A Portrait of the Author as an Artist. Ideology, Authenticity and Stylization in the Canzone d'Autore

Nowadays, canzone d’autore is supposed to be Italian most influential musical genre. It is culturally legitimized as an “indigenous and (national) popular form of song culture” (as stated by Marco Santoro and Goffredo Plastino in “Popular Music”’s special issue on Italian Popular Music), mostly because it seems less reliant on Anglo-American models. It has gained a major role in official culture, too: cantautori’s lyrics are currently excerpted like poems in school anthologies, and a cantautore (Roberto Vecchioni) wrote the entry “canzone d’autore” for the Treccani, possibly the most authoritative Italian encyclopaedia. The turning point in the definition of Italian canzone as a field of artistic production took place at the beginning of the 60s. Cantautori constituted a new genre, characterised by struggle for authenticity against the traditional clichés of canzone, and by the overlapping author-performer, as suggested and codified by the very word, the neologism “cantautore”: cantante + autore, singer + performer. At the end of the decade, social and cultural changes as well as the massive import of Anglo-American music and musical practices (for instance, bands vs. soloist performers) lead to a broad rethinking of canzone as a form of art. Luigi Tenco’s suicide, while participating at Sanremo Festival in 1967, symbolises the end of an era and forces both artists and audiences to a vaster reflection about the very possibility of art song within mass popular music. Changing ways of thinking music are mirrored by the introduction and the rapid diffusion in 1969 of a new neologistic expression: canzone d’autore (literally, “author’s song”). The locution “d’autore” suggests authorship to be linked to quality more explicitly than cantautore did, but it focuses the attention on the object (the song), instead of the performer. This both allows the cantautori genre to widen its boundaries, and provide an aesthetic value to song in itself. As a result, the continuous “rule testing and bending” (Frith) which diachronically re-defines the boundaries of canzone d’autore since its codification as a genre in the early 70s, has been following two opposite ways. On one side, “canzone d’autore” - as an umbrella-term - broadened the semantic field of “cantautore” and has attracted to its semantic area other musical events “of quality”, dealing with left-oriented political canzone, folk, rock, jazz song and – since the beginning of the 90s – hip hop and rap: canzone d’autore as the place for Italian “good music”. On the contrary, the ideological supremacy the genre gained ended up in a crystallisation of stylistic features – namely, through a “stylization” process - which gave birth to a mannerist stream of canzone d’autore, inspired by major masters: canzone d’autore as a “formal” genre. The Club Tenco – a cultural association promoting since 1974 “Premio Tenco”, Italian most important prize for canzone d’autore – has had a key role in both processes. Because of its “double nature”, the label “canzone d’autore” is hard to be used in an emic perspective and many – even many cantautori - rejected it. Its inner ambiguity offers a valuable example of the ideological and interpretive essence of musical genres. To tag a musical event as “canzone d’autore” is an ideological move and implies an evaluative opinion.