JEPC 4 (1) pp. 9–18 Intellect Limited 2013 Journal of European Popular Culture Volume 4 Number 1 © 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jepc.4.1.9_1 Franco Fabbri University of Turin is there popular music out there? abstract Keywords Is European popular music actually ‘popular music’? Of course it is, especially if we consider that the United Kingdom is part of Europe. But perhaps the question should be formulated as follows: ‘Is continental European popular music actually “popular music”?’ Yes, if we consider that the first conference on popular music research was held in Amsterdam and offered a number of papers on non-Anglophone popular music, that IASPM was established in Sweden, that its second conference (titled What is Popular Music?) was held in Italy, that many popular music scholars are based in continental European countries, and many of them study their local genres and scenes. However, those genres and scenes are not called, in local languages, ‘popular music’, and only a semi-informal international convention made continental European scholars adopt the English term for their object of study. On the other hand, there are also many signs that Anglophone scholars, when they use the expression ‘popular music’, tend to refer to Anglo-American popular music, and incline to call other popular musics ‘world music’. Of course, the issue is not just about linguistic usage: in the article examples both from the media and the academia are commented, and their ideological implications are discussed. genre commonsense ideology popular music studies ethnocentricity colonialism PoPular music, commonsense and the academy ‘Tony Palmer is one of the leading directors of music documentaries and historical drama films in the world’. This is the opening sentence of Tony Palmer’s biography on his own website, and it is no exaggeration. It continues: 9 Franco Fabbri 1. All comments are from http://www. tonypalmer.org/ Tony_Palmer_reviews. htm#All_You_Need_Is_ Love, accessed 4 June 2011. He has won over forty international prizes for his work, including and especially television’s most coveted award, the Prix Italia; indeed, he is the only person to have won this prize twice, and has been honoured by the Italia Prize with a gala screening of his work. Amongst the documentaries and biopics that feature in the British director’s filmography (again quoting from the website’s notes), we can find Benjamin Britten & his Festival (Palmer 1967), which became the first BBC film to be networked in the United States; All My Loving (Palmer 1968), an examination of rock’n’roll and politics in the late 1960s; Maria Callas (Palmer 1987), a profile of Maria Callas; Charles Wood’s Wagner (Palmer 1983), starring Richard Burton, with Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Vanessa Redgrave: ‘a masterpiece’ (The Sunday Times) and ‘one of the most beautiful films ever made’ (Los Angeles Times); and A Time There Was (Palmer 1979), a film about Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears that won the Prix Italia. There is no doubt that Palmer is not only an excellent film director, but also a sensible and profound music expert, whose competence covers many different genres. One of his best known works is a seventeen-part series titled All You Need is Love (Palmer 1975–76), completed in 1976 for British television, and recently (2008) released on five DVDs, for a total duration of nearly fifteen hours. The subtitle is The Story of Popular Music. A book with the same title and subtitle, and the same author, was published in 1976, and also enjoyed considerable success. Reading comments over the web, including the notes of appraisal reported on the author’s site, and reviews on www.amazon.com of both the TV series on DVD and the book, one is immediately led to believe that Palmer’s work is actually what the subtitle promises: the story of popular music. To cite a few: It’s [sic] subtitled The Story of Popular Music, and it really is, in nearly 15 hours, on five discs … How great must this be? See for yourself. Calling this five-disc, 17-episode walk through history of pop music ‘comprehensive’ is like calling the Bible ‘important’… All You Need Is Love is a musical education in a box. There’s no shortage of ambition in this 17-episode series directed in 1977 for British TV by music journalist and filmmaker Tony Palmer. Subtitled The Story of Popular Music, this is the closest we will ever get to a definitive portrait of such a sprawling topic.1 The only less than enthusiastic comment (‘very disappointing’, in fact) is by one of Amazon’s reviewers, who begins with the objection that: This is supposed to be the history of American popular music. The problem is, this is a British take on popular music in America and, for the most part, they got it wrong. (Amazon 2008) To be honest, there is no suggestion by the author that All You Need is Love is the story of American popular music (although, of course, popular music from the United States is a dominant part of the whole). According to the author, and to most comments, it is simply ‘the story of popular music’, without any specification. But, as a matter of fact, All You Need is Love is a history of Anglophone popular music, focused particularly on the United States and 10 Is there popular music out there? England: a comprehensive, brilliant, well-documented historical account of what, in the commonsense of the majority of those whose mother tongue is English, is meant by the expression ‘popular music’. Here are the subjects of the seventeen episodes: Introductory Programme, God’s Children, I Can Hypnotise ‘Dis Nation (Ragtime), Jungle Music (Jazz), Who’s That Comin’? (The Blues), Rude Songs (Vaudeville and Music Hall), Always Chasin’ Rainbows (Tin Pan Alley), Diamonds As Big As the Ritz (The Musical), Swing That Music! (Swing), Good Times (Rhythm and Blues), Making Moonshine (Country Music), Go Down, Moses! (Folk ‘War Songs’), Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll (Rock’n’Roll), Mighty Good (The Beatles), All Along the Watchtower (Sour Rock), Whatever Gets You Through The Night (Glitter Rock), Imagine. (New Directions) Artists and subjects outside the English-speaking world are just a handful: Charles Aznavour, Edith Piaf, Marlene Dietrich, Maurice Chevalier in the episode ‘Vaudeville and Music Hall’, Stomu Yamash’ta and Tangerine Dream in ‘New Directions’. My suspicions about Anglophone commonsense are strengthened by the fact I have been unable to find any viewer’s or reader’s comment about histories of popular music which argue that no effort to recount ‘the story of popular music’ could be considered serious were it not to mention fado, flamenco and tango, Neapolitan song, Enrico Caruso and Carlos Gardel, rebetiko and Umm Kulthum, samba, rumba, mambo and cha-cha-cha, Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel, Mikis Theodorakis and Maria Farantouri, Tom Jobim and Joao Gilberto, Carlos Puebla and Atahualpa Yupanqui, Domenico Modugno and Italian cantautori, Serge Gainsbourg, Lluís Llach and Abba, to name just those genres and artists enjoying immense national and/ or international popularity from the 1830s to the time Tony Palmer drafted his ‘story’. I am not complaining about Palmer’s choice of subtitle. ‘The story of AngloAmerican popular music’ would not have pleased the marketing department, and would have probably disappointed its US reviewer even more. I merely wish to cite a well-known example as evidence of the widespread assumption that ‘popular music’, in English-speaking countries, means Anglophone popular music, at least in the mid-1970s, but probably today as well. Nevertheless, shortly after the first broadcast of the series, the expression ‘popular music’ began to be associated with a much wider meaning, though in a more limited context: that of early academic studies covering the subject. The journal Popular Music and Society had been in existence since 1971. Yet on examining the tables of contents of all issues from the 1970s, I was able to find only two articles covering non-English-speaking countries: Redjeb Jordania’s (1978) ‘Essay in semiotics: Boris Vian and the popular song’ and Richard C. Helt’s and Ullrich Mohring’s (1979) ‘The West German “Country-Musik” fan: Some initial observations’. (And it is highly debatable whether the latter would be a valid entry in a list of studies of non-Anglophone music….) Most of the other articles were about popular music in the United States. If we want to see signs of a broader understanding of the term, we have to wait until the following decade. In 1981, the journal Popular Music was established, and the first International Conference on Popular Music Research convened in Amsterdam by Philip Tagg, David Horn and Gerard Kempers, 11 Franco Fabbri two British scholars (one living in Sweden) and a Dutch radio journalist. This paved the way for the founding of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music later that year. Full articles on non-Anglophone popular music – on the Japanese record industry and rock in Hungary – started appearing in Popular Music in 1983, although some international theoretical perspectives (prompted by the IASPM Conference) had already appeared the previous year. Since then, the presence of non-Anglophone popular music in this journal has been constant, starting with volumes 4 and 5 (1984–1985), which cover Japanese pop, Dutch rock, rock and politics in Italy, pop in the Soviet Union. Volume 6.2 was dedicated in its entirety to popular music in Latin America, the first in a series of similar regional or national perspectives. The international network created by IASPM was essential in the widening of the popular music concept that affected the journals’ contents in the early 1980s, and I am also sure that such openness was in the aims of IASPM’S founders. Nevertheless, it must be noted that ‘popular music’ is not defined in IASPM’s statutes. Epistemologically and politically, this was – in my opinion – an excellent choice, although it does not avoid the possibility that the amateur or distracted reader (such as the aforementioned US reviewer of Tony Palmer’s TV series) might think that the ‘popular music’ mentioned in many of the statutes refers to Anglophone or ‘American’ popular music. Why should not an International Association for the Study of Anglophone Popular Music be the logical outcome of an old and widespread commonsense? Yet, as a matter of fact, the Second International Conference on Popular Music Studies in 1983 (this time, organized by IASPM), was entitled What is Popular Music?, and papers presented by scholars coming from 21 countries and covering popular music from many parts of the world demonstrated that the concept of popular music as not restricted to Anglophone countries was internationally shared. From then on, thirteen (and, in a few days from the time of writing, fourteen) more IASPM International conferences have taken place, all of which featured dozens of papers on non-Anglophone popular music. A copy of the letterhead I designed for IASPM after the 1983 conference (when I was Membership Secretary) illustrates clearly the concept shared within IASPM’s Executive Committee at that time. However….Let me quote from a paper I delivered a little more than a year ago: My personal ethnography (that is, participating in many conferences on popular music, lecturing in Anglophone countries, corresponding with friends, discussing in mailing lists) suggests to me that for many colleagues, especially in the USA, it is almost inescapable to think of popular music as ‘American popular music’ (of course, other colleagues have objected for years to the use of the continent’s name to indicate an individual country, but I will not comment any further on this). Or, ‘American popular music’ plus the Beatles and what followed. Often I have the impression that some people think that referring to tango, or timba, or French chanson, or Greek néo kyma, with the expression ‘popular music’ is an act of political correctness, that can be dispensed with when talking ‘amongst us’. And music that any good effort to define the popular music concept would recognize as popular music from other countries, is called by many ‘world music’. Although the expression ‘world music’ as a genre label is probably of British origin (Frith 2000 reports it to have been adopted by English record producers 12 Is there popular music out there? Figure 1: Letterhead from 1983 IASPM Conference. in July 1987, but Peter Gabriel was using it months before), it resonates with the concept of ‘the world’ being ‘not us’, that was at the base of the hymn ‘We Are the World’, a hit in 1985 (re-enacted recently for Haiti). It appears to be a special act of generosity to say that ‘we’ are the world: usually, ‘they’ are the world. (Fabbri 2010: 88) In the same paper, I also quote the definition of ‘popular music’ given by Roy Schuker in his Key Concepts in Popular Music (2005): The term ‘popular music’ defies precise, straightforward definition […] In one sense, popular music encompasses any style of music that has a following, and would accordingly include many genres and styles that are largely excluded from this volume, most notably the various forms of classical music and jazz. Obviously, the criteria for what counts as popular, and their application to specific musical styles and genres, are open to considerable debate. Record sales, concert attendance, numbers of performers, radio and television air play, are all quantifiable indicators of popularity, but classical music clearly has sufficient following to be considered popular, while, conversely, some forms of popular music are quite exclusive (e.g. death metal) […] 13 Franco Fabbri 2. The reference is to Fiori (1985), where the author introduced the concept of unpopular popular music. For the purposes of this study, I have largely followed conventional academic practice, equating ‘popular music’ with the main commercially produced and marketed musical genres, primarily in a Western context. I am conscious that this emphasis is open to charges of ignoring many significant forms of popular music, located primarily in non-Western settings, but boundaries were necessary to make the project viable. Further, Western styles of popular music continue to dominate the international market place, at the same time appropriating local music styles […] Accordingly, the emphasis is on traditional ‘rock’ and ‘pop’ forms, and their various derivative styles/genres, along with more recently prominent genres such as rap, ‘world music’ and the various styles of dance music. (Shuker 2005: xii–xiii, emphasis added) And here follow my comments: A rather vague description for a book bearing that title! An excellent book to many respects, however, if one considers the Anglophone academic readership at which it is aimed. There is a ‘popular music’ entry, of course, where the author duly (and very briefly) reports about ‘various attempts to provide a definition’ […], having noted however that ‘difficulties lead some writers on popular music to slide over the question of definition, and take a ‘common-sense’ understanding of the term for granted’. (Shuker 2005: 203–04) […] The key concepts here (I apologize for any unwanted irony) are: ‘conventional academic practice’, ‘quantifiable indicators’, ‘Western context’, ‘international market place’. And they are inevitably ideologically loaded, because (for example), academic practice in English-speaking countries may differ greatly from that of Latin American, or Nordic, or Central European, or Southern European, or Middle Eastern, or African, or any other academic practice on popular music in countries different from the UK, Ireland, Canada, USA. And quantifiable indicators are subject to the same criticism raised by Fiori2 more than thirty years earlier (though the matter of uncommercial or ‘niche’ popular music practices is reported by Shuker, in his annotation about death metal: maybe not the most uncommercial of uncommercial popular music that one can think about). The Western context is, of course, a choice. But even within such an ethnocentric perspective, does the West include just Englishspeaking countries? Aren’t Brazil, or Argentina, or Mexico or Cuba westerly enough? Isn’t Greece part of Western civilization? Or Russia? And remaining within strict quantitative criteria, which international market place are we talking about: are we considering the millions of copies sold of each successful single or album by popular artists in Egypt, or India? Do figures about the Arabic record market or live performance business belong to the international market place? And if not, why? There is something odd in the currently common concession that ‘this position can be accused of ethnocentrism, but …’, and that ‘but’ is generally followed by good or very excuses (like ‘within the scope of this study’, or ‘otherwise the size of this book would be excessive’, and 14 Is there popular music out there? so on). It makes us feel nostalgic of good old ethnocentrism, that didn’t need to give explanations. (Fabbri 2010: 84–85) translation issues Yet, it would be unfair if popular music scholars from non-anglophone countries overlooked the importance of the adoption of the expression ‘popular music’ for that multidimensional field of study. Before the early 1980s, several names existed in many languages (and cultural traditions) for the music those scholars were interested in, and still there are. As I wrote in an editorial note to the Italian edition of the 1983 IASPM conference proceedings: There is a very large set of music activities that (with some exceptions […]) are not the object of study in conservatories, in universities, in ‘official’ music institutions; it’s a set of music activities which do not receive (in Western countries) any public subsidy, but are based on ‘free market’; their circulation is mainly based on the mass media, including records and tapes, and electro-acoustic instruments have a primary role; often those activities are the expression of subcultures and countercultures (being related to behaviours, lifestyles, dress codes, political and ideological stances), or are integrated in communication systems that include music (cinema, television, radio and TV advertising), or are anyway meant as parts of a more complex system (background music for workplaces, public spaces, supermarkets). 3. The expression musica extracolta was introduced in the 1970s by music critic and historian Luigi Pestalozza, paraphrasing the term extraparlamentare/ extra-parliamentary, used to describe political groups to the left of Italian Communist Party, and not represented in the Parliament. Musica extracolta, then, meant music not represented in art music (musica colta) institutions. These are some of the common features, but it is known that those music activities take place in different contexts and circumstances, following (or transgressing) norms accepted by various communities of participants (authors, performers, audiences, etc.): those activities are referred to as genres, each one defined by a name and a set of conventions that represent it, that locate it in the multidimensional space of the ‘sociomusically possible’. Now, it is clear for everybody that the field defined by the above mentioned common features (which point at an intersection in the space of the ‘musically possible’, excluding – at the same time – other musics) includes rock’n’roll and commercial jingles, reggae and Muzak, singer-songwriter genre and disco, and in more problematic ‘border’ zones (but a multidimensional border!), pasillo, kronkong, some progressive rock, some minimal music, where the usage of ‘some’ is per se a symptom of an uncertain taxonomy. But, on the other hand, it isn’t at all clear what expression should be used to indicate all these musics collectively, all these genres that are ‘felt’ to have common features: if any, the fact that they are excluded from institutional music studies. Maybe ‘extra-cultivated’ musics (musiche extracolte)?3 Use-music (musiche d’uso)? Consumption music (musica di consumo)? Functional music (musiche funzionali)? Anglophones (with various nuances, especially on the opposing sides of the Atlantic) chose a rather old and ambiguous term, ‘popular music’, which nonetheless picks up one of the core aspects in the study of those music activities: the problematic dialectics between industrial production 15 Franco Fabbri 4. In English in the original Italian text. 5. In English in the original Italian text. and consensus (appealing to many)4 and between massification and spontaneity (of the people).5 (Fabbri 1985: 11–12, my translation) To some extent, the international adoption of the term ‘popular music’ saved our lives; or, at least, allowed us to spare some precious time. I have always thought that it would be fine to have an international forum (or even wiki) to collect information about the proceedings and outcomes of regional and national debates on the subject. Thus questions could be asked such as, is música popular equivalent to popular music? Does musique de variétés cover the same semantic space as popular music? And musique populaire? What about U-Musik and Schlager? In Italy, after a long struggle, ‘popular music’ is now used by scholars (ethnomusicologists, sociologists, anthropologists) and many music critics. Yet the term does not feature in the syllabus descriptions of the Ministry of University, Education and Research because of the strong opposition of conservative musicologists, who prefer terms like musica leggera, musica di consumo, musica d’uso, or even altre musiche (other musics). My course at Turin University is called ‘Popular music’, but for this to be so, I had to be hired as an ethnomusicologist (and pass an examination as such). At Parma Conservatory – where I teach exactly the same subject matter as in Turin – my course is called ‘Storia delle musiche d’uso’. The chapters I am writing for a textbook for high schools are titled ‘Musica di intrattenimento’ (popular music from 1830 to 1920) and ‘Altre musiche’ (popular music from 1920 to 2000). is there PoPular music out there? I had like to reiterate the point that ‘popular music’ is an expression that covers a very wide semantic space: it is good for distinguishing very broad musical tastes or interests, as opposed to ‘classical music’, ‘traditional/folk music’, ‘jazz’ (though anyone knows how tricky such distinctions become at the multidimensional borders of those cultural units). Nevertheless, after 30 years or so of popular music studies, saying that one is a popular music scholar does not mean that one is an expert of every possible kind of popular music. This also applies to regional or national subsets, such as ‘European popular music’ (which, seen from a British perspective, sounds to me more like ‘continental European’, that is, European popular music, minus popular music from the British Isles). Whatever is meant by that expression, Europe is large enough to offer a stunning variety of music activities, which is definitely a challenge for scholars. To start from the most obvious, as a large part of popular music repertoires is vocal, and there are several dozens of languages spoken in Europe (in just the European Union, there are 23 official languages, plus ten minority languages, plus dialects – about a 100 in Italy alone), studying European popular music requires linguistic competences that cannot be acquired by an individual during a whole lifetime. The same can be said about music grammars and styles: one cannot study Greek rebetiko, or endechno or néo kyma, without a firm knowledge of Ottoman and Byzantine modes, of additive metre in Balkan music traditions, of Eastern Mediterranean, Turkish and Central Asian organology. Of course néo kyma practitioners (songwriters, singers, instrument players) were also influenced by Anglo-American (and French, and Italian) popular music, but not unlike W. C. Handy, who included in his ‘St. Louis Blues’ a habanera-like sixteen-bar bridge. And approaching rebetiko or néo kyma without knowing the melodic structures and most common harmonizations of 16 Is there popular music out there? dhromi like Rast, Houzam, Oussak, is like approaching the blues ignoring its scales, chord progressions, and its lyrical and musical structures. I do not mean, however, that only local scholars can disentangle the complexity of local popular musics; the best articles I have read on rebetiko harmony are by a Finnish scholar (see Pennanen 1997). Certainly a foreign eye and ear can help bypass rusty theoretical traditions. In the case of Greece, for example, there is the long-standing nationalist taboo about the Turkish influence. Yet, overall, these ‘intrusions’ need to be welcomed, not seen as the rule. Local scholars have to be encouraged, and they should be offered an international platform to present the results of their research. This appeal is not new, of course, but I had like to underline again its political significance and implications. In the programmes of international conferences over the past 30 years (like IASPM’s biennial conferences) there have been many panels on local genres and scenes. I attended many. Unfortunately, when the subject was not Anglophone popular music, the number of attendees was much smaller than average, even if compared with panels on very small, niche (but Anglophone) subcultures. This had nothing to do with the quality of the papers, the theoretical interest of their perspectives, or the cultural relevance of the music that was studied. It had much to do, I fear, with the commonsense about popular music I discussed above, with sociocultural assumptions about what (musically and theoretically) has to be seen as cool, with the fact that English is the recognized lingua franca in popular music studies, and non-native speakers may be less fluent than required. It also sometimes had to do with disinformation, even with sheer ignorance. Ignorance of the history of popular music, as that ‘third type’ of music (quoting Scott 2009) that developed in the early decades of the nineteenth century in places like Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria, France, Britain, Germany, as well as in the United States and in Latin America, and that had its first transnational waves with Viennese waltz, habanera, flamenco, chanson, Neapolitan song, tango, cakewalk and ragtime; ignorance about the world-wide importance of mass media (music publishing, records, radio, sound film, and then – more obviously – television and Internet), and about actual popular music dissemination figures. Ignorance about the history of nations, of cultures and of their identities. This may sound like smashing down an open door (or preaching to the already converted), in an issue on European popular musics (I note the plural), edited and contributed to by British scholars and by scholars from various European countries, with a great variety of subjects. But I just wished to make clear why I wanted so much to be involved in this project. reFerences Amazon (2008), ‘Very Disappointing’, http://www.amazon.com/All-YouNeed-Love-5pc/dp/B0014Z4OG6. Accessed 4 June 2011. Fabbri, F. (1985), ‘Nota di cura’ (Editor’s note), in Franco Fabbri (ed.), What is Popular Music? 41 saggi, ricerche, interventi sulla musica di ogni giorno (41 Essays, Studies, Comments on Everyday Music), Milano: Unicopli, pp. 11–14. —— (2010), ‘What is popular music? And what isn’t? An assessment, after 30 years of popular music studies’, Musiikki, 2, pp. 72–92. Fiori, U. (1985), ‘Popular music: Theory, practice, value’, in David Horn (ed.), Popular Music Perspectives 2. Papers from The Second International Conference on Popular Music Studies, Reggio Emilia, September 19–24, Göteborg and Exeter: IASPM, pp. 13–23. 17 Franco Fabbri Helt, Richard C. and Mohring, Ullrich (1979), ‘The West German “CountryMusik” fan: Some initial observations’, Popular Music and Society, 6: 4, pp. 324–30. Jordania, Redjeb (1978), ‘Essay in semiotics: Boris Vian and the popular song’, Popular Music and Society, 6: 1, pp. 45–63. Palmer, Tony (1967), Benjamin Britten & his Festival, London: BBC. —— (1975–1976) All You Need is Love: The Story of Popular Music (TV episodes), London: London Weekend Television (LWT) and Theatre Projects Film Productions Ltd. —— (1979) A time there was, London: Isolde Films. —— (2008) All You Need is Love: The Story of Popular Music (CD), London: Isolde Films, Voiceprint. —— (1968), All my loving, London: BBC. —— (1983), Wagner, London: London Trust Productions. —— (1987), Maria Callas, London: Isolde Films and London Trust Productions. Pennanen R. P. (1997), ‘The development of chordal harmony in Greek Rebetika and Laika music, 1930s to 1960s’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 6, pp. 65–116. Scott, D. B. (2009), ‘The popular music revolution in the nineteenth century: A third type of music arises’, in Vesa Kurkela and Lauri Väkevä (eds), De-Canonizing Music History, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 3–20. Shuker, R. (2005), Key Concepts in Popular Music, London and New York: Routledge. suggested citation Fabbri, F. (2013), ‘Is there popular music out there?’, Journal of European Popular Culture 4: 1, pp. 9–18, doi: 10.1386/jepc.4.1.9_1 contributor details Franco Fabbri is a musician and musicologist, and teaches popular music at the University of Turin, Italy. His main interests are in the fields of genre theories and music typologies, the impact of media and technology across genres and musical cultures, and the history of popular music. He has served twice as chairman of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). He has published on the rapport between music and technology (Elettronica e musica), on the confrontation of musical cultures in contemporary world (L’ascolto tabù) and on the intricate fabric of influences and coincidences in the history of popular music (Around the clock). His most read book (Il suono in cui viviamo, three editions) contains articles on diverse subjects including genres, analysis of popular music and aesthetics of sound. He is co-editor (with Goffredo Plastino) of the new book series Routledge Global Popular Music. Contact: Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Università degli Studi di Torino, Vía S. Ottavio, 20, 10124 Torino, Italy. E-mail: franco.fabbri@unito.it Franco Fabbri has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd. 18