Club Tenco
The Club Tenco is an Italian club , the 1972 Sanremo was established. It is named after the Cantautore Luigi Tenco (1938–1967) and is dedicated to promoting the Italian author's song . He has been awarding the Tenco Prize annually since 1974 .
history
The popular Sanremo Festival , the most important pop music competition in Italy , has been held annually in Sanremo since 1951 . During the 1967 festival , Luigi Tenco , a young Cantautore from Genoa , committed suicide after his song Ciao amore ciao was eliminated from the competition. This traumatic event, which also showed the discrepancy between the music of the cantautori and the music of the mainstream , shook the Italian music scene lastingly and Tenco was elevated to a cultural icon by many young people (see The “Trauma” Luigi Tenco ).
The florist Amilcare Rambaldi, a music lover and one of the ideas behind the Sanremo Festival after the Second World War , decided to organize an event to promote the Cantautori and their music as a kind of counterbalance to the Sanremo Festival. His first foray into the city of Sanremo in 1971 was unsuccessful, but through the mediation of the music critic Roberto Buttafava, Rambaldi succeeded in attracting interested parties from all over Italy to the initiative and establishing contact with an already existing Club Tenco in Venice . In 1972 the new Club Tenco was officially founded in Sanremo.
After a few smaller events with cantautori such as Giorgio Gaber , Francesco Guccini or Roberto Vecchioni , the club hosted the Rassegna della canzone d'autore for the first time in July 1974 , at which various cantautori performed and the Tenco Prize was awarded. With the name of the event, the hitherto little known term canzone d'autore , "author's song", was institutionalized. It was also very important for the club to invite international singer-songwriters and to honor them. In the first year it was Frenchman Léo Ferré . In the further course of the event, the prizes were given preferentially to international musicians in order to give the event as little competitive character as possible.
In addition to awarding the Tenco Prize, Club Tenco launched a number of other initiatives, including the short-lived Congresso Nuova Canzone (1975–1977), the award of the Targhe Tenco in various categories by a jury of journalists (since 1984) and the newcomer competition Il Tenco Ascolta ( since 2008). Club Tenco also publishes the annual Il Cantautore magazine, along with various books and CD publications.
Prizes awarded
- Tenco Prize (since 1974)
- Targhe Tenco (since 1984)