Songbook for a Revolution

Songbook for a Revolution tells the story of how songs and performance became effective political tools in Italy through a critical history of a radical folk music collective in 1962 Milan, the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI) or "New Italian Songbook." Leftist intellectuals, young songwriters, and working-class musicians who made up the NCI used field research, live performance, and recorded albums to amplify marginalized voices and put to music an alternative vision of Italian culture and politics. With extensive archival and multimedia research, author Rachel E. Love shows how the NCI innovated the use of folk songs to create a new activist culture and, in the process, tap into the revolutionary energies of this remarkable historical moment. Love traces the political tensions of this musical world: the embrace of working-class voices as political expression alongside the marketing of protest music within the wider music industry, the complex adaptation of US influences, and the group's role within the rise and fall of the Italian new left. Featuring original oral history interviews with eight former NCI members, Love also examines their intertwining memories of personal loss and the grief of revolutionary dreams deferred. Readers will learn how the stories of song and protest pioneered by the NCI became the soundtrack of an intense and transformative period of Italian history. A provocative exploration of the relationship between folk music and dissent, Songbook for a Revolution illustrates how an innovative group of singers and researchers catalyzed a musical counterculture to challenge party politics, raise the stakes for artists, and provide a platform for the cultural expressions of ordinary people.