“Where Is the Orchestra?” The Sanremo Festival Through the 80s and the 80s Through the Sanremo Festival

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.