Abstract
In Italy, the Sanremo festival and its songs, the canzoni sanremesi, gained the status of antonomasia for an “easy”—and maybe “old”?—kind of song. During the 80s, the festival’s producers faced the increasing importance of commercial TVs and new international MTV-pop stars. They tried to renew its image by Borgna (Le canzoni di Sanremo [Sanremo’s Songs]. Laterza, Rome, 1986) creating a brand new section for young singers (the “nuove proposte”), and (Borgna in L’Italia di Sanremo. Cinquant’anni di canzoni, cinquant’anni della nostra storia [Sanremo’s Italy. Fifty Years of Songs, Fifty Years of Our History]. Mondadori, Milan, 1998) removing the orchestra. After 30 years, singers could now go on stage and perform playback, while drum machines, gated reverbs and synthesizers could be used not necessarily involving “old” orchestral sounds. Eros Ramazzotti and Luis Miguel had a great success at the festival singing about the importance of being “nowadays young people” (Terra promessa and Ragazzi di oggi) symptom of the rush of being “up-to-date” of the decade—exactly as the removal of the orchestra showed on a timbral level—while commercial TVs were polarizing their success exactly on that. The aim of this paper is to analyze through several musical aspects (tonal, timbral, vocal, etc.) how the festival created new pop phenomena in the 80s while commercial TVs were creating their own, their differences and similarities (if any) and what it meant for later Italian pop song.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1980, RAI (Italian national broadcasting company) had three TV channels. Commercial TVs were recently born, and were not broadcast nationwide.
- 2.
Owned by Silvio Berlusconi, TeleMilano58 later became Canale5, one of the most popular TV channels in Italy.
- 3.
Kind of an Italian version of Top of the Pops.
- 4.
After that, he moved to private TVs and to private radios again.
- 5.
- 6.
Its full name is Festival della canzone italiana (Festival of Italian song).
- 7.
Ricchi e Poveri in the 1970s were a vocal quartet (two women, two men), and turned into a trio (one woman, two man) in 1981.
- 8.
The same song won both first prize and critics’ poll four times: in 1995, in 2001, in 2007 and in 2011.
- 9.
In a scene of a 2006 Italian movie called Notte prima degli esami, set in 1989, a young lawyer looking like a slimy yuppie sings Noi ragazzi di oggi with his brand new karaoke system.
- 10.
Significantly, while the band sings the lines: “Mamma mia, mamma mia/Mamma mia let me go/Beelzebub has a devil put aside/For me/For me/For me.”
- 11.
It was the second—and last, so far—time for an Italian singer to win the Eurovision Song Contest. The first and previous Italian winner was Gigliola Cinquetti with Non ho l’età (per amarti) in 1964.
- 12.
Other successful songwriters almost disappeared in the 1990s: Cristiano Minellono and Dario Farina, who wrote many songs for Al Bano & Romina and for Ricchi & Poveri in the 1980s, disappeared from the charts too (with a brief return in the 2000s).
- 13.
Just to name four albums: Felicità (Happiness 1982), Che angelo sei (What an angel you are, 1982), Effetto amore (Love effect, 1984) and Sempre sempre (Forever and ever, 1986).
- 14.
Romina Power is the daughter of US-American actor Tyron Power.
- 15.
- 16.
Yes, the alto saxophone rises the pitch an octave higher, but Ranieri comes back right after a few bars of solo, and sings a semitone lower—helping his final, high and long note.
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Conti, J. (2017). “Where Is the Orchestra?” The Sanremo Festival Through the 80s and the 80s Through the Sanremo Festival. In: Povilionienė, R. (eds) Sounds, Societies, Significations. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47060-3_14
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