Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:30:17.194Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Commercial song1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2017

Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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

Adorno, T.W. 1959. ‘Il carattere di feticcio in musica e la regressione dell'ascolto’, in Dissonanze (Milan, Feltrinelli), pp. 751 [‘On the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening’, now in Essays on Music/Theodor W. Adorno, ed. R. Leppert (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2002), pp. 288–315]Google Scholar
Eco, U. 1963. ‘La canzone nuova’, Sipario, XVIII/212, pp. 2931 Google Scholar
Eco, U. 1964a. ‘Prefazione’, in Le canzoni della cattiva coscienza, Straniero, M.L., Liberovici, S., Jona, E., and De Maria, G. (Milan, Bompiani), pp. 528 Google Scholar
Eco, U. 1964b. ‘La canzone di “consumo”’, Il Marcatre, II/3 (Milan, Lerici), pp. 5764 Google Scholar
Eco, U. 1964c. ‘La canzone di consumo’, in Apocalittici e integrati (Milan, Bompiani), pp. 275–94Google Scholar
Eco, U. 1994. Apocalypse Postponed (London, BFI)Google Scholar
Hayakawa, S.I. 1955. ‘Popular music vs. the facts of life’, Etc.: A Review of General Semantics, 12/2, pp. 8395; also in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in Americai, ed. B. Rosenberg and D. Manning White (Glen Coe, IL, Free Press 1957), pp. 393–403Google Scholar
Lalo, C. 1948. Notions d'esthétique (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France)Google Scholar
Morando, S. (ed.) 1963. Almanacco Letterario Bompiani 1964. Eroi, miti e problemi dei giovani del nostro tempo (Milan, Bompiani)Google Scholar
Pestelli, C. 2014. ‘An escape from escapism: the short history of Cantacronache’, in Made in Italy: Studies in Popular Music, ed. Fabbri, F. and Plastino, G. (London, Routledge), pp. 153–61Google Scholar
Straniero, M.L., Liberovici, S., Jona, E., and De Maria, G. 1964. Le canzoni della cattiva coscienza (Milan, Bompiani)Google Scholar
Wright Mills, C. 1951. White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar