Origins of canzone d’autore

Early attempts to renovate Italian popular song, freeing it from old-fashioned escapist lyrics and pre-WWII music styles took place in the late 1950s. Most lyricists and composers active then had started their careers in the 1920s and 30s, and their songs circulated thanks to the Sanremo Festival (established in 1951) and RAI’s broadcasting monopoly.¹ No trend comparable to the renovation of cinema (neo-realism) or literature could be found in post-war (and post-Fascist) Italian popular music, until a group of composers, poets, and singers established ‘Il Cantacronache’ in Turin in 1958, with the aim to ‘escape from escapism’.² Influenced by French auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes (ACI) and by Brecht’s collaborations with Weill and Eisler, Cantacronache was a marginal group of engagé intellectuals (including writers like Italo Calvino, Franco Fortini, Umberto Eco), and their work left traces mostly in political song and folk revival.³ In 1958, the winning song at Sanremo was Domenico Modugno’s (and Franco Migliacci’s) ‘Nel blu dipinto di blu’. It was a huge international hit, composed by its performer: a rare feature in Italian popular music history. Modugno’s success encouraged young recording industry executives to sign new lyricists and/or composers as performers (as they wouldn’t find proper interpreters for their songs), or to persuade singers to write their own songs (rather than cover foreign material or interpret songs by old-fashioned professional authors). Between 1959 and 1961 some of these singer-songwriters (Umberto Bindi, Gino Paoli, Giorgio Gaber, Gianni Meccia) hit the charts. A new term, cantautori,⁴ created by one of the first (and few) female representatives of the category, Maria Monti, was adopted to designate them: by 1961 it was firmly established in Italian language. Initially, it was intended almost as a joke – a lighter term compared to the cultural connotations of chansonnier.⁵ However, during the 1960s cantautori became more and more involved in the debate on cultural and political commitment (versus commercialism) in popular music, also under the influence of foreign examples: from French ACI to Bob Dylan, and also Theodorakis (especially after the 1967 coup in Greece). When one of the best-known cantautori, Luigi Tenco, committed suicide during the Sanremo Festival in January 1967 (see p. 322 below),⁶ amongst the reactions to this event emerged the perception of a need that a type of popular song be identified, which could be opposed to the commercial mainstream: after ‘canzone diversa’,⁷ and ‘nuova canzone’,⁸ the term ‘canzone d’autore’ (author’s song, obviously modelled after cinéma d’auteur, and coined in 1969)⁹ was proposed. It was officially adopted in 1974 within the title of a festival (‘Rassegna della canzone d’autore’ – hereafter ‘Rassegna’ – organised since then annually by Club Tenco), and soon became a widely accepted concept.

Origins of entechno

The Greek term entechno [tragoudi], the literal translation of which is ‘artful’ [song], originally emerged as the first component of the paradoxical term entechno-laïko tragoudi (‘art-folk song’)¹⁰ invented largely by leftist intellectuals in urban Greece, prominent among whom was Mikis Theodorakis. This artistic endeavour followed an effort to sanctify the previously repudiated rebetiko music, initiated by the composer Manos Hadjidakis with a groundbreaking speech in 1949.¹¹ Rebetiko song was an urban popular music genre, which emerged prominently during the relocation of refugees from Asia Minor to the Greek mainland, as a result of the Greek–Turkish war between 1919 and 1922. Influenced by genres prominent in the urban areas of Athens and Piraeus and folk musical elements from the refugees’ home culture, rebetiko became connected in the Greek middle-class imagination with marginalised underclasses and perceived ‘decadent’ behaviours.

From the late 1950s onwards, both Theodorakis and Hadjidakis invested their creativity in the search for new genres that utilised the rebetiko style within more highbrow musical forms combined with contemporary poetry. The Greek popular music scene after the 1960s was dominated by the work of Theodorakis and Hadjidakis to the extent that, within international music circles, Greece was often referred to as ‘the country of the two composers’.¹² Specifically the release of Theodorakis’ album Epitáfios in 1960 epitomises the new entechno-laïkó genre by combining the leftist poetry of Yannis Ritsos with laïko compositions.¹³ A dedicated Marxist and Western-educated composer,¹⁴ Theodorakis aimed to create a genre that would familiarise the working class with contemporary poetry, while at the same time incorporating pan-Hellenic folk musical idioms, free of references to particular regions.¹⁵ Manos Hadjidakis’ role, even though less political, was equally important to the development of entechno-laïko. His incorporation of folk music was part of a wider search for compositional styles, less pompous and patriotic and more introverted than Theodorakis, thus closer to the entechno style that survives after the 1970s.

The transition from this period of entechno-laïko to the more eclectic (if less wordy) entechno, coincided with the emergence of the term tragoudopios (literally, ‘song-crafter’). Similarly to the Italian cantautori, Greek tragoudopii (pl.) used the term as a less charged offset to the ‘composers’ (synthetes) of the Theodorakis–Hadjidakis period. Epitomised by the versatile performer Dionysis Savvopoulos, this new caste of singers-songwriters emerged through the turbulent years of the Junta of the Colonels (1967–74), and achieved popular stardom after the restoration of democracy. The aesthetic foundations for this new trend were set by the artists of the so-called neo kyma (lit. ‘new wave’, a direct translation of the French nouvelle vague artistic movement), most prominent among whom was the composer Yiannis Spanos. Utilising some of the musical principles of intellectualism and left-leaning sensibility from Theodorakis along with the lyricism of Hadjidakis, neo kyma artists were decidedly more low-key and minimalistic, often their music comprising merely vocals with an accompanying guitar.

Entechno after the dictatorship: new directions

If entechno-laiko was created by Theodorakis with a clear political agenda, the musical production that came to be known plainly as entechno after the end of the Junta was characterised by a process of depoliticisation. The restoration of democracy (or metapolitefsi as it is often referred to in Greek) brought about a number of political developments with the clear intention of reconciling populations on the left and the right of the political spectrum who were in open or concealed conflict since the end of the Nazi occupation and the Civil War in the 1940s. The most important of those were the abolition of the monarchy with a referendum and the legalisation of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), both within months of the end of the dictatorship in 1974. These new developments cultivated a climate of acceptance, or even open celebration of leftist aesthetics and ideals, especially among urban intellectual circles. The electoral victory of the Social-Democrat party PASOK in 1981 sealed this transitional period and was accepted by many, even within the communist left, as the end of the national divide.

While Theodorakis was turning from a prosecuted communist (during the Junta) to a celebrated artist,¹⁶ the need for his maximalist revolutionary music was diminishing. Ironically, the more Theodorakis’ music was featured in state-sponsored festivals and performances, the less relevant it was becoming to current aesthetics. The new wave of entechno that developed from the 1980s onwards was less overtly political, more introvert, wider in its musical references, and more diverse and experimental. The aesthetic of the post-dicatorship entechno is defined by three fundamental features: eclecticism, intellectualism, and technophobia.

The effective abandonment of ‘folk’ (laïko) in the genre label from the late 1980s onwards is due to the fact that its artists began to expand well outside the realm of Greek urban-folk music in their pursuit of inspiration. The popularity of French chanson, as well as the Anglo-American folk revival and its singer-songwriters became catalytic in this new trend, but entechno artists of the Greek 1980s and 1990s utilised influences as diverse as jazz, fado, and Brazilian popular music (MPB).¹⁷ While entechno expanded its musical influences, it similarly widened its lyrical themes from leftist activism to a range of other topics, most notably romantic, poeticised love. If this signalled an abandonment of Theodorakis’ militant aesthetic, however, the emphasis on intellectualism remained intact. Singer-songwriters such as Dionysis Savvopoulos were celebrated as both musicians and poets, while a whole caste of professional poet-lyricists emerged, including Manos Eleftheriou, Manolis Rasoulis, and later Lina Nikolakopoulou.

Within the 1990s, entechno artists incorporated more forcefully two, until then clearly demarcated, music styles: rock and ‘traditional’ (paradosiaka). Greek rock music, which in its more subcultural form was already in the 1980s expressed forcefully by numerous bands, broke into the mainstream through the voice of Vassilis Papakonstantinou. His collaborations with entechno composers such as Manos Loizos and Thanos Mikroutsikos paved the way for the incorporation of rock idioms, and specifically the sound of the electric guitar, within entechno productions. In the 1990s this practice became prominent in the work of singer-songwriters Dionysis Tsaknis and Lavrentis Mahairitsas. If the electric sound of rock was a natural development within the cosmopolitan entechno aesthetic, the search for sounds from rural ‘traditions’ was more problematic, since rural folk music (dimotiko) was often perceived among urban middle classes as having nationalistic overtones, heavily connected in their imagination with cultural displays promoted by the Junta. The incorporation of traditional instruments from the Eastern Mediterranean, including rural Greek instruments like the laouto and the lyra, was eventually made possible through an engagement with an ‘ethnic’ aesthetic, in its essence utterly cosmopolitan.¹⁸

Technophobia is a less-discussed but equally important defining element of entechno. Although, as we saw, the electric sound eventually made it into mainstream entechno in the late 1980s and 1990s, the aversion towards anything electronic or programmed has been a consistent attitude. This, however, applies to the aesthetic rather than the practical dimension. For example, digital technology in the recording studios is widespread in entechno productions, and this is not seen as a breach as long as it remains inaudible.¹⁹ To use Thomas Turino’s celebrated terms, entechno has consistently produced ‘high fidelity’ rather than ‘studio audio art’ recordings.²⁰ This aesthetic choice should be understood within the increasing dipole between entechno and folk-pop (laikopop), with the latter genre availing of the opportunities of digital programming to an extent that is often perceived by entechno artists and fans as overly commercial and kitsch.

From cantautori to canzone d’autore

The choice of ‘canzone d’autore’ as a label for Italy’s singer-songwriter genre was a political one. Amongst the possible choices, it was the most neutral term: ‘nuova canzone’ (a label that was used, anyway, for conferences held during Club Tenco’s ‘Rassegna’) had its origins in the context of folk revival and political song, ‘canzone diversa’ bore excessive connotations of otherness, and notwithstanding the prestige of its creator (semiotician Umberto Eco) had never become part of the community’s common cultural awareness. In the Sessantotto – the years of Italy’s political turmoil, which lasted from 1968 to the end of the 1970s – what was needed was the delimitation and distinction of a field of music activities, different both from conventional, market-oriented Italian popular music, identifiable with the Sanremo Festival, and from radical leftist political song, as well as from the Anglo-American pop-rock mainstream, then hegemonic in the record market. As a matter of fact, cantautori, before Tenco’s suicide in 1967, had been sharing the same scenes and places with more traditional singers: they participated in the Sanremo Festival and had huge juke-box hits. The name cantautore itself had ambivalent meanings and connotations, suggesting the existence of two subcategories: 1. an artist who was at the same time a singer and a songwriter – often just a composer, as it soon became common in Italy for singer-songwriters to collaborate with professional lyricists; 2. an author of songs of a ‘special kind’, implying uncommon artistry or engagement, which deserved to be performed by the author himself. As the very figure of the singer-songwriter was new in Italy’s late 1950s and early 1960s, the two meanings were blurred, although – as we shall see – the difference will emerge later as a substantial factor in the construction of canzone d’autore’s ideology. Technically, the list of cantautori in the early 1960s includes singer-songwriters who won or scored well at the Sanremo Festival, like Domenico Modugno,²¹ Tony Renis,²² Pino Donaggio,²³ Bobby Solo:²⁴ but with the exception of Modugno, for his role as a pioneer, these cantautori are very seldom included in accounts on the genre, and other best-selling early singer-songwriters, like Gianni Meccia, Nico Fidenco, or Edoardo Vianello, are similarly forgotten. It must also be said that other cantautori, like Gino Paoli, Umberto Bindi, Giorgio Gaber, Sergio Endrigo – generally ascribed to the second subcategory – took part in the Sanremo Festival in the early 1960s, and that some of their songs aimed at the mainstream market (not presented at the Festival) enjoyed great commercial success, like Paoli’s ‘Sapore di sale’ of 1963.

Luigi Tenco’s participation in the 1967 edition of Sanremo was not a novelty or a special compromise: it followed a wave of cantautori trying to use the Festival as a platform to reach a wider audience: Tenco himself had declared a few months earlier that he would ‘use’ media and commercial institutions (including Sanremo) like American singer-songwriters had been doing in the USA.²⁵ His models were Bob Dylan and Barry McGuire. His disillusion at the results (his song was immediately eliminated), his suicide, and especially the cold, embarrassed reaction of the industry, of the media, even of his colleagues (only one, Fabrizio De André, attended Tenco’s funeral), moved a burgeoning community of fans and activists to see Sanremo as the paradigm of commercialism, lack of artistry and authenticity, the exact contrary of what lovers of ‘quality songs’ were looking for.²⁶ Journalists hailed Endrigo’s victory at Sanremo in 1968 as Tenco’s – or the cantautori’s – revenge, forgetting the continuing participation and success of cantautori in former editions, and possibly implying with that lapsus memoriae that the term cantautore was not apt to sustain an overt semantic and political opposition against the music industry. The Sessantotto had begun.

New cantautori, and a new genre.

While the term ‘canzone d’autore’ was making its way from the columns of a local newspaper to the title of a festival celebrating Tenco’s memory, provocatively based in Sanremo, new cantautori became popular: among them, Fabrizio De André,²⁷ Francesco Guccini, Lucio Battisti, Lucio Dalla, Francesco De Gregori, Antonello Venditti. With two notable exceptions, they were all authors of their own lyrics; they were also composers of their songs’ music, but their craftsmanship as musicians (composers, or singers, or players) was bound to occupy a lower place in the new genre’s ideological hierarchy compared to their ability and authenticity as poets. Exceptions were Lucio Dalla, who emerged from Italian beat²⁸ and participated in the Sanremo Festival, collaborating with lyricists and poets, as well as writing his own lyrics, and Lucio Battisti, who became one of the best-known artists in Italian popular music, collaborating with professional lyricist Mogol, and later with poet Pasquale Panella. The very existence of Dalla and Battisti is a challenge to canzone d’autore’s ideology: they were among the best-known cantautori for nearly three decades, but – especially Battisti – they failed to be acknowledged as ‘proper’ members of the genre. Battisti never took part in the ‘Rassegna’, Lucio Dalla participated just once, in 1986. They were never awarded the Tenco Prize, which has been given since 1974 to almost every famous cantautore and to many singer-songwriters from other countries.²⁹ The obvious explanation for such an anomaly is that Battisti was not left-wing, and scorned the intellectualism and political commitment of most other cantautori.³⁰ But this cannot be applied to Dalla. It is also worth noting that until 2014, when Maria Farantouri (not a songwriter!) was awarded the prize for her role in the international success of entechno, no Greek author or singer had ever been invited to the ‘Rassegna’. If we add that Battisti and Dalla are probably the only Italian cantautori known in Greece,³¹ we are suggesting another possible explanation: that the top hierarchical criterion for authorship in canzone d’autore was attached to the image of the ‘singing poet’, and singer-songwriters who focused mainly on music (just like some forgotten early cantautori, or like some prominent figures in entechno) have been seen by the genre’s communities as ‘out of place’. In fact, the practice of setting to music existing (literary) poems, or lyrics written by known poets, which has been an important feature of French chanson (since at least Yvette Guilbert in the 1910s), and of Greek entechno, never took off in Italy, with very few exceptions related to lesser-known cantautori; on the contrary, the public debate about canzone d’autore has been focused for decades on the issue of whether cantautori should be considered as poets, or even as ‘the real poets of the twentieth century’.³²

Genre conventions (‘norms’) are often hierarchically ordered, and ideology can be seen as the hyper-code controlling such hierarchy.³³ The focus on the cantautore as a poet, articulated in various conventions (formal-technical, communicational, behavioural, proxemic, economic, etc.), also dictates the relevance of practices ‘allowed’ in the genre. Two striking examples, which emerge in the comparison between canzone d’autore and entechno, are: 1. the relative scarcity of collaborations between authors/interpreters in Italy (regarded as notable exceptions, rather than almost a norm, like in Greece); 2. the acknowledgement of ‘pure’ performers as fully representative of the genre, which is again common in Greece (including male interpreters, like Manolis Lidakis), while limited to a handful of ‘classy’ female singers in Italy (Ornella Vanoni, Fiorella Mannoia), who have been seen as, so to speak, ‘guests’ of the genre and corresponding scene. On the other hand, a number of cantautrici (female singer-songwriters) have appeared since the mid-1970s: Gianna Nannini, Alice, Carmen Consoli, Paola Turci, Elisa, Cristina Donà, Nada Malanima,³⁴ and others. However, cantautori still outnumber cantautrici by at least an order of magnitude.

Any genre’s hierarchical system of values (i.e. its ideology) is subject to continuous negotiations within the genre’s interrelated communities: artists, producers, critics, fans, etc. In canzone d’autore a community of ‘experts’, formed by members of the Club Tenco, by the organisers of the ‘Rassegna’ and other festivals and prizes, by critics and organised fans, has been ‘dictating the rules’ for about forty years, slowly evolving from the early celebration of the French ACI model to the formulation of a more general ‘quality principle’, at least theoretically unbound from the figure of the singer-songwriter. In fact, groups have participated in the ‘Rassegna’ since the earliest editions, and, more recently, prizes for the interpreter or the record producer of the year were launched, opening to a collaborative model closer to the cinematic origins of the canzone d’autore concept. Although canzone d’autore originally implied an anti-rock stance, sooner or later its communities had to acknowledge the success of singer-songwriters whose styles were closer to those of British or US singer-songwriters: from Franco Battiato, who drew initially from Brian Eno’s solo albums, to Ivano Fossati, who dedicated his first album (1983) to Randy Newman, from Vasco Rossi to Luciano Ligabue, both strongly indebted to Bruce Springsteen, to Vinicio Capossela, initially a Tom Waits epigone, later a rebetiko addict (he imitated or covered classics of the genre, even recording them with Greek instrumentalists from the entechno scene).

Nonetheless, some artists are still closer to the canon than others, and it isn’t surprising to see that they are (or were) cantautori in the stricter sense: Paolo Conte (as a singer-songwriter, a creature of the ‘Rassegna’, as he had been a successful song composer earlier), Roberto Vecchioni, Fabrizio De André, Giorgio Gaber, and Enzo Jannacci. The last three in the list died recently (respectively in 1999, 2003, and 2013): their deaths, along with Battisti’s (1998), were the origin of a flood of comments with ambivalent effects, on one hand allowing a deeper critical reflection on canzone d’autore, on the other consolidating some aspects of the genre’s ideology, like the demiurgical image of the auteur/poet. The effect was especially notable in many accounts of Fabrizio De André, who excelled in collaborating with lyricists, composers, arrangers, and engineers, and could be best described as a ‘singing producer’, but was sanctified as the archetypal poet.³⁵ As a reaction, some of the new Italian singer-songwriters preferred to hide behind a fictional band’s name, like Bologna violenta (Nicola Manzan, from 2005) or Luci della centrale elettrica (Vasco Brondi, from 2007). It is also true that, especially after the beginning of the recording industry’s downfall, ‘pure’ performers became a rare species in Italy (like almost everywhere), as co-authoring a song is a way for singers to compensate for decreasing record sales and royalties.

Contemporary entechno: artists, roles, and gender conventions

As we have seen, after the dictatorship entechno emerged and developed with close reference to the image of the lone singer-songwriter. This image is compatible with all its origins: Theodorakis the pioneer, left-wing intellectual composer/activist, the influences from international artists (chanson, cantautori, folk-revivalists), and the low-key solo performers of neo kyma during the dictatorship. However, to assume that contemporary entechno is dominated by singer-songwriters is quite misleading. Instead, what should be noted is a change in the distribution of creative roles that happened around the early 1990s; the early period of the 1970s–80s was characterised by collaborations, while the latter period, from the 1990s onwards, becomes defined by a strictly gendered division of roles, focusing mainly on the singer.

In order to identify that change, it suffices to examine some of the key artists of the two periods. The collaboration between composer Manos Loizos and singer Haris Alexiou, or that of composer Apostolos Kaldaras and singer Yiorgos Dalaras, produced multiple albums in the 1970s. It is indicative that, in many of those albums, the names of singers, composers, and lyricists are written alongside each other on the cover, turning the collaborative procedure into a point of attraction for the audiences. Similarly, the collaboration between composer Nikos Ksydakis, lyricist Manolis Rasoulis, singer Nikos Papazoglou, and producer Alekos Patsifas for the albums Ekdikisi tis Gyftias (‘Revenge of Gypsydom’, 1978) and Ta Dithen (‘The Pretentious’, 1979), has been seen as catalytic for the musical production of the period. In fact, such collaborations have been heavily mythologised within the audience’s imagination, with numerous stories of their internal conflicts surviving through the interviews of the artists until today.

During the period after the 1990s, however, the discography of entechno revolves around two types of artists: female solo singers, and male singer-songwriters. Female singers such as Eleftheria Arvanitaki, Alkistis Protopsalti, Melina Kana, and Eleni Tsaligopoulou perform songs written by male composers such as Nikos Ksydakis, Stamatis Kraounakis, or Thanos Mikroutsikos, and appear in live performances as solo singers with almost exclusively male backing orchestras. With the roles of the composer and lyricist diminishing in favour of the singer after the 1990s, albums often feature multiple, lesser-known songwriters who are commissioned to support the presence of a popular singer. Their contribution is rarely acknowledged on the album cover, thus altering the previous attitude of collaboration towards a division between main artists and supporting personnel.

At the same time, male representatives of contemporary entechno are more often than not the authors of the songs that they perform. Singer-songwriters Orfeas Peridis, Alkinoos Ioannidis, Sokratis Malamas, Christos Thivaios, and Thanassis Papakonstantinou are the most prominent exponents of the genre from the late 1990s until today. All of them are equally appreciated as composers, lyricists, and singers, and they usually appear onstage with an instrument (acoustic guitar or lute), a practice almost unheard-of among the female artists. In some notable collaborations between male and female entechno artists, such as Malamas with Kana or Ioannidis with Arvanitaki, the norm is for the male to take the role of songwriter and backing vocalist, while the female is promoted as the main singer.

This change in roles and production style from the 1970s to the 1990s, cannot be seen outside of the political circumstances explained earlier and the neoliberalisation of the Greek music market. While the leftist political imperative of entechno as represented by Theodorakis, Loizos, and the early Savvopoulos increasingly lost its aesthetic appeal, the industry switched to the more globally established norm of promoting vocalists. This coincided from the mid-1990s onwards with the economic decline of the label Lyra, the main production force of entechno from the 1960s, and the eventual dominance of multinational recording companies over the Greek popular music scenes.

Conclusion

Two genres that sound very little alike, canzone d’autore and entechno have remarkably parallel histories. The emergence of the terms cantautore and tragoudopios, and the scenes that followed, have similarly fluctuated between left-wing sensibilities and commercialism, often taking advantage of the converging interests of the political opposition and the music industry (like in the US: ‘The Revolutionaries Are on Columbia!’). The intense debates of authenticity exercised by critics, artists, producers, and audiences have managed to turn these seemingly low-key performance styles into terrains of ideological–aesthetic conflict, through which national politics and transnational affinities are tried. The remarkable ways in which canzone d’autore and entechno artists managed to bring poetry and ideology into the everyday musicality of people of all social backgrounds seems to serve as a common thread between many singer-songwriter genres of the late twentieth century. Yet, the different political phases through which people in the two nations have related to each other, to Europe, and the international stage, have ensured that canzone d’autore and entechno are as deeply entwined in the particularities of their homelands as in their cosmopolitan influences.