ATeM Archiv für Textmusikforschung
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Fare l’americano, dagli anni Cinquanta a oggi: riflessioni sulle cover versions della hit carosoniana
Full text linkSince its first release in 1956, Renato Carosone’s Neapolitan swing “Tu vuò fa’ l’americano” has been covered extensively. The interest in this piece increased significantly after 1999, thanks to its use in the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley and a number of ‘interlinguistic’ covers.This study aims at identifying the main elements, both in the lyrics and in the music of the original song, that generated this flow of alternative versions, as an attempt to discern the “patchwork of references” that has become a fundamental feature of popular music (Holm-Hudson 2002). It argues that the ironic use of national and cultural stereotypes is at the core of the process of covering “Tu vuò fa’ l’americano”, together with the fundamentally intercultural sonic and textual representation of a Neapolitan-wannabe-American. Simultaneously, the musical structure has been adopted by the covers as a sort of elastic structure from which each musician and composer can extract bits that are relevant to their artistic discourse while still retaining a recognizable relationship to the original.The article is introduced by an overview of the theoretical discussion around the process of covering that gravitates around – although not restricted to – taxonomies of covers in popular music. The central part focuses on musical and textual components that inspired artists to create different versions of “Tu vuò fa’ l’americano”. It then provides an interpretation of a substantial, albeit not exhaustive, corpus of different covers of Carosone’s hit, dividing them into typologies that aim not only at pointing out the semiotic processes involved, but also at casting light on the reasons why this song has been covered within such a vast array of linguistic and stylistic contexts
La musique instrumentale : des ‹ sons › ou du ‹ sens › ? Un bref parcours à travers l’esthétique rationaliste, romantique et symboliste
Full text linkFrom the 18th to the 20th century, the problem of meaning is raised in music. Can music, devoid of words, only ‹ run after them › or unite itself with them? Momigny first attempted to prove that music, too, has a grammar and, like poetry, a logic, and composers of the Viennese classic era such as Haydn serve to demonstrate his claim. Wagner, as theorist, reversed the problem: Music proceeds from poetry, but the latter could accomplish what is impossible for the former. It was able to reactivate the alliance of idea and sensation, lost in language, and surpassing all logic, shed light on the mystery of the world. Debussy, for his part, following in Mallarmé’s footsteps, would like for his grammar to be more temporaland inconclusive
« Une réaffirmation de l’élément ‹ musical › de l’écriture » – Yves Bonnefoy, une musique entre guillemets
Full text link“Toute la langue, ajustée à la métrique, y recouvrant ses coupes vitales, s’évade,” says Stéphane Mallarmé, “avec les cris d’une orchestration.” T.S. Eliot devotes a famous essay to The Music of Poetry (Eliot 1942). Among poets, the fact that music is in poetry seems to be a commonplace analogy. The reader is therefore not surprised when Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), an original practitioner of the French verse, seems to be suggesting a “reaffirmation of the ‘musical’ element in writing” (tr. N.V.) in L’alliance de la poésie et de la musique (Bonnefoy 2007). Quotation marks, however, keep at bay what they quote, and express a doubt as to its nature
Reale und fiktive Sender-Adressaten-Konstellationen in Fußball-Fangesängen – mit romanistischen Beispielen
Full text linkFootball chants have been researched in several disciplines – from musicology to ethnology to linguistics – for quite a while now. They have been most intensively investigated in the German speaking countries, thus focusing on German chants; Kopiez/Brink 1998 is still the reference work in this respect. Other languages and cultures, however, have been studied much less; this paper therefore proposes an investigation of the (lyrics of) football chants of Romance language cultures using a corpus of French, Spanish and Italian songs. The analysis follows a new categorizing scheme, namely “participant constellations”, i.e. constellations of senders and addressees (fans towards their own team, fans towards referees, fans towards opponents’ fans etc.). The results reveal that constellations can be both real and fictitious; in the latter case, the fans sing a text which takes the position of a first person and is sung from the perspective of one exemplary fan. This is the case in chants which stylize the fan’s connection with his/her team as a romantic relationship. The corpus also contains other, sometimes very original fictitious speakers that are linked to the feeling of togetherness among the fan base and show creativity and humour
Faire chanter la parole, faire parler la musique. Généalogie d’une instauration réciproque
Full text linkThere is no evidence in taking for granted the Great Divide between musica and parola: Emerging genres and practices constantly reinvent ways of redefining and connecting those entities. By presenting contrasted ways of singing words, from ethnic ritual performances to religious cult, from opera to French song or rap, this paper outlines ways in which all along history, speaking and singing have re-formed each other through contrasted relationships. Following Foucault’s plea for “genealogy” and Certeau’s concept of the “inversion of the thinkable”, it thus aims to address music history without writing it backwards by drawing on categories that themselves are products of this history. To sketch such a genealogy of its basic elements may help us rebuild our ways of making music of the past present again
Jacopo Tomatis: Storia culturale della canzone italiana. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2019. ISBN 978-8842825463. 816 pages.
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‹ La question sans réponse › : programmatique ou analogie structurelle ?
Full text linkThis article explores possible links relating the composition The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx”. It starts from the observation that the title of the former is a quote drawn from the latter, and the established knowledge that the 20th-century New England composer was deeply interested in and influenced by the 19th-century movement of transcendentalism, in general, and the poet-philosopher Emerson, as one of its most famous exponents, in particular. Highlighting characteristically transcendentalist aspects in Emerson’s text, as well as its marked meta-poetic or meta-artistic dimension, it goes on to examine how these aspects might manifest themselves in Ives’ piece of music, taking into account programmatic aspects of the latter as well as potential structural analogies, and focusing on a possible meta-artistic interpretation of thebrief composition
Music and Prosody: Suprasegmental Features of Reggaeton Songs
Full text linkThe processing of reggaeton songs demands an active engagement from the listener due to the high level of fragmentation in the lyrics, which stems from the variability in word stress and prosodic segmentation. Changes in word stress challenge the listener’s ability to parse the lyrics and often render the passage semantically and grammatically opaque. Long, deliberate pauses and rhythmic variations within grammatical units can be a hindrance to the perception of certain passages, and hence, to the overall comprehension of the text. However, the prosodic disjointedness is compensated by semantic and grammatical links between the parts of separated structures
