ABSTRACT
The importance and influence of French auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes and Existentialism across Europe were undeniable from the 1950s to the late 1960s. Italy’s cultural and geographical proximity to France meant this cultural osmosis was particularly effective across the Alps, as it had been before the Second World War. 1 For this reason, the cultural role of the cantautore in Italy resembles closely that of auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes: these French musicians constituted the idealized model of what Papanikolau (2007) calls ‘singing poets’ in the eyes of Italian fans and critics in the late 1950s, when the label ‘cantautore’ was coined (even when the musical and lyrical references of such artists were patently north American). 2 Thus cantautore was originally used by the Italian press not so much to describe someone who writes and sings his own songs, but more importantly to distinguish him from the ‘highbrow’ – and politically oriented – chansonnier ( Fabbri, 2008b , pp. 94–8). 3 And thus the term rapidly acquired ‘highbrow’ connotations of its own, associated with the figure of the author. This culminated when the term canzone d’autore (literally ‘author’s song’) was coined at the turn of the 1970s to refer to a certain kind of ‘art’ song, different from the ‘lowbrow’ or ‘facile’ songs that had circulated in Italian culture under many different names since the mid-1950s (Tomatis, 2011). 4
