Five easy pieces 1964–2006: 40 years of music and politics in Italy, from B(ella ciao) to B(erlusconi)

In five interconnected ‘pieces’ spanning almost half a century of Italian history, the author recollects the main critical junctures in the complex relationship between music and politics since the 1960s. The first piece recounts how the growth of the Italian folk revival centered around Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, a group of progressive ethnomusicologists and folksingers who in the early 1960s helped break the musical establishment’s conservative stranglehold on musical expression. The second piece traces the evolution of Stormy Six, a folk-rock-turned-progressive-rock band formed in Milan in 1966, as well as the creators of L’Orchestra, an independent label aimed at promoting a wide range of non-commercial music, from avant-garde and jazz to political protest song. The last three pieces chronicle the decline of these and other such forward-looking, countercultural initiatives over the 1980s and 1990s, as the influence of the intellectual Left on the Italian government wanes and a new anti-communist coalition led by Christian Democrats establishes tight control on the political system. In newly conservative Milan, Musica nel nostro tempo, a prestigious season of modern and contemporary music started in 1976, is allowed to go bankrupt, and Claudio Abbado is forced to resign as La Scala’s chief conductor because of his ‘excessive’ attention to the modern repertoire.