Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano: The Songbook of 1968 in Italy

Abstract

This article examines how the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI) – a leftist collective founded in Milan in 1962 by Gianni Bosio and Roberto Leydi – used their journal to theorize oral cultures as instruments of class consciousness. By doing so, they contributed to the political movements of the 1960s in Italy. The NCI worked to construct a culture of protest through recorded albums, live performances and field research into oral practices. Despite their prominence as the ‘music of 1968’ in Italy, the NCI first came together as a journal. The ten issues of the group’s journal, Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, published between 1962 and 1968, provided materialist and ethnomusicological analysis of oral cultures, as well as the repertoires of rural singers like Giovanna Daffini, and nourished the work of young songwriters. I argue that this journal fostered new militant approaches to culture, documented the artistic vitality of the labouring classes and helped foment the revolutionary sentiments of 1968.