What is a “cantautore?” Distinction and authorship in Italian (popular) music

Abstract

The article presents a socio-historical analysis of the Italian canzone d'autore (literally “author's song”) as both a musical genre and an aesthetic category. The canzone d'autore is analyzed as the product of a constellation of musical, cultural, social, economic, and political factors that crystallized in the 1960s and 1970s—among them the identification of a new category of cultural producers, the cantautori, and the formation of a celebratory apparatus centered around a non-profit association, the Club Tenco—and thereby transformed the Italian “song world” (or better, an inclusive segment of it) into a semi-autonomous artistic field. This process, which may be conceptualized as a symbolic revolution, is mapped through the intersection of a set of discourses and practices—above all the specific public discourse about this genre, its authenticity, and artistry—by various producers of meanings, including the cantautori themselves, many of whom also belonged, for cultural capital and/or profession, to the intellectual (literary) field. Studying a local case of cultural production of a classification that relies on the social institution of the “author”, the paper addresses the problem of genres and of authorship in the world of popular music. In particular, Fabbri's renowned theory of musical genres is addressed.