LAMIAGENDAan innovative editorial project conceived by the publishing house The Fifteenwhich has accompanied the school life of many Italian students for years, this year tackles the planet of music, and does so through the lyrics of Claudio Sottocornola, also known as philosopher of pop for his numerous essays on the subject and his concert lectures on contemporary music. School diary aimed at primary and secondary school students, LAMIAGENDA 2024-25 presents itself as a great “book” to be lived and filled, day after day, month after month. In the perspective of the educational philosophy of The Fifteenboys and girls are not the simple “addressees” of the publication, but the real protagonists. Thus, alongside the narration of the history of music, from antiquity to the present day, Sottocornola strings together timely listening suggestions, from Bach and Beethoven to Eminem and Freddy Mercury, from Listz to De André, from Louis Armstrong to Ludovico Einaudi, from Tchaikovsky to Amy Winehouse, while the amusing cartoons to color by Sergio Diella represent in an ironic and amusing way the great singers and musicians in question, and the educational games developed by Franca Vitali Capello offer a note of educational entertainment that never hurts.
Claudio SottocornolaBut why was it decided to address the music theme in this 2024-25 agenda? Sottocornola answers: “The world of music is extraordinary: one of the art forms that is most capable of involving adults and children in the name of an experience of beauty that takes hold of us every time we listen to a song we like or watch the performance of a talented singer, musician or author. From ancient times to the present day, despite the changing fashions, tastes and styles, music has always accompanied humanity in its desire for elevation, sharing, celebration, but also in painful moments, giving consolation, hope, new energy. This is why intellectuals and philosophers have questioned it, while nowadays mass and social media have greatly facilitated its diffusion among all ages and conditions. Yet too often, even in our schools, musical education is neglected, and children struggle to identify the characteristics of a piece of music, to place a famous musician or singer-songwriter in his historical and stylistic context. Well, LamiAgenda 2024-2025 would like to help them enter the mysteries of the planet-music, quickly retracing its evolution from antiquity to the present day, and traveling among its most famous genres, following a historical approach.”.
(LaScimmiapensa.com)We begin with classical music, going through the different periods in six substantial files, highlighting its characteristics, the main protagonists and the forms in which it is expressed, to then tackle Afro-American music, from spiritual ai gospeldal blues al jazzwhich contributed to a great musical revolution, allowing the birth of new experiences, from rock’n’roll to culture hip hopbut also having a huge impact on the spread of music pop. This term, as a contraction of popularin the Anglo-Saxon world, designates that culture, and by extension that music, which, produced thanks to the means of industry, is aimed at the masses, and concerns the entire imagination of contemporary civilization, not only music, therefore, but also visual art, cinema, television, socialnewspapers, comics, videogame, web. The song form is also approaching, which had a great development in the 20th century, and in particular in the second half of the century, marking culture and collective imagination, from Paris to Naples, from London to New York, from Milan to Seoul with its k-pop.
(eBay)The itinerary does not lack precious information on the general characteristics of music (by which we distinguish it from a simple noise), the main instruments, the technology essential for its recording and diffusion, the media through which we listen to it, the innovations brought about by the digital revolution that has radically changed our way of enjoying music itself. And the auspicious title is chosen by Sottocornola by drawing on the great tradition of Italian popular song, But what music, Maestro!in homage to the iconic TV theme song sung and danced by Raffaella Carrà in ’70’s songdemonstrating the 360° approach that the author wanted to take in writing this initiation to music for the youngest.
(Donato Giupponi)Claudio Sottocornola, former teacher of Philosophy and History in high schools, has in fact taught History of the song and the show at the Third University of Bergamo, with great attention to the heritage of Italian song, sanctioning, in fact, an overcoming of the traditional distinction between high and low culture, classical and popin the name of the search for quality and beauty beyond styles and fashions. It seems that LAMIAGENDA 2024-25 fully obeys the educational model of the great pedagogue Maria Montessori, who wrote: “To give modern culture in its entirety has become an impossibility: thus the need arises for a special method by which all the factors of culture can be presented to a child; not in a program imposed on him, with exactitude of details, but by spreading the greatest number of germs of interest. They will be received by the mind as soon as possible, but they can germinate later, as the will becomes more precise, and thus he can become an individual suited to our expanding age.” (How to educate human potential1947). The ideas, suggestions, listening tips, but also the fun cartoons to color, could make this diary a sort of initiatory game for the youngest ones, just to discover the planet-music.
Claudio Sottocornola (Bergamo, 1959), full professor of Philosophy and History in high schools, he was also a teacher of IRC, Literary subjects, Educational Sciences e History of the song and the show at the Third University of Bergamo. A member of the Order of Journalists since 1991, he has collaborated with various newspapers, radio and TV, with interviews with the major exponents of Italian entertainment and culture, later collected in the anthology Variety (Marna, 2016). As a philosopher he is characterized by a strong attention to the category of interpretation, in the light of which he investigates the contemporary world, and he has often used music, poetry and images to speak to a transversal audience, in schools, theaters and in the most varied places of everyday life. His musical studies on pop and his concert-lessons have been collected on CD (Appointment 1, 2, 3CLD, 2005), dvd (The Appointment/The VideoCLD, 2006; Working ClassCLD, 2012), pendrive (A night in ItalyCLD, 2014), and are present on the web on the channel YouTube CLDclaudeproductions,
His poems from Youth… Goodbye. Late 20th Century Diary in Verse (Velar, 2008) and Nuggets, nuggets, lamps (Velar, 2009) have been translated into English, French, Spanish and Romanian. He is the author of numerous publications, which involve three prevalent thematic areas: intellectual autobiography, culture popular contemporary, the current crisis of the sacred in the West and its possible theological-philosophical remodulation, investigated with a hermeneutic approach particularly attentive to a possible synthesis between weak thought and metaphysics. Among the most recent works, Pop Essays (Never, 2018), Good words (Marna/Velar, 2020), Bull’s eye (Never, 2021), Between heaven and earth (Eucharistic Center, 2023), Blooming in the desert (Velar, 2023), So close, so far (Velar, 2023), How late is it at night? (Oltre Edizioni, 2024). For children he also edited LamiAgenda 2023-24 All the colors of the rainbow (The Fifteen, 2023), on the theme of inclusiveness.