Tenco 2021 Award: the presentation press conference with guests Mogol, Fiorella Mannoia, Enrico Ruggieri and Stefano Bollani
Merge, not divide. With these intentions, the press conference for the presentation of the Tenco 2021 Awardwhich will return in attendance on 21, 22 and 23 October at theAriston of Sanremo.
“A song without adjectives”: this is the fundamental theme of the 44th edition of the songwriting review, an edition that wants to go beyond musical barriers. What is the song? What is the purpose of the music? This is the leitmotif of a world that has lately been increasingly fragmented between positions and opposing languages that have shifted the main interest of artistic representation into the subdivision of labels.
The 2021 Award has a (finally) important mission. Regardless of the denomination, the adjectives, value the feelings, the sensations. Where can a song be referred to as “cultured” and when can it be classified as “commercial”?
The point is representation. Representing reality or dreams, everyday life or poetry as “the world we would like to live in”; accept both shades of a universal and subjectively perceptible language, without filters or influences. The music, the song as an empty container, to be filled with emotions, not judgments or impressions, shades and colors.
“Without adjectives” is the opening to what until now had perhaps remained extraneous to the Tenco award, “Without adjectives” as the last and first experience at the same time.
No musical barriers and no social barriers. Music as an example, music as an example.
In the words of the artistic manager Sergio Secondiano Sacchi the explanation of the title: “To distance ourselves from what was once simply defined as “pop music”, the use of genitives and adjectives has always conditioned Italian song since the late 1950s. As logical and natural, the desires of differentiation and proud positioning have filled the musical vocabulary with denominations indicating not only the origin or language (ethnic, rock), but also the container of diffusion (commercial, festival), automatically establishing a sort of qualitative contrast. The ideological flavor of this contrast has also created more than one question mark (Azzurro is a commercial song if interpreted by Adriano Celentano and an author if sung by Paolo Conte?). Furthermore, the ancient antithesis between a low quality song destined for large numbers and a quality one destined for an elite fell at the same time that the greatest songwriters were at the top of the sales charts. “
“If the contrast between origins and containers had a pregnant logic in the 60s and 70s – he continued Sacks – we cannot think of remaining there motionless and that the world around us is unchanged. Tenco is forty-nine years old, we are more durable than the GDR, the Berlin wall has fallen, it is useless to imagine an immutable world, which still wants ideological and cultural barbed wire. Representing obsolete cultural, aesthetic and qualitative barriers, certain labels and denominations of uncontrolled origin have lost all reason for survival. Not wanting to represent an institution that exists only to give quality licenses to the Italian singer-songwriter and taking up the authoritative indications of Luciano Berio and Roberto Leydi, Club Tenco believes that, with regard to the song, the only adjectives with the right of citizenship are “beautiful “Or” ugly “. Therefore, looking to the near future and thinking that a “songwriting” should be considered a “beautiful” song regardless of the container of origin, the title of this Review of the Song of the Author will be “A song without adjectives”.
With this in mind, eight will take turns on stage Tenco Awards 2021. To represent the thought of this edition there will be, in fact, songwriters, authors and performers among the winners: Fiorella Mannoia, Mogol (for the partnership with Battisti), Enrico Ruggeri, Stefano Bollani, Vittorio De Scalzi, Paolo Pietrangeli, the International Tenco Award Marisa Mountain and the Tenco Cultural Operator Award Pere Camps.
The performances of the winners of the Tenco 2021 plates: Samuele Bersani, Madame, Peppe Voltarelli e i Fratelli Mancuso.
During the three evenings it will be possible to attend various unpublished tributes: in the 100th year of his birth and in the 40th year of his death, the one to the French singer-songwriter, poet and actor could not be missing. Georges brassens remembered by Alberto Patrucco.
“It is an almost epochal turning point that we are making: I agree. The Tenco was tight on me and even now a little. Now it is a larger area of freedom, creativity and realism: we have come out of the den. I am very happy that Mogol has accepted the Award. It is an important signal for the reconciliation of music in general and Italian. He has suffered from uncorrected conflicts in the past, ”he said Stefano Senardi, member of the board.
Guests of the presentation, also went live streaming on zoom Fiorella Mannoia: “I am happy with this award I am a Tenco addict, I spent many happy years there, I have many memories of happy evenings not only to sing but also to meet”, and Enrico Ruggieri who did not let a nice joke about his absence from the Tenco stage escape: “I can’t wait to get there and I would play my idea would be to bring what I have done in these years, but the problem is that since the last time I was at Tenco I have recorded 29 albums and I will try to condense, as Pooh does with medleys. I’d like to tell what happened from 1988 to 2021 ”.
Also Stefano Bollani, presents in the press conference said: “I am one of those who have disappeared from the Tenco Award, but I repeat that it is the prize of the meetings we hope to be able to do it also with the after Tenco. Here we talk about two beautiful things: encounters and abandonment of conflicts and if we abandon conflicts in music, perhaps we also abandon them in other areas ”.
In the end Mughal, who wanted to remember Luigi Tenco: “Luigi Tenco spent many hours with my father when he went to visit him, he is part of my age and if he had listened to me he would not have died. I told him, in an inn where we stopped to eat, not to go to Sanremo, he didn’t need it. He replied that it would give him popularity. Eventually I learned of his death and that year I went to his funeral in a small village. “
At a time when the Italian music sector and beyond is going through, as we all know, a difficult time, the hope is that Tenco will bring value and physicality back to the performances, starting from the main objective of this edition, to break down barriers, hoping that a new wave of hope assails us like the notes of a song, that Fabrizio De Andrè, to whose memory this edition is dedicated, he gave us some time ago: “Love and laugh if love answers / cry aloud if he doesn’t hear you. / Nothing is born from diamonds, / flowers are born from manure “