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The authors of this book present four complementary approaches to the issue of commercial song, i.e. of that ‘gastronomic’ music produced by the music industry in order to meet trends that the industry itself discovers (and feeds) in the national market. The fact that they have restricted the focus of their inquiry to ‘gastronomic’ music already suggests the polemic attitude of their studies: considering that the whole family of ‘bad music’ – music aimed at satisfying needs by definition trivial, superficial, immediate, short-lived and vulgar – is examined and accused here, the reader might think that the authors have employed a considerable number of pages to convince us of something we never doubted. Yet the authors felt the need to establish – albeit by means of analyses that are at times animated and angry – the historical and structural foundations of such musical sleaze.
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Footnotes
1
This text first appeared – untitled – as a preface (Eco 1964a) to a book written by four former members of the songwriting collective Il Cantacronache (Straniero et al. 1964). It was republished shortly after, in February 1964, in the journal Il Marcatre (Eco 1964b). It was included later in the same year – with a small but meaningful change at the end – in Eco's then controversial Apocalittici e integrati (Eco 1964c). It was never translated into English (Eco did not include it in Apocalypse Postponed (Eco 1994), a collection of previously untranslated essays, also drawing from his 1964 book). There were neither bibliographical references nor footnotes in Eco's original text: they have been added here by the translator. For this translation an effort has been made not only to make Eco's opinions understandable to an Anglophone readership, but also to respect his style, which in the early 1960s was somehow more convoluted than that of his later essays on semiotic theories, not to mention gender correctness, which was then totally absent from this kind of text, not only in Italy. If, here and there, the text sounds odd in today's English, it does so in Italian as well.
References
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