Also, in 1935, American jazz great Louis Armstrong toured Italy with great success. In the immediate post-World War II years jazz took off in Italy. All American post-war jazz styles, from be-bop to Free Jazz and Fusion have their equivalents in Italy. The most gifted exponents of jazz music in this period (from the 1940s to 1960s) are musicians like Gorni Kramer, Giorgio Gaslini, Lelio Luttazzi and Franco Cerri, the composer Bruno Martino and great singers like Natalino Otto, Jula de Palma, Nicola Arigliano and Johnny Dorelli. The universality of Italian culture ensured that jazz clubs would spring up throughout the peninsula, that all radio and then television studios would have jazz-based “house-bands,” that Italian musicians would then start nurturing a “home grown” kind of jazz, based on European song forms, classical composition techniques and folk music (for example, in Sicily, where Enzo Rao and his group Shamal have added native Sicilian and Arab influences to American jazz). The jazz recorded in Italy from 1912 to 1950 is practically unknown, though in those years a remarkable number of recordings were made by both Italians and foreign musicians in Italy. The records, all of them 78 rpm, are rarities for collectors, as their original matrixes were destroyed either in the devastating bombings of World War II (most of the record companies were located in Milan and Turin, two cities severely damaged by the war) or due to the foolishness of the many record company directors who sent to the rettery the remaining recordings of the period. Notwithstanding, thanks to few collectors, the best jazz recorded in Italy from 1912 to 1955 has been re-edited (by Riviera Jazz Records - www.rivierajazz.it). The story of Italian jazz, from the beginning, has been written by Adriano Mazzoletti : “Il Jazz in Italia. Dalle origini alle grandi Orchestre” and “Il Jazz in Italia. Dallo swing agli anni Sessanta”, published by E.D.T., Turin. (www.edt.it). A photographic book with all the Italian musicians from the origins, “L’Italia del Jazz” have been published by Mastruzzi Editore, Rone (www.slms.it).

Italian occult psychedelia

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Etymology and characteristics#

The music form has emerged as a form of hauntology, an engine of reactivation of an Italian collective memory. The features of this shared past are related to the imagery of Italian genre films as cannibal movies, spaghetti westerns, Italian B horror movies and their soundtracks, and are related also to the violent, obscure and esoteric folklore so well outlined in the essays of Ernesto De Martino and in the documentaries of Luigi Di Gianni. “The darkness of human mind and the superstitions of old religions are leit-motifs that run through Giallo films and the music of IOP bands is hardly surprising: Italy is a country bound by belief and superstitions.” Other references are the stories and the characters of Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Musically, Italian occult psychedelia is a cross of post-punk, psychedelic rock, Italian progressive rock, Italian library music and “Mediterranean vibes.” According to Rumore, also other influences that “goes from Krautrock to Italian B-movie soundtracks, from drones to analog electronics, from lysergic folk to free jazz.” According to Joseph Stannard, “It’s equally clear that Italian occult psychedelia is far from sonically homogeneous.” Simon Reynolds identifies italian occult psychedelia as an Italian counterpart to hauntology.

Italian opera

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Origins#

Dafne by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today. Peri’s works, however, did not arise out of a creative vacuum in the area of sung drama. An underlying prerequisite for the creation of opera proper was the practice of monody. Monody is the solo singing/setting of a dramatically conceived melody, designed to express the emotional content of the text it carries, which is accompanied by a relatively simple sequence of chords rather than other polyphonic parts. Italian composers began composing in this style late in the 16th century, and it grew in part from the long-standing practice of performing polyphonic madrigals with one singer accompanied by an instrumental rendition of the other parts, as well as the rising popularity of more popular, more homophonic vocal genres such as the frottola and the villanella. In these latter two genres, the increasing tendency was toward a more homophonic texture, with the top part featuring an elaborate, active melody, and the lower ones (usually these were three-part compositions, as opposed to the four-or-more-part madrigal) a less active supporting structure. From this, it was only a small step to fully-fledged monody. All such works tended to set humanist poetry of a type that attempted to imitate Petrarch and his Trecento followers, another element of the period’s tendency toward a desire for restoration of principles it associated with a mixed-up notion of antiquity. The solo madrigal, frottola, villanella and their kin featured prominently in the intermedio or intermezzo, theatrical spectacles with music that were funded in the last seventy years of the 16th century by the opulent and increasingly secular courts of Italy’s city-states. Such spectacles were usually staged to commemorate significant state events: weddings, military victories, and the like, and alternated in performance with the acts of plays. Like the later opera, an intermedio featured the aforementioned solo singing, but also madrigals performed in their typical multi-voice texture, and dancing accompanied by the present instrumentalists. They were lavishly staged, and led the scenography of the second half of the 16th century. The intermedi tended not to tell a story as such, although they occasionally did, but nearly always focused on some particular element of human emotion or experience, expressed through mythological allegory. The staging in 1600 of Peri’s opera Euridice as part of the celebrations for a Medici wedding, the occasions for the most spectacular and internationally famous intermedi of the previous century, was probably a crucial development for the new form, putting it in the mainstream of lavish courtly entertainment. Another popular court entertainment at this time was the “madrigal comedy”, later also called “madrigal opera” by musicologists familiar with the later genre. This consisted of a series of madrigals strung together to suggest a dramatic narrative, but not staged. There were also two staged musical “pastoral"s, Il Satiro and La Disperazione di Fileno, both produced in 1590 and written by Emilio de’ Cavalieri. Although these lost works seem only to have included arias, with no recitative, they were apparently what Peri was referring to, in his preface to the published edition of his Euridice, when he wrote: “Signor Emilio del Cavalieri, before any other of whom I know, enabled us to hear our kind of music upon the stage”. Other pastoral plays had long included some musical numbers; one of the earliest, (1480) by Poliziano had at least three solo songs and one chorus.

Italian popular music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Fascist period: affirmation of a national Italian culture#

Music and the artistic production of this period reflected the need of the political class to affirm its ideological statement of a united and strong Italian identity on both the political as well as cultural basis. Regional languages and independent cultural inheritances began to be slowly eradicated through the school system and the advent of the mass media which, at the time, were entirely controlled by the Italian government. The slow process of the industrialization which begun during the fascist period had strong effects on the lower classes; it helped in forming the contemporary Italian society, in particular in the economical separation between the north and the south, which is reflected in the different references to the traditional background in the contemporary popular music. Emigration contributed to the exportation of the Italian musical background to other countries such as Argentina, Australia, and the United States.

Italo dance

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Influences#

The sound of the genre evolved directly from Eurodance. Italo dance displays a great influence from Italo disco, a genre which was very popular in Italy during the 1980s. Italo disco was a direct continuation of disco music (which would never experience a rejection wave in Italy), incorporating the new sounds that had begun to emerge from the late 1970s. Another main influence comes from Italo house, an Italian-based form of house music also influenced by Italo disco.

Italo disco

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Terminology#

The term “Italo”, a generic prefix meaning Italian, had been used on pop music compilation albums in West Germany as early as 1978, such as Italo Top Hits on the K-Tel label and the first volume of Italo Super Hits on the Ariola label. There is no documentation of where the term “Italo-Disco” first appeared, but its origins are generally traced to Italian and other European disco recordings released in the West German market. Examples include the phrase “Original Italo-Disco” on the sleeve of the West German edition of “Girls on Me” by Amin-Peck (Rome) and “Ask The Boss” by Flowchart (Bologna) in late 1982, and the 1983 compilation album The Best of Italo-Disco. These records, along with the Italo Boot Mix megamix, were released by Bernhard Mikulski on his ZYX label, who was therefore credited with coining the term “Italodisco”. The Best of and Boot Mix compilations each became a 16-volume series that culminated in 1991. Both series primarily featured disco music of Italian origin, often licensed from independent Italian labels which had limited distribution outside Italy, as well as songs in a similar style by other European artists. The presenters of the Italian music show Discoring (produced by RAI) usually referred to Italodisco tracks as “rock elettronico” (electronic rock) or “balli da discoteca” or “musica dance”. The term “Italodisco” was not really used in Italy until the 2000s.

Italo house

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

While the name was not yet developed, early notable Italo-house acts would include Klein + M.B.O. and Alexander der Robotnick. The genre reached mainstream popularity in 1989, with Ride on Time reaching the top ten in all of Europe except Itality. “Italo-house” as it became known in the early 1990s was a happy, euphoric sound; pioneered essentially by the production stable of Gianfranco Bortolotti, whose alter egos included Cappella, R.A.F., East Side Beat, and the 49ers. Records produced in Italy dominated the UK dance charts of 1990/91 with tunes including Asha’s “JJ Tribute” (lead vocals by Joyce Chung), DJ H’s “Think About”, Last Rhythm’s “Last Rhythm”, and Jinny’s “Keep Warm” signifying the uplifting, happy vibe. Artists such as K-Klass, Bassheads, and Felix built on the Italian piano sound to create uplifting tunes still played out today, although the pioneers of the sound such as DJ Sasha have long since left the happy vibe of piano house to concentrate on other styles.