This article attends to the conjuncture in the early 1970s of post-Cagean musical practice and poststructuralist theory associated with the journal Musique en jeu and the music department of the Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes. Reading the theoretical writing of figures including Daniel Charles and Ivanka Stoïanova alongside the music of Costin Miereanu, the article elaborates the account of the open work that emerges there, before turning to an LP by Miereanu, Luna cinese (1975), which grapples with the aporetic figure of the open record and in so doing takes the ‘openness’ of post-Cagean experimentalism in new directions. In conclusion, I begin to theorize what Miereanu's open record suggests about the listening that records call for and the fixity of records in general.

This article examines the role played by the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino as a kind of cultural laboratory for experiments in operatic staging in 1930s Italy. Founded in 1933, Florence's opera and arts festival was a key testing ground for ‘modern’ approaches both to set and costume design and to opera direction, two areas in which northern Europe (especially Germany) is normally held to have led the way, and through which the Maggio helped to reinvent Italian mise-en-scène as an act of independent, artistic creation. Setting the festival's overall project in the context of 1930s aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural debates about theatre, opera, and cinema, and drawing on a rich archive of as-yet-unexplored primary source materials, the article retraces an intellectual and cultural history of Italian staging c. 1930 that resonates productively with several present-day critical and scholarly concerns: from changing attitudes to the nineteenth-century operatic canon, to the early stirrings of Regietheater, to the intertwining histories of opera and film.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Henri Verbrugghen founded the first Australian branch of the British Music Society. The BMS – a product of post-First World War cultural renewal – was established in London to ‘champion the cause of British composers at home and abroad’. In Sydney, these aspirations extended to promoting music from Australia, and through affiliation with the International Society for Contemporary Music, music of the rest of the world. This article explores the activities of the Sydney BMS, situating these within contemporary discourses of nationalism and internationalism in the construction of interwar Australian cultural identity. It argues that the sometimes conflicting aims of the society reflect a wider political and social ambivalence about Australia's place in the international landscape. While its primary goal was to champion local composers, this was held in uneasy balance with a desire to promote British music ‘proper’.

The Panama Canal was officially opened on 15 August 1914. At this point, the United States had been the builder of a difficult and controversial project for ten years and was to be the operator of the most important link between the Atlantic and the Pacific. To do this, it first helped Panama to independence, immediately annexing the canal zone. Thus, the construction of the canal is a classic lesson in colonial, (inter-)national politics and its interdependencies in the early twentieth century. At the same time, Panama was a fairly widespread topic of US popular music. This article investigates the effects of politics on cultural life, using the example of popular music referring to Panama. Applying a postcolonial approach, it will study the musical ways in which the United States constructed its pseudo-colony Panama as an Other in order to exercise power there and continue to form its own national identity.

This article explores Nikos Skalkottas's engagement with stylistic accessibility after his return to Greece from Germany in 1933. It considers the composer's self-proclaimed efforts to establish a more accessible, tonal musical style in the context of Greek sociopolitical upheaval and the political culture of anti-fascist resistance. Centring on the period between 1947 and 1949, this shift is viewed in terms of the impact of Socialist Realism in Greece for the first time. This article excavates the promulgation of Socialist Realism in Greece amid the anti-fascist resistance and re-evaluates Skalkottas's works and his published and unpublished writings as testifying to these unique political and cultural circumstances. It focuses in particular on Skalkottas's Classical Symphony in A for wind orchestra, two harps, and lower strings composed in 1947; a major work that continues to occupy a peripheral position in existing Greek and Anglophone scholarship on the composer.

In this article I bring Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw, Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper's opera based on the novella, and elements of the 2011 Glyndebourne production of the opera into interaction with theories of the uncanny to wonder about the act of reading. This novella and opera thematize reading in connection with the uncanny and the ghostly, providing an opportunity to pursue what might be at stake and what might be possible when boundaries blur and meaning is put in motion. I begin to explore uncanny reading as a tool to unsettle binary logics and one-to-one mappings. I consider the uncanny as connective tissue between theoretical makings related to identity, relationships, and the potentialities of fiction. And I put these ideas into interactive practice as I self-consciously read this opera, to connect to and challenge normative and oppressive forces, impulses, and systems, including cultural scripts, social power structures, and ways of knowing and interacting.

‘I couldn't tell who was colored and who was white’, admitted the African American trumpet player Roy Eldridge after being submitted to a so-called blindfold test by the white critic Leonard Feather in 1951. Feather was happy that the blindfold test duped a prominent Black musician, because it proved his point about the fundamental colourblindness of music and listening. Through close reading of the source material, this article provides the full context for this infamous case and shows how the blindfold test was a product of transnational discourses of colourblindness, primitivism, ‘reverse racism’, and technological mediation. Building on current research in racialized practices of listening in musicology and sound studies, and mobilizing interventions from critical race studies, the article contends that acousmatic techniques of listening often promote a colourblind ideology invested in whiteness, which remains hegemonic in music culture.

This article argues that in the age of social media, the affective power of music can dare listeners to become complicit with misogyny and right-wing populism. It investigates the weaponization of dubstep in internet trolling strategies by examining the genre's relationship with a type of user-generated content called ‘Major League Gaming [MLG] Montage Parodies’. Mixing musical and audiovisual analysis with digital methods, the article considers the origins of MLG Montage Parodies and then investigates the content's development from 2011 to 2016. As a memetic timbral topic, the dubstep drop was initially deployed in MLG Montage Parodies as a form of pubescent power play to troll young male gamers. But then in 2014, it was redeployed as anti-feminist ammunition amid the toxic masculinity of #GamerGate. Finally, it was weaponized by alt-right trolls during the 2015–2016 ‘Great Meme War’ that accompanied the US Presidential Race. The closing remarks reflect on the ethical, ontological, and disciplinary implications of the research and issue a call for memetic musical literacy.

This article interrogates an overlooked claim made by Mario Bauzá, that the impact of Latin American musics on a fundamental change in the rhythm of twentieth-century music has been written out of history. After presenting four original analytical definitions, a corpus analysis establishes that a transition occurred from swung-quaver, compound-metre, and crotchet ‘monorhythm’ to straight-quaver polyrhythm in US popular music, culminating in early 1960s rock ’n’ roll. Focusing on Paul Anka's ‘Diana’ and the style ‘rock-a-cha-cha’, a combination of music analysis and reception history demonstrates that Afro-Latin musics were the predominant influence on the rhythmic transformation – which was erased by rock historians, influenced by three factors. This impact of Latin American music and migration is theorized in terms of cosmopolitanism. The article concludes that the impact of Latin American music on the United States is not a superficial ‘tinge’: it prompted a paradigm shift in the rhythm of twentieth-century music.