CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Academic year and teacher
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- Versione italiana
- Academic year
- 2022/2023
- Teacher
- DANIELE PALMA
- Credits
- 6
- Curriculum
- Comunicazione della cultura e delle arti
- Didactic period
- Secondo Semestre
- SSD
- L-ART/07
Training objectives
- Know: The course aims at providing a general overview of popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries, with particular reference to the Italian context. A further goal is to build understanding of the production and fruition practices of music in the mass media era.
Know-how: To place chronologically the main developments in 20th and 21st century Italian popular music, and relate them to cultural and social issues and phenomena, as well as to the evolution of the media system in the country. Prerequisites
- None
Course programme
- Cultural History of the canzone italiana: Fundamentals
The course frames music as a multiform expressive practice that inhabits our everyday experience in multiple ways, also in relation to changing technological conditions. In this light, we will move along the lines of a cultural history of the Italian song, understanding it as a complex object and an indispensable category for tracing the development of popular music genres in the country. The lectures will deal with some salient moments in this history: from Piedrigrotta to Fascism, from rock and roll to the "invention" of the Sanremo song, from the years of the economic boom to songwriting, from rap to trap, with insights devoted to fascist propaganda products; a Song Festival organised in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s; ultras and inmates forms of music-making; finally, musical "italianità" in times of coronavirus. Didactic methods
- Lectures with commentary on texts and music pieces, and use of Powerpoint presentations; meetings with experts and cultural operators. All course materials will be made available to students on the lecturer's Classroom platform in a shared folder (access code: f7y43gc). It is also envisaged that 10 asynchronous lectures of approximately 15 minutes will be recorded and stored on the Classroom platform at the end of the course as additional material for both non-attending and attending students.
Learning assessment procedures
- Oral examination in two stages:
1. Presentation by the candidate of a topic of their choice, delimited and not too general, from among those covered in the adopted reference volume;
2. Two further questions (one more general, one more circumscribed) on the main topics of the course, all relating to the chapters in the adopted reference volume.
For non-attending students, the oral test is divided as follows:
1. Presentation by the candidate of a topic of their choice, delimited and not too general, from among those covered in the adopted reference volume;
2. A question from the lecturer on the topics covered in the adopted reference volume;
3. Brief presentation by the candidate of one of the texts of their choice from the further examination bibliography. Reference texts
- Reference Handbook:
Jacopo Tomatis, Storia culturale della canzone italiana, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 2019, chapters 1 (pp. 29-86), 2 (pp. 87-104 e pp. 115-136), 3 (pp. 137-210), 5 (pp. 283-327), 6 (pp. 365-390).
A list of further optional readings will be provided during the course and uploaded to Classroom. Choice texts for non-attending students will also be included in this list.
