Emanuele D’Onofrio
On February 25, 2007, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented an Academy Honorary Award to Ennio Morricone (more than 400 scores in a 40‐year career) “in recognition of his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music” (Academy Awards Database 2012). This was the first time this special prize was presented to a composer, and it served as extraordinary acknowledgment of Italian film music as a whole, already recognized in the previous 12 years by Oscars for Best Original Scores to Luis Bacalov for Michael Radford’s Il postino (Il Postino: The Postman, 1995) and Nicola Piovani for Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997). Such international attention within so short a time frame reflects how much film music composition is thriving in Italy. Today, directors and production companies are favoring collaborations with new musicians, while the soundtrack market is expanding and concert hall programs are filled with tracks from cinema (Bandirali 2008a, 7–8). Just a few weeks before receiving the Oscar, Ennio Morricone had made his debut in the United States conducting a 100‐piece orchestra and a 100‐voice choir at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, in a medley of his most famous and colorful themes.
In light of all this, it could be a favorable moment for rethinking the rich and interesting history of Italian film music. Perhaps we can look more objectively than at other moments at Italian film music’s problematic aspects, such as the ongoing hierarchic conflict between academic and industry establishments, between art and business, and between tradition and innovation. If film music struggled everywhere to gain its artistic dignity (Kassabian 2001), that struggle would have particular resonance in the country that the nineteenth century had affirmed as the legitimate “watchdog” of the noble institution of melodrama. The enjoyment of popular opera arias, echoed in combination with moving images, can tell us much about both social classes and their forms of entertainment. In this chapter, I will delineate a social history of film music that highlights some key moments in the perennial negotiation between forms of production and consumption. Ultimately, I will reveal the modalities in which this cultural form participates with others in the constant renegotiation of Italian society and identity.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, cities were propelling the windmills of modernity. Electric power had illuminated hidden and startling opportunities for secular entertainment in a country that, after 40 years of history, was at daggers drawn with the Catholic Church. After the initial phase, when the newfangled art of moving images had been enjoyed as a form of street show in fairs, pavilions, and circuses, it would soon be included with acting and musical numbers in early‐night club and music‐hall programs, where the rising urban middle class sought fun and discovered transgression. Indeed, whereas “uplifting” subjects such as La presa di Roma (The Capture of Rome, Filoteo Alberini, 1905) were shown open air to thousands at Porta Pia in Rome to celebrate the 35th anniversary of that event, titles such as Il bagno di un’artista, Il pittore in cerca di modelle, and Scandalo in un albergo (Brunetta 2007, 18), with their emphasis on baths, artists’ models, and hotel scandals, suggest a different kind of cinema for quite different locales. More importantly, music accompanied these kinds of films, as musicians were borrowed from the different groups performing during the evening. The instrumental combinations could vary from violin and piano to a chamber orchestra (with a piano, accompanying strings, and woodwinds). Presumably, as we have no definitive evidence, they would play popular themes, dances, and transcriptions from opera arias. Indeed, as a certain early evening’s shade threatened the glory days of Italian melodrama by bringing the news of Giuseppe Verdi’s death in 1900, the consumption of opera was going through significant changes. For some years now, phonographs and other mechanical devices had been reproducing famous tunes and arias on the street, mixed with the noises of modernity, for the pleasure of social classes that had never belonged to the theater audiences. Therefore, traders and clerks could find themselves humming the aria “Di provenza il mar, il suol” from Verdi’s La Traviata, perpetuating the never‐ending process of contamination that makes popular what once was highbrow and reshapes social and cultural hierarchies.2 Now these “sacred” themes happened to be performed publicly by common musicians as a commentary on “indecent” images moving on a white screen.
As the new medium revealed its potentialities, particularly in terms of profit, it soon found new homes. From 1899 onward, film theaters conquered the centers of the biggest cities, from Florence (Sala Edison, 1900) to Rome (Moderno, 1904), an exponential growth that will stop only in 1915. Since films had never really been silent—music had always been part of the show—these new places were provided with specific areas for those who would play during the screenings. Ordinary theaters were meant to host only a piano or small instrumental groups, whereas luxury cinemas often featured full and permanent orchestras. Sergio Miceli (2009, 39–40) believes that the technical skills of those performers were generally too poor to allow them to improvise, and that they played music drawing mainly on two sources, the repertoires and the cue sheet. The former were collections of musical material written mostly by classical composers in the late Romantic style and categorized not only in accordance with the different narrative situations (mysterious, passionate, etc.) and moods of the story, but also with regard to the place where the screening took place. These pieces became very popular in the business and made fortunes for publishers such as Sonzogno and Ricordi. The cue sheets, instead, were detailed lists of preexisting themes with time‐in and time‐out indications that the production companies attached to every film reel they sent across the country, to be performed as accompaniment during the show. Both these practices caused unenthusiastic reactions among music critics and classical composers. Repertoires relied on repetitive themes that for their simplicity were denied the artistic integrity of, say, the Wagnerian leitmotiv,3 whereas cue sheets were accused of tearing to pieces opera and, therefore, the nation’s pride. Compared to the United States, where young yet solid companies churned out mostly action and comic films that used popular genres of music, in Europe, and specifically in Italy, audiences seemed to respond to art films: sophisticated stories and uplifting plots that producers drew mainly from literature and theater classics. In order to produce adequate musical accompaniment to historical and epic subjects such as Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis? (1912) and Marcantonio e Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra, 1913), and Giulio Antamoro’s Christus (1916), film producers (directors were usually excluded from making this choice) knocked on the door of academic musical institutions, asking established, classically trained, maestri, such as Romolo Bacchini, Giocondo Fino, and Luigi Mancinelli, to score films or parts of them. (Sometimes they needed more than one score, to be used in other countries.)
These collaborations are one significant manifestation of that tension that the emergence of cinema, born as a popular art suspended between highbrow culture and business, provoked.4 The composers who embarked on film projects in the silent era generally did it for economic reasons, following the investments that from the world of melodrama were moving to the more profitable industry of films. Yet, they did it reluctantly, hardly concealing feelings of embarrassment, unease, and even disgust. Their sense of diminishment and frustration, above all, prevented them from developing any interest whatsoever in the still uncharted expressive potentialities the new medium could nurture. The only exception to a common conservative approach to composing that discounted the visual images the music was meant to support was provided by Pietro Mascagni and his musical contribution (unfortunately lost) to Rapsodia satanica (Nino Oxilia, 1915). Indeed, the celebrated composer of Cavalleria rusticana (1890) embraced the offer to collaborate with curiosity and enthusiasm, not only for the notable reimbursement he was offered, but also because it appeared to him as a new territory in which to put into practice his naturalistic style. His collaboration took various forms: at times, working with the humility of a craftsman, he wrote music using a chronometer on the filmed material, but at times he wrote music in advance, and was even given the unique chance by the production company Cines to influence the director’s decisions on scenes (i.e., to have scenes shot and reshot in order to fit them with his score). The great part played by the composer, as well his extraordinary care in every detail and in the coherence of the whole, suggested to the contemporary critics that film could be defined as a “great symphonic poem” (Piccardi 1990, 496).
Far more common was the composer Ildebrando Pizzetti’s approach to his collaboration on the epic film Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914), the biggest budget production of the Italian silent age. Suggested by the eminent poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, hired to write the film’s intertitles, Pizzetti seemed to Pastrone the right musician who could emphasize the epic tone of the narrative. Eventually, however, Pizzetti complained about the lack of commitment shown by the two artists. He wrote to D’Annunzio, who had played an important part in convincing him, although sharing with him a negative impression on the project, “I asked for a reimbursement of 10,000 lire, vaguely hoping for a refusal …. But Mr. Pastrone accepted. I did not know what to say and let myself be forced to sign the contract. And now, from yesterday, I am terribly sad” (quoted in De Nicola 2012). Finally, he wrote the score for the main scene of the film, a piece named Sinfonia del fuoco, consisting of 65 pages for 20 minutes of music, while leaving (as was the custom at the time) the rest to his pupil Manlio Mazza (who wrote 600 pages, mainly adapted from music by Hector Berlioz, Gaetano Donizetti, and others). His satisfaction with the final result (“a score full of fire and stamina”) was mitigated by his concerns regarding how cinema orchestras would have played the piece and, above all, for having been part of an operation he always considered, in contrast to other historical films he will eventually work for, as merely commercial and antithetical to the spirit of pure music.
Precisely 8 years had passed since the March on Rome had imposed Fascism on Italy, when, in October 1930, the Supercinema in Rome launched La canzone dell’amore (Gennaro Righelli), the first domestic feature‐length picture with synchronized sound. Since very few theaters were equipped with sound‐reproduction technology, it was only the year before that Italian audiences had been given the chance to experience the first talkie ever made, Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927). In Righelli’s film, the title song was performed by Beniamino Gigli, one of the first tenors, along with Tito Schipa and Gino Bechi, to swing from opera stages to radio, from recording studios to the big screen. This phenomenon was the sign of a mutation in the universe of Italian music. While in 1926, Turandot, Giacomo Puccini’s last opera, premiered at La Scala, between 1924 and 1926 public radio stations started to broadcast in the main cities. These 2 years changed the concept of music for Italian society; with Turandot the curtain was drawn on opera as a contemporary genre, while radio introduced the first canzonette (songs with light content) into Italian houses, filled with the middle classes that the programs of urbanization were constructing as the “spine of the Fascist society and its economy” (Prato 2010, 189). Music and the regime had a schizophrenic relationship. Indeed, the fascistizzazione of the country—pursued also by the nationalization of prestigious musical institutions such as La Scala and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and by censorship strategies applied to defend the language from the attack of foreign languages and regional dialects—could not impede the wide‐scale diffusion of canzonette, with allusive contents, and of exotic dances (such as the tango and fox trot) in public places. From the late 1920s, however, cinemas, which had never been so full and cheap, also became the main loudspeakers through which light music reached large crowds. Moreover, for the first time in films, artists could make their faces famous and build their star personae. As Schipa (1937, 24) wrote: “How often we heard that the ability on stage of [opera] singers … depends on their voice …. Today cinema, forcing us to be actors, allows us to redeem ourselves from this old accusation.” This is the case of both opera singers and new actors (among them, Vittorio De Sica and Alberto Rabagliati) who, not being professional singers, still performed crooner‐style songs that soon became hits. Performers from both these categories appear in films that, often named after the main song performed, are the prototype of that film genre named musicarelli that will appear in the late 1950s. Among many examples, we can cite Gigli in Non ti scordar di me (Forever Yours, Augusto Genina, 1935), Tito Schipa in Vivere (To Live, Guido Brignone, 1936), Gino Bechi in Fuga a due voci (Music on the Run, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1943); De Sica singing the popular tune “Parlami d’amore Mariù” in Gli uomini, che mascalzoni … (What Scoundrels Men Are!, Mario Camerini, 1932), and Rabagliati singing “Il primo pensiero” in Una famiglia impossibile (Bragaglia, 1940).
Most of the canzonette in those comedies in the 1930s and 1940s complied with the Fascist morals and myths of “good feelings” and “happy family” (another example is “Portami tante rose” in L’eredità dello zio buonanima, Amleto Palermi, 1934) and were written by the composer Cesare A. Bixio, in collaboration with the lyric writer Bixio Cherubini, who also wrote most of their incidental music. In the meantime, a younger generation of composers demonstrated unusual flexibility in adapting skills to the needs of the new medium, even if these composers had been trained in conservative music institutions. Some of them were Alessandro Cicognini (who wrote more than 100 scores from 1936 to the 1990s), Enzo Masetti (who wrote about 60, and contributed to create a film music school at the Centro Sperimentale della Cinematografia in Rome), Riccardo Pick Mangiagalli (one of Pizzetti’s pupils), and Renzo Rossellini (who, eventually, will link his name to his brother Roberto’s work). Certainly, the music in the sentimental comedies scored by these composers is by no means innovative, usually reproducing the melodic style and tones of pathos that are reassuring for Fascist ideology. This is also the case for most of the content of the canzonette, when they do not leave space to satirical allusions such as the popular “Maramao perché sei morto?,” to which some students playfully referred in a poster they attached on a monument to make fun of a dead member of the Fascist establishment. Yet, their diffusion has an extraordinary relevance from a sociological perspective. Neither the music critics of the time, who castigated this new cultural form, nor contemporary and thorough film critics, such as Miceli (2009, 305), who use pejorative definitions such as “undignified production” and “canzonettismo radiofonico,” have been able to grasp this relevance, rooted as they are in a distrust of Italian academia toward popular culture—what Umberto Eco (2005) described as an “apocalyptic” (versus “integrated”) critical approach.
Indeed, this widespread use of songs revealed a significant new effort by companies and directors to reach the largest audience possible. However, for the films dealing with more “dignified” subjects, those in charge insisted on calling in established, old‐school composers. Even if this did not seem to change the overall approach to film scoring, it seemed to work in the films promoting Fascist propaganda, featuring the colonial military adventures in Libya, and revisiting historical and literary subjects favored by the Duce. These films certainly did not call for a new concept of music, particularly from artists who still considered cinema a lower art with which their best music should not get involved. Therefore, maintaining Cabiria’s score as the perfect model of rhetoric and pomp for certain cultural attitudes, most composers kept far from any form of experimentation that could bring within the rigid boundaries of the pseudo‐national tradition the Trojan horse of exotic “anti‐patriotic” influences. This is the case, among many others, of Pizzetti’s score for Scipione l’Africano (Carmine Gallone, 1937), of Giorgio Federico Ghedini’s for Don Bosco (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1936), of Cicognini’s for La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, Alessandro Blasetti, 1941). Although film music appears for the first time as one of the topics discussed at the International Congress of Music in Florence in 1933 and 1937, Italian musicology is dominated in the 1930s by Benedetto Croce’s views of the sanctity/priority of music in any application mixed with other cultural forms. Only the composer Antonio Veretti in Lo squadrone bianco (Genina, 1936), a romantic film with the Libyan battlefield as a background, was able to maintain his creative freedom of expression while accepting the rules of cinema. In this score he shows a unique disposition to interpret the functional role of music, particularly in the modulation of timbres, in the varied use of orchestration, and in the introduction of silence.5 But, in the wake of Cabiria, another ambitious film production, Acciaio (1933), a romantic drama directed by the German Walter Ruttmann in the gigantic steel industry complex in Terni, Umbria, reveals yet again the frustration and disrespect that so often attended film music composition of the time. At first, composer Gian Francesco Malipiero enthusiastically accepted the offer to participate, happy to be part of a production team that included Luigi Pirandello as the storyline writer. Initially convinced he would contribute on a par with Pirandello and the director in what seemed to him a noble project, he soon realized he would be excluded from all the main decisions, including those concerning the use of the score in the film. In fact, it was the production company Cines itself that replaced parts of the score with live sounds and popular tunes that they were distributing on records. The only piece composed by a disappointed Malipiero that survives in the film, the so‐called “Choreographic March of the Machines,” appears to work in opposition to the images, struggling to emerge and live independently as an “ideal hymn to the machine civilization rather than music for a film sequence, rhythmically organized” (Miceli 2009, 310). Years later, Malipiero still remembered the manipulation he went through: “It was all wrong: they had to make the movie, and then to chronometer it, and then to make the music …. Ruttman acted as a tyrant” (quoted in Miceli 2009, 313). Frustrated composers such as Malipiero did not recognize that the working conditions they enjoyed—in terms of time, for instance—were in many ways favorable in comparison with those of film composers to come.
World War II left film business, its facilities as well as its former ideas, in ruins. This rubble, however, served as liberation from existing tensions and freed forces that were striving toward a new national identity—forces that a number of directors were able to represent by bringing their camera to the street, using nonprofessional actors, and catching the live sounds of a suffering society. Was music able to contribute to these films’ effort to reproduce reality? Today, critics still debate the result. Most of them argue that neorealist film music—in particular Cicognini’s for De Sica’s works and Renzo Rossellini’s for his brother’s—offered nothing new, reiterating clichéd late Romantic canons and melodramatic atmospheres that were by no means congruous with the engagement with the real that the new visual style sought to achieve. Others detect an endeavor to bring film music to a new level, where, instead of being a mere form of commentary on the images, it turns into a form of representation in and of itself. At the International Congress of Music in Florence in 1950, it was affirmed that “a Neorealist film requires its music …. Something that is not outside the Nature‐man’s action but is inside … a new dimension, faithful to all realities” (quoted in Perri 2003, 22). According to Perri, Guido Petrassi’s music for Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis, 1949) is a good example of this. Although this old‐school composer maintained conservative views on film music, which he saw as a form of “prostitution,” he imaginatively imported fragments of the real field hands’ songs, a choice that increased the sense of misery De Santis meant to communicate.
By the dawn of the 1950s, a whole wave of new music invaded Italy. While a few rich houses still heard merely the sound of their own pianos, swing, jazz, boogie‐woogie, and eventually rock ‘n’ roll were taking over the public and domestic spaces of the middle and lower classes, breaking in to create the soundtrack of the economic miracle or “Boom” in Italy of the later 1950s and early 1960s. As a significant percentage of the population moved to urban centers, went to school, and got used to the idea of being part of a modern country, Italians also discovered the pleasure of spending money not only on refrigerators and cars but also on music, which was everywhere. It was the music of the Allied liberators, yet, imported with the desire to renovate the domestic song style, it still centered on the tenets of bel canto. It was also now the role of the newborn medium of television to diffuse popular music. Since its early days in 1954, television accomplished this through three main programs: the daily clips of Carosello (a show composed of brief commercials that aired at the end of the broadcast day on Rai), the weekly musical quiz show Il Musichiere, and the annual live broadcast of the Festival della canzone italiana di Sanremo. When in 1958 Domenico Modugno performed “Nel blu dipinto di blu” (“Volare”) with his nasal and mesmerizing voice, and opened wide his arms to the people gathered in front of a few television sets, it was clear that the conservative melodic stereotypes, defended since 1951 and still reproduced by this festival (Gundle 2000, 187–88), had been swept away.
Yet, in the middle of the decade, cinema, not music, prevailed as the most popular form of entertainment. Its peak was in 1955, with an average of more than two million spectators per day. Popular music became a protagonist on the big screen. New stars migrating across media turn up in a large number of musical comedies, often playing themselves or lending their names to the characters. As it happened in the old commedia dell’arte, they became “masks” of human qualities. Claudio Villa, the last hero of bel canto’s melodiousness, embodies manly arrogance and self‐confidence, while Modugno epitomizes self‐ironic blustering and Achille Togliani personifies cynical seduction. The songs in these films are included—together with original incidental music, revisited arias, and orchestral versions of songs from the protagonist’s repertoire—in what we may define as the earliest sustained musical soundtracks of Italian cinema. Many still today judge these films negatively as an aspect of the dangerous partnership in formation at the time between media and market, “leading mainly to conformism and fetishism” (Bassetti 2004, 152). However, customs were radically changing, as a new generation finally expressed its desire “to have fun,” and to affirm for the first time the value of its youth and technology. In I ragazzi del juke‐box (Lucio Fulci, 1959) Adriano Celentano, one of the youngest urlatori (literally “screamers,” the pejorative term media used for the new singers) sang the hymn to this new machine, which had arrived in Italy in 1956. Protagonists of new possibilities for social encounters, particularly with the other sex, emerged. “You can buy youth for no more than 50 lire. In a jukebox coin, there’s obsession—the obsession of the kids of the juke box.” The juke box appears in many films in the Boom’s glory days, particularly in those musicarelli—films where the narrative developed on the basis of one successful song—a subgenre that spread, particularly thanks to Fulci, Piero Vivarelli, and Ettore Maria Fizzarotti, until the late 1960s, when the filmmakers’ interest in the canzonetta decreased.6 Indeed, at the beginning, the appearance of a new generation’s preferred popular music as the main drive of film narratives “sounded” a considerable challenge to the traditional order of the family in a conservative and gerontocratic Italian society. This was partially linked to the subversive character that songs, played as a whole, can have within the film text. As Richard Dyer (2012, 30) points out, “songs in film take up literal but also temporal and sometimes metaphorical space. They impose musical time and length on spoken and acted narration. They allow voices to fill or carry over space and, in dance, permit—even incite—bodies to do the same. This can be lovely, but it may also be disruptive, threatening, subversive.”
Also favored by the diffusion of stereo sound in theaters, film music gained a new relevance. The 1950s brought about the habit to “sonorize” life in all the dimensions that could be represented on the big screen. The new authors of soundtracks certainly had been conservatory educated, but they were less conservative than their predecessors, and understood that cinema was something different from opera or from other supposedly more dignified music‐based forms (Prato 2010, 259).
A new generation of composers finally set out to adapt their original art to the language and rules of cinema, convinced that their creativity did not nest merely in the academic fortresses of tradition, but was finding its way as elastic disposition and as research into solutions to make music cinematographic. For instance, Mario Nascimbene regularly used nonconventional instruments, such as the Jew’s harp, and real‐life sounds (a bicycle ring, a clock ticking) in his scores, which he conveyed through the mixerama, the first type of synthesizer utilized in Italian films. In fact, following neorealism’s lesson (Nascimbene worked frequently for Rossellini and De Santis), his music demonstrates that reality pushes too hard to stay confined outside the big screen. Also Angelo Lavagnino, even if he never renounced certain rhetorical elements in his 250 scores written for directors from Carlo Lizzani to Raffaello Matarazzo, came to mix styles and timbres in original ways. These two artists also revealed unusual self‐awareness and self‐promotional skills, which brought them work in foreign productions: Lavagnino most notably on Orson Welles’ Othello (1952) and Nascimbene on, among other films, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954).
Among other figures who start working in these years, two composers in particular contribute to the definition of a new concept in Italian film music: Giovanni Fusco and Nino Rota. Both transitional composers related to late nineteenth‐century Romantic style, these classically trained artists nonetheless exhibit a lack of prejudice regarding films and directors, and are prepared to accept the film production hierarchies and to support narrative development through formal and stylistic innovations. However, in what is only a seemingly paradoxical result, their film music becomes a more autonomous element, taking on the role of protagonist, pushing the story forward, and interacting with the whole acoustic environment. They both share a common trait in Italian cinema: the formation of a principal partnership with one director, whose narrative world they help to define with musical atmospheres and silences. When Giovanni Fusco meets with Michelangelo Antonioni, the former is already an established name, yet, the director’s vision influences his style, encouraging him to reduce the presence of the full orchestra and to rediscover smaller instrumental sections, even single instruments. From Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950) to Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964), he learns how to calibrate silences, essential themes, and long drones. As D’Amato (2001, 153) claims, “In Antonioni’s work in progress … noises and silences become more and more ‘poetical’ … real material of a sound landscape, the sonic echo of the screen, in tune or out of tune with the images.”
Nino Rota is the composer who most embodies the paradox of producing music that is both “purely functional” and, at the same time, internationally acknowledged as unique art. It is particularly from 1952 onward, when he had already produced music for 64 films and a large number of directors, that Rota limits his collaborations to a few auteur productions, the first of which were by Federico Fellini. In Fellini’s films, Rota fragments symphonic sound into more intimate moments, filled with ironic, emotive, ethereal, and nostalgic atmospheres. (See Dyer 2010, especially the chapters on ironic detachment, 40–127, and Fellini, 153–82.) Drawing upon Italian regional folklore, he makes truly “popular” art, drawing together both Italian and English senses of the “popular” and the “folk.” Fellini, who from Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952) to Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal, 1978) owed much to Rota’s irony and nostalgic evocativeness, observed, “I stand by the piano, he is at the piano, and I explain to him exactly what I want …. He is aware that film music is a marginal element, secondary, that only in certain moments can [it] be protagonist, but in general it must only support” (quoted in Miceli 2009, 343–44). These words, though they betray a certain dismissiveness, still suggest to us the extent to which film music was, by the time Fusco and Rota arrived on the scene, beginning to liberate itself from its historical sense of guilt and prepare to move in the many directions cinema was about to take.
As the economic miracle ended, it left behind changed consumption patterns. People were reluctant to give up their newly discovered forms of entertainment. Italy became (and remained so until the 1980s) the 10th largest market worldwide in terms of record sales. Popular music broke rapidly into many categories that soon acquired social and generational significance. As the musicarelli’s songs became the symbol of a conservative adult and middle‐class culture, the lower classes began to enjoy the new Italian beat, rock, and pop. Furthermore, the specifically Italian phenomenon of the cantautore emerged. This no longer designated simply a singer who was also a songwriter, it referred to the singer and songwriter of a different kind of song, a distinctive and distinguished form of music—poetic, socially aware, and at times political—that redefined the boundaries of commercial and more obviously “light” music (Santoro 2002, 116).7 It is perhaps because of the social and political commitment, or even poetic flavor, of such music that films did not seem to welcome easily the canzone d’autore, except perhaps at times for the opening or closing credits (Fabbri 1990, 7).
And, as the music scene changed, so did the movies. Having commenced a long decline in Italy, cinema was now divided into defined and identifiable genres, which were useful for the critic, who could establish new hierarchical values. This division separated commercial from auteur cinema (the work of mainly Bernardo Bertolucci, Luchino Visconti, Fellini, and Antonioni) and from political cinema d’impegno (mainly by Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi)—the only types acknowledged to have a license for ideological and formal rebellion. What this “apocalyptic” approach impedes, however, is an understanding of the impact that the various genres had on a large part of Italian society, and how these genres drew from and reflected social custom and forces. Alongside comedy, that for 15 years at least remained the most popular instrument to explore difficult terrain (war, resistance, the effects of consumerism), there was a flourishing of western, horror, erotic, detective, noir, and thriller genres. The multiplication of this articulated “underworld” stimulated film music composers to specialize and develop new formal canons, to experiment with electronic instruments, and to draw with no prejudice from all kinds of influences, not only musical. Film and film scores entered, in this way, into the circle of a popular culture that saw imagery and sound migrate among television, magazines, records, comic books, and radio. (Exploiting a legislative vacuum in which no law protected the Rai media monopoly, something like one thousand radio stations were created across the country between 1974 and 1976.) The kind of contamination that was occurring was clear from the fact that it was film comedy that familiarized many of its spectators with an elitist or niche musical genre such as jazz. This happened plainly in Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), where an innovator such as Pietro Umiliani, mindful of the arbitrary association of jazz and noir in American cinema (Butler 2002), elaborates the subgenre of cool jazz, producing what we might define as jazz “made in Italy,” that populated many comedies and thrillers in the following years.
Another composer who brought new influences to Italian film music was Piero Piccioni, who lived for years in the United States and played with Charlie Parker, before returning and working for Risi, Ettore Scola, Rosi, Petri, and Lina Wertmüller—directors whose work embraced a vast range of films and styles. Piccioni was, above all, linked, through his collaborations, with the popular actor and director Alberto Sordi. A third innovator of the time was Armando Trovajoli, who played in an Italian jazz band from 1939 on and worked in radio and television (with Piccioni) before establishing fruitful partnerships with Risi, Scola, and other comedy directors. Piccioni and Trovajoli made Italian cinema become aware of the benefits of musical contamination, integrating in their sonic textures bebop, Afro‐Cuban rhythms, and other international styles. This generation of composers—among whom was also Carlo Rustichelli, who produced many scores for director Pietro Germi—shared the characteristics that are typical of the Italian film music composer: “a versatile and solid polymorphism of musical skills and competence, a daring experimentalism of new sonic forms … and a strong inclination to adaptation” to all possible film styles and genres (Tordini 2012, 24).
Ennio Morricone is universally recognized as the father of the movie specialisti, even if, like Rota, he has written all kinds of music. Both have made Italian film music an identifiable and profitable product across the world. Morricone combined his firm symphonic touch and his experimental approach to both the acoustic and electric dimensions. As one of the members of the association Nuova Consonanza, he had the chance to familiarize himself with contemporary styles and with improvisation and thus be in a position to re‐elaborate the melodic and nonmelodic clichés of film music and to help dissolve the boundaries between art and genre films. Initially, a composer of canzonette, he debuted with Luciano Salce’s Il federale (The Fascist, 1961) and achieved his fame with scores for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, displaying a radically new capacity to make music and sound interact with cinematography in the dilation of time and space—highlighting, for instance, through “acoustic close‐ups,” the smallest noises, such as a drop of water. The Leone films brought to light an unexpected market for soundtracks and instrumental music: Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965) was third on the Italian charts; Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, 1966) rose to fourth in the United States. Morricone’s impact on cinema—to many, he is the real architect of Leone’s “musical” cinema (Scrollo 1989a, 16)—paved the way for his collaboration with directors such as Bertolucci, Gillo Pontecorvo, Petri, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, in whose films classical music releases unforeseen semantic opportunities (De Giusti 2001, 182). More recently, he has worked with Giuseppe Tornatore, who admits that, from Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1988) on, he has found it beneficial to have the music composed before shooting the film (Fazzini 2006, 22).
For a classically educated musician, Morricone has shown an extraordinary ability to communicate with the largest possible audience. He has been a pioneer in the use of preexisting tracks, both classical and popular, as expressive means functional to the story and to the director’s view.8 Through five decades, Morricone’s fame and independent personality—which distinguish him from Rota, who never prevailed over directors in artistic decision‐making—have become so consolidated that at times they call into question the primacy of the director as author of the film. Indeed, he admits his fame today is intimidating for some directors (Fazzini 2006, 32). The prominence of this composer has allowed some lingering cultural prejudices to burst forth. There continue to be those who allege the inferiority of film music, impugning the maestro since he owes his fame uniquely to his film scores. In addition, the great amount of music he has produced outside cinema, as well as his live concert programs, are generally disregarded by critics (Scrollo 1989b, 49). Thus, even though film music is “inferior,” film composers must compose only for cinema! In the Italian scene, what is celebrated and studied is Morricone’s work in art films, which overlooks the presence of his name among the credits of horror movies and thrillers. Indeed, he has paved the way for those artists and “jobbers” willing to negotiate boundaries between hierarchies and genres, “descending” even into the category of “B” movies. Some of these are Riz Ortolani, Bruno Nicolai, Gianni Ferrio, and Vittorio Gelmetti—and, from the 1970s, Stelvio Cipriani, who worked on many thrillers and horror movies, although his bestseller (14 million albums sold worldwide) is the music for Enrico Maria Salerno’s Anonimo Veneziano (The Anonymous Venetian, 1970). There are also Franco Micalizzi and bands such as Goblin, who created unmistakable tunes central to the success of Dario Argento’s films. Also, once the musicarelli lost their appeal, many writers of canzonette and rock turned to film—including Nico Fidenco, Pino Donaggio (who worked regularly with the American director Brian De Palma), and progressive rock bands such as Osanna and New Trolls. “B” genres have also been the training ground for artists such as Luis Bacalov who have made their way to the red carpet of the Oscars.
Born in Argentina and educated in France, Bacalov is one of the most active and highly awarded composers today. His relationship with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences starts early, with the Oscar nomination for Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964). Ever since, he has drawn on his cultural roots to infuse genre films (particularly detective stories and thrillers) and auteur works, such as Fellini’s La città delle donne (City of Women, 1980), with a Latin American atmosphere, but also with nuances of contemporary music (he participated in Nuova Consonanza with Morricone). On the contrary, Nicola Piovani does not have much experience with different genres. His melodic simplicity, which can feature sudden harmonic digressions or changes in the main theme, and his research into local folk music culture, have granted him fame as Rota’s heir—most of all in relation to Fellini, who, after Rota’s death, worked with Piovani on three occasions. He is also an extraordinarily active live musician, touring the world in the difficult attempt to make his work outside film appreciated internationally.
Fortunately, the public’s and critics’ celebration of contemporary Italian cinema, due in part to figures such as Bacalov and Piovani, has encouraged the abandonment of certain prejudices, though this has involved a certain auteur‐centered prejudice of its own. One of the most recent Italian publications on film music, Musica/regia (Bandirali 2008b), is a collection of eight conversations between established pairs of directors and composers that highlights some recurring traits in Italian cinema: for instance, the composer’s more “transversal” attitude compared to that of directors. The conclusive section presents a round table in which critics sketch a portrait of film music today, drawing on a diagram in which Morricone, “a gigantic paternal figure, stimulating and intrusive,” is the center of a solar system around which the other composers revolve (Bandirali, Buffa, and Tomasacci 2008 147). These pages show that some level of disagreement exists on the legitimacy of categories such as “morriconiani” and “rotiani,” but they also reveal that most scholarship has not yet (to cite a favorite Bertolucci theme) “killed the father”—that is, abandoned an auteurist inclination that is often devotional. Too often, in fact, the term autore is used, and, increasingly, the field of cinema music is granted its artistic dignity only through undisputed acknowledgment of a few practitioners, rather than being treated as a vaster field open to critical exploration.9 Indeed, perhaps ironically, never as in the past decade have the forms and techniques of composing for films been so radically fragmented and made irreducible to rigid categorization. In the past 30 years, new soundscapes have altered our perception of sound. For instance, techno and digital sound everywhere, from cell‐phone ringtones to TV jingles, have made us increasingly familiar with a universe of synthesized acoustic reality that is reshaping our perception of our audible world and of films.
Things started to change rapidly in the early 1980s, with the emergence of rock‐enthusiast filmmakers, such as Carlo Verdone with Borotalco (1982). This was also the beginning of Verdone’s long partnership with composer Fabio Liberatori, and the moment when contemporary popular music genres and preexisting songs began to make more consistent inroads into films. This trend has exploded over the past decade, when these sounds have often become the representational form used to emphasize the perspective of youth. Because of their popularity, and/or because of the grasp they have on young audiences and their imaginary, popular bands get increasingly involved with writing music, particularly for young directors’ works. Among the most renowned are Banda Osiris, Massive Attack (Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra/Gomorrah, 2008), CSI (Davide Ferrario’s Tutti giù per terra/We All Fall Down, 1997), CSI’s former guitarist Massimo Zamboni (for Daniele Vicari’s films), Negroamaro, and Avion Travel. A growing phenomenon has been the emergence of popular songwriters (encouraged by far‐sighted film producers such as Domenico Procacci) as directors: Luciano Ligabue with Radiofreccia (Radio Arrow, 1998), Franco Battiato with Perduto amor (2003), and others.
Today, musicians who write film scores can count on solid familiarity with popular music and with a digital sonic environment, which they let contaminate their musical education and production. Even film‐music specialists now privilege the use of fragmented harmonic structures—an insistence on timbres and pulses rather than on melodic patterns. This also happens when they come to work with auteurs. The case of composer Riccardo Giagni is instructive: with his minimalist style, based on the development of “sonic cells”; his research on timbres; and his capacity to create a meaningful sound texture that intersects with the original score, diegetic noise, and preexisting tracks both popular and classical, Giagni has helped change the visual and the narrative style of the long‐established author Marco Bellocchio, beginning with L’ora di religione (My Mother’s Smile, 2002). A contemporary composer such as Franco Piersanti has helped create the intimate atmospheres of Gianni Amelio’s films. Andrea Guerra, who shifts mainly from youth comedy to drama such as Fernan Ozpetek’s stories, and Paolo Buonvino, preferred by directors of the new sentimental comedy such as Paolo Muccino, show an eclectic capacity to draw from and rework preexisting material. This includes television (often blamed for Italian cinema’s decline), as they play with clichés and quotations to create an effective level of irony and emotion, reflecting the complexities of the cultural moment.
If the “right song to sing,” to quote Bruce Chatwin (1988), is exercised in such a way as to represent contemporary contradictions and uncertainties, it must abandon the safety of tradition and risk going in new directions. This is the premise that underlies any score written by the young composer Teho Teardo, with whom I will end this journey. A diversified musician, who also works for theater productions and performs live regularly, Teardo is the choice of many who today make committed films: Paolo Sorrentino (Il divo, 2008); Guido Chiesa; and other, young, directors. His methodology embraces the principles common to most film music today: rejection of conventional cinematic rules (for instance, visual–sound synchronization); free interpretation of basics such as the notation system; crossing of the classic dichotomous boundaries between diegetic and nondiegetic music; contestation of the frontiers among music, noise, and dialogue; and finally, constant creative engagement with preexisting music. He has stated, “I am not a film composer, I bring music to cinema. The depression of record sales makes films an interesting place to propose music. Films are seen by millions of people if they work, and it is difficult for a record, especially experimental music, to have such visibility” (Teardo 2007).
It is intriguing to note that while, in the 1930s, singers used films to popularize their personae, films today offer the same possibility to composers who consider themselves primarily musicians. Furthermore, as has always been the case, it is important for these artists to see in the productions they are offered the space for their own creativity. Like the “grumpy” composers of the 1920s and 1930s, these self‐conscious artists seem to want to be involved in all the steps of the working process:
When they propose [to] me already edited films I think “the director must be 70 years old,” but [then] when I see that it is a debut [film] I get mad. We all have a responsibility, for both those who direct and those who make music, to narrate our own time. We cannot do that with the methods they used in the 1960s. (Teardo 2007)
In reality, feeling themselves included in an expanding popular culture, Teardo and others insist on the concept of a fluid, collective authorship such as we find in Daniele Vicari’s Il passato è una terra straniera (The Past Is a Foreign Land, 2008). The end credit song is written by Vicari, scored by Teardo, and sung by the main actor Elio Germano. Contemporary iconoclastic composers, articulating the sounds of our worlds through “musical incidents” and mixing classical instruments with all kinds of digital devices, require the viewers’ imagination—more so than was the case in the past—to face up to and oppose any form of cultural standardization.