The Singer-Songwriter in Europe

Paradigms, Politics and Place

Isabelle Marc, Stuart Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317016052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

The Singer-Songwriter in Europe is the first book to explore and compare the multifaceted discourses and practices of this figure within and across linguistic spaces in Europe and in dialogue with spaces beyond continental borders. The concept of the singer-songwriter is significant and much-debated for a variety of reasons. Many such musicians possess large and zealous followings, their output often esteemed politically and usually held up as the nearest popular music gets to high art, such facets often yielding sizeable economic benefits. Yet this figure, per se, has been the object of scant critical discussion, with individual practitioners celebrated for their isolated achievements instead. In response to this lack of critical knowledge, this volume identifies and interrogates the musical, linguistic, social and ideological elements that configure the singer-songwriter and its various equivalents in Europe, such as the French auteur-compositeur-interprète and the Italian cantautore, since the late 1940s. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of this figure in the post-war period, how and why its contours have changed over time and space subsequently, cross-cultural influences, and the transformative agency of this figure as regards party and identity politics in lyrics and music, often by means of individual case studies. The book's polycentric approach endeavours to redress the hitherto Anglophone bias in scholarship on the singer-songwriter in the English-speaking world, drawing on the knowledge of scholars from across Europe and from a variety of academic disciplines, including modern language studies, musicology, sociology, literary studies and history.

Part I
Paradigms

Chapter 1
'The Songs I'd Write Would Be Like That': Transnational Influences between Poets, Composers, Singer-Songwriters

Franco Fabbri

It wasn’t until the publication in 2004 of his Chronicles, Volume One that Bob Dylan revealed he had been strongly influenced by Bertolt Brecht, ‘the antifascist Marxist German poet-playwright whose works were banned in Germany’ (Dylan, 2004, p. 272), and especially by ‘Pirate Jenny’, one of the ballads in The Threepenny Opera (1928), to which he was exposed during an off-Broadway performance of Brecht songs in the early 1960s (Dylan, 2004, pp. 272–6). After listening to that and other pieces, dismounting and re-assembling them many times, Dylan would compose and sing ‘in a few years’ songs such as ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, ‘Who Killed Davey Moore’, ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’: in 2004 he maintained that without Brecht’s example those songs would never have been born (Dylan, 2004, p. 287). In the same autobiographical book, Dylan wrote that he was (at about the same time) influenced by French existentialist playwright and novelist Jean Genet: ‘The songs I’d write would be like that’ (Dylan, 2004, p. 89). none of Dylan’s critics before 2004 ever dared to suggest an influence on Dylan by the best-known German communist poet of the twentieth century, or by one of the exponents of the Parisian intellectual scene that had produced engagé songs by the likes of Boris Vian, Georges Brassens and Léo Ferré. Surprise was the reaction of those who had been writing essays and books on how Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash or William Blake, and the Bible, had moulded Dylan’s poetry and music.

This chapter will be about such unjustified surprises, and it will begin with some theoretical reflections on how and why models are chosen in artistic work. It goes without saying that in the history of music (and of poetry) individual artists, as well as genres, styles, scenes, schools, became the models for others: in some cases the influence is obvious (Italian opera, Austro-German instrumental music, French operetta, tango, jazz, rock’n’roll, the British Invasion bands, hip-hop) in others less so (like the way French chanson was taken as a model in late nineteenth-century Austria and Germany, giving birth to Kabarett, or how Greek éntechno laikó traghoudi was based on a similar attempt to make ‘art’ out of an urban popular tradition, that of rebetiko). Focusing especially on Europe, the chapter will inevitably take into consideration examples from other continents, like the influence of Dylan himself (and of the US folk revival scene) on British, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek singer-songwriters, as well as influences by Latin American singer-songwriters (from bossa nova artists like Tom Jobim to Silvio Rodríguez and Atahualpa Yupanqui) on Spanish and Catalan cantautores, and Italian cantautori. Intra-European influences include the widespread adoption of the Rive Gauche auteur-compositeur-interprète model from Spain to Russia (and Italy and Germany), the long-standing influence of Brecht–Weill and Brecht–Eisler songs on Italian, French, British political song and ‘committed’ rock, the way British folk revival (Ewan MacColl) and singer-songwriters (from the Beatles to Cat Stevens, Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, Sting, nick Drake, Richard Thompson and others) were received in other European countries by lyricists, composers and singers who thought: ‘The songs I’d write would be like that.’

Influence: Theoretical and Practical Approaches

‘Influence’ is a widely used critical concept in music journalism, also adopted by artists, especially at the beginning of their career, and by the recording industry (in press releases, for example). It connotes similarity, and so it functions like class concepts such as genre, style, scene, school, as a workaround to avoid more specific descriptions of the lyrical or musical text, or of the way they are performed or recorded. Recommender systems on the Internet (Celma, 2010) try to fulfil the same need (to create associations among similar items, without describing them), although these are based on quantitative rather than qualitative data: those who liked, or listened to, or bought a certain song, or album, or artist, or genre, also liked others, which are the object of recommendation. Influence appears as one of the recommendation factors in iTunes Store (in the biographical section for a given artist, although not all artists have one).¹ There is also a recommender system fully based on influence, inflooenz.com – ‘The music lineage guide’ – which promises to ‘Discover who influenced your favorite artists’.² Influence adds a hint of causality, suggesting a reason for similarity, and this may be an explanation of the concept’s success among music critics, who often seem to be aiming at a (rather trivial) rationalization of music history.³

Influence is not a trivial concept. When similar content elements or stylistic traits are found in different texts, influence may be (or may be not) operating. Phenomena such as intertextuality and disciplines like translation studies, then, can be invoked as relevant to the study of influence. In this chapter, however, I will concentrate on the poietic⁴ aspects of influence, rather than on its post factum effects. Harold Bloom elaborated a theory of influence in literature, developing the idea of anxiety generated in poets by the implicit challenge posed by precursors who influenced them; Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) was considered at the time of its publication as one of the foundations of a new, ‘revisionary’ approach to literary criticism. Bloom’s insistence on hierarchic values, and on the opposition between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ poets, as well as his faith in the dominance of the Western canon, make his theory old-fashioned – to say the least – in our age. However, some of Bloom’s suggestions could probably be applied to singer-songwriters, without implying any resemblance or identification with poets (a highly controversial issue).⁵ The six basic concepts, or ‘movements’, or ‘Revisonary Ratios’, developed by Bloom in order to explain various modalities of influence – clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, apophrades (Bloom, 1973, pp. 14–16) – apply independently of their author’s canonistic views. One of the most important suggestions we can draw from these categories is that influence is an active (rather than passive) process on the side of the influenced. In other words, the influenced is the agent of influence: which should be obvious, if we weren’t misled by the usage of a passive form. It could also be observed that to some respect ‘to be influenced by someone’ is a euphemism for emulating, imitating, copying or even stealing from someone.⁶ If we were to adopt Bloom’s hierarchies, we could say that ‘stronger’ singer-songwriters would admit they stole from someone, while ‘weaker’ ones would maintain they were influenced. Of course, the idea of influence as exerted actively by an influencer onto an influenced is implicit in constructs like acculturation, commercial and media dominance, cultural imperialism, but it must also be noted that often in music history processes of influence were initiated before influencers were massively visible/audible in the context of the influenced. A paradigmatic example is offered by Georges Brassens’s fortune in other European countries in the 1950s and 1960s: non-French singer-songwriters (like Italian cantautori) began ‘to be influenced’ by his songs at a time when Brassens was probably one of the least known auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes outside France (or, rather, known only by a niche of enthusiasts, while other auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes like Charles Trenet and Gilbert Bécaud, had access to radio, television and the record market).⁷ The example of Dylan and Brecht is even more revealing: aside from his encounter with Brecht’s songs in English translation during an off-Broadway performance, there would have been hardly any other chance for Dylan to listen to them at any time.

Models and their copies are created out of the desire that they be transported into a new context: as Borges said, ‘poets create their precursors’ (quoted in Bloom, 1973, p. 19). new styles or genres are also often created by desire, like Italo Calvino’s Nonexistent Knight (Calvino, 1962), an empty suit of armour put together and brought to life by the popular will that such a hero existed.⁸ Communities of any magnitude whose members adopt the conventions of a certain genre or style may be formed by and around examples offered by individual works (i.e. music events) or by other genres or styles (Fabbri, 2012b).

Transnational Influences: Early Examples, from Art to Popular, from Popular to Art

In the history of music (and of poetry) individual artists, as well as genres, styles, scenes and schools, have become models for others. In some cases the influence is obvious. Italian opera was the model for musical theatre across Europe from the seventeenth up to the nineteenth century. When operas by Italian composers were first performed in Paris, arias were preceded by recitatives where singers declared they would soon sing a famous song to moderate the shock for severe French aristocrats unaccustomed to singing actors.⁹ Soon, however, French opera was born, with composers such as Lully and Rameau. German and British opera, also based on Italian models, followed shortly. Similarly, Austro-German instrumental music became canonical in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially after Beethoven’s death and the creation of the myth of his ‘genius’. Subsequently, ‘national schools’ were created elsewhere in Europe. Likewise French operetta was taken as a model in Austria, Great Britain and Italy. The habanera, a dance from Cuba (itself probably influenced by French contredanse) was imported to Europe in the 1860s, and used by Georges Bizet in his Carmen (1875) for its generic Hispanic exoticism; ‘O sole mio’, one of the so-called ‘classics’ of neapolitan song, composed in 1898, is a habanera. Argentinian–Uruguayan tango, resulting from different Afro-Caribbean and Latin American sources (habanera, candombe, milonga), ‘invaded’ Europe and the Middle East in the early twentieth century, during which thousands of tangos were composed, imitating and transforming the original models. Jazz, rock’n’roll, the British Invasion bands, hip-hop are other more recent and even more obvious examples of the influence of genres, styles and scenes on composers, lyricists and performers from other countries. Even the name of just one band, the Sir Douglas Quintet, from San Antonio, Texas (one of the US responses to the British Invasion in 1964–1965), offers a good example of the agency of the influenced.

Other cases of influence are less known and less obvious, such as the way French chanson was taken as a model in early twentieth-century Austria and Germany (Jelavich, 1973). This gave birth to Kabarett, whose repertoire was formed around Otto Julius Bierbaum’s collection of Deutsche Chansons (Brettl Lieder) (Bierbaum, 1900). While Bierbaum, in his quest for a form of ‘applied lyric poetry’ (or Gebrauchslyrik) was looking at songs composed by French chansonniers such as Maurice Macnab, Xanrof and Aristide Bruant, Kabarett songs were composed mostly by professional composers, based on poems written by poets, not lyricists.¹⁰ Conversely, Yvette Guilbert, a star of the Parisian café concert and cabaret in the same period as Bruant (and similarly portrayed by Toulouse-Lautrec), started in 1913 to include songs based on the poems of Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire and other nineteenth-century poets in her repertoire (Hawkins, 2000, p. 76), originating a practice that would characterize French chanson until the 1950s and 1960s (Calvet, 2008).¹¹

Greek éntechno laikó traghoudi (artistic popular song) was based on a similar attempt to make ‘art’ out of an urban popular tradition, that of rebetiko (Papanikolaou, 2007). Again, while the repertoire of rebetiko had been moulded primarily, but not exclusively, by singer-songwriters such as Markos Vamvakaris and Vassilis Tsitsanis, éntechno was originally the creation of classically trained composers like Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis, who set to music poems by Yannis Ritsos, Giorgos Seferis, Odysseas Elytis and others.¹² Theodorakis conceived his idea of éntechno after returning to Greece from Paris, where he had been studying composition (with Olivier Messiaen) and conducting, from 1954 to 1959: he was certainly exposed to the fascination of the Rive Gauche scene, almost at the same time as other followers of the auteur-compositeur-inteprète model, like the Italian Cantacronache. While the collaboration with poets remained a feature of éntechno until recently, the genre was transformed during the years of the dictatorship (1967–1974) and especially in the late 1970s and 1980s, when singer-songwriters emerged, such as Dionysis Savvópoulos, nikos Xydakis, Sokratis Málamas, Thanasis P...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• General Editors' Preface
• Introduction More Than Words: Theorizing the Singer-Songwriter
• Part I Paradigms
• Part II Politics
• Part III Place
• References
• Index