PUTTING CIRCUITS INTO FIELDS, OR HOW ITALIAN CANZONE GAINED THE STATUS OF ‘ART’ IN THE MUSIC MARKET

ABSTRACT

This article shows how deep moral issues can impinge upon popular culture without this losing its commercial appeal, a process made possible by the role of consecrating institutions in the music market. The article focuses on the fabrication and establishment of a new genre within Italian musical culture and music market, the so-called canzone d'autore, and it is set after the suicide in 1967 of singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco during the most important Italian song festival (Sanremo's Festival della canzone italiana). Drawing upon Zelizer's notion of ‘circuits of commerce’ and Bourdieu's theory of cultural fields, the article will shed some light on the specific dynamics of the interplay between moral issues and commercial appeal in the Italian music market.

Keywords:

• music market
• sacrilization
• authorship
• suicide
• circuits of commerce
• field of cultural production

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jim English, Marta Herrero, Motti Regev, Roberta Sassatelli, and especially Viviana Zelizer for their precious comments to a previous version, and Paolo Magaudda and Marco Solaroli for their generous editorial help.

Notes

¹We may conceive a song as a system of meanings embedded in a certain form (Griswold 1994). Every song is part of a larger field of songs, typically organized in genres. My focus in this paper is on songs as a cultural genre, albeit internally differentiated into more specific (music) subgenres. On genres as an integral part of musical culture, integral to both musical practice and the social organization of musical life see Fabbri (1981), Santoro (2002), Holt (2007) and Lena and Peterson (2008).

²The artistic legitimation of popular music is far from being specific to Italy. Authorship itself is a well known strategy of cultural consecration deployed by both critics and musicians (e.g., Toynbee 2000). The construction of rock as an art form is an established topic in popular music studies (e.g., Regev 1994). What the Italian case adds to an established literature is, first, a focus on a historically rare, and extreme, event which links the romantic ideology of the artist to popular musicianship; and, second, a story of cultural entrepreneurship, symbolic production, and institutionalization which makes reference to ‘authorship’ not as a theoretical move but as a feature of the same historical process. To my knowledge, only in Italy was the idea of ‘author’ appropriated by the same agents of the music field as a genre label (i.e., canzone d'autore) and a genre reference for the production of recordings, the publication of books and magazines, and the organization of festivals.

³In this paper I draw upon documentary and ethnographic sources. See also Santoro (2010).

⁴I draw the distinction between analytic and concrete forms from Talcott Parsons. For a more recent application see Kane (1991).

⁵I thank Jim English who made me aware of this theoretical possibility.

⁶The Sanremo festival was much more than a media facilitator. It was influenced by the state broadcaster (RAI) and by government political parties, which controlled Italian radio and television. In short, Sanremo's political role has to do with the creation and reproduction of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983), something not so irrelevant in a country marked by a relatively weak sense of national identity. See Santoro (2010) on Sanremo as a social institution.

⁷See Santoro (2006, 2010) on Tenco's suicide, its context and consequences, including the different frames activated to make sense of it in the public sphere.

⁸The tangible product of a project of cultural entrepreneurship that was rooted, as it often happens, in the context of local status politics (see DiMaggio 1982), the Club Tenco was nonetheless the acknowledged product of an event (partly, a media event) that demanded reparations from those who felt morally responsible.

⁹On the logics of prizes in cultural markets, and their proliferation since the early 1970s, see English (2005). In order to distance itself from the traditional Sanremo song contest, Club Tenco's awards (‘Targhe’) are allocated before the festival, thus shielding the festive and friendly character of the ‘Rassegna’ from the competitive spirit of the awards.

¹⁰A similar role has been played for years by the Folkstudio, a small locale founded in Rome in 1960, more informal, more explicitly entertainment-oriented and, also for these reasons, less suspicious towards the music market and industry than Club Tenco. The Folkstudio is a nice instance of those ‘proto-markets’ identified by Toynbee (2000) as a counterpart to the music industry where the latter however also finds its ideas and talents. As I suggest, a profitable way to conceptualize these instances is through the notion of ‘circuit of commerce’. See infra.

¹¹Interestingly, Club Tenco has historical and geographical close links with an organization nowadays internationally renowned as Slow Food. I have no space here to compare the two organizations, an exercise which could shed some light on a crucial question: are there limits or constraints to the translocal development of moralization movements in the field of arts, limits which seem to be less important or effective in fields such as food? For a recent discussion of Slow Food as a moral institution in the consumer market see Sassatelli and Davolio (2010).

¹²This argument is backed up by evidence from a comparative study, currently in progress, including Italian, as well as Brazilian and French examples of sacrilization in fields of popular music. It is worth noting that the Brazilian scene of the 1960s developed partly from a musical movement centred on festivals that explicitly followed the Sanremo song festival's model.

¹³On quality in the market and the marketability of quality, conceived of as ‘economies of singularities’, see Karpik (2007).

¹⁴I would say that what I have tried to do in this paper is much in the spirit of DeNora (2003), i.e., an attempt to explore Adorno's statements at macro level, with a micro examination of practices. Lets recall that Adorno's views on ‘on popular music’ (1941) were grounded on empirical research.