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Genealogie e memoria culturale nelle cover delle canzoni di Luigi Tenco

Abstract

A historical overview of Luigi Tenco's album covers allows us to reconstruct the historical and cultural dimensions of the singer-songwriter's legacy. From a theoretical and historiographical standpoint, it provides an opportunity to reexamine the types of intertextual relationships in reuse and reappropriation practices, and outlines the path that has brought Tenco back into the spotlight.

In an attempt to develop a unified approach to Tenco's songbook, Marconi (2014, p. 109) proposed viewing his work as an example of a song that is neither "gastronomic" nor "different," nor integrated nor apocalyptic. As part of a historically situated culture, songs are considered distinctive signs of the time, in which different trends confront and contrast each other, continuously transforming poetic-musical language. Tenco's covers exemplify the transition from the midpoint between “gastronomic” and “different” songs, where Tenco would have positioned himself, to the singer-songwriter as a cultural icon of auteur song. Here, I am not interested in the sociological implications of this shift, which have already been discussed at length. Rather, I am interested in the structural, performative, and productive repercussions found in the "tradition in motion" represented by the creative revivals and reinterpretations of Tenco's songs in the decades following his death.

Finally, we will reflect on how the cultural practice of covers entered the new millennium as a digital practice, taking on the characteristics of modularity and combinatorics typical of digital transformations. While doing so, it continues to represent a possibility for a positional relationship between performers and authors. We will achieve this through a comprehensive overview of Tenco covers produced in recent decades (updated to 2020) and by discussing particular case studies. The revival of Tenco's songs over the last half-century is an extraordinary example of the malleability of popular culture objects as a means for performers and authors to affirm themselves by manipulating the past to construct their own present and future.