Modern Dance Music of Italy

Italy has been a significant country known for the electronic dance music, especially ever since the creation of the Italo disco in the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The genre came from the disco, combined melancholy melodies with pop and electronic music, making usage of synthesizers and drum machines, which often gave it an innovative sound. According to an article in the Guardian, in cities like Verona and Milan producers would work with singers, using mass-made synthesizers and drum machines and incorporating them into a combine of experimental music with a class-pop sensibility that would be aimed for the nightclubs. The songs produced would be sold later by labels and companies like the Milan-based discomagic. Italo disco influenced many electronic orchestras like the Pet Shop Boys, New Order and Erasure, as well as genres such as Eurodance, freestyle and Eurobeat. By circa 1988, though, the genre had appeared into other forms of European dance electronic music, which one of which is the Italo house blended elements of Italo disco with traditional house music; its sound was generally uplifting, and made a rigid usage of piano melodies. By the latter-half of the 1990s, a subgenre of Eurodance called Italo dance appeared. Taking influences from Italo disco and Italo house, Italo dance generally included synthesizer riffs, a melodic sound, and the usage of vocoders. Over the eras, there have been many significant Italian dance music composers and producers like Giorgio Moroder, who won three academy awards for his music, he is credited by Allmusic as one of the principal architects of the disco sound.