This article reflects on a little-told story of musical and cultural censorship: the Mexican government's 1996 destruction of the Foro Abierto, a 2,000-seater auditorium in the heart of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. The Foro Abierto was the home of an anarchist theatre group called CLETA, and was an important venue for a number of genre-crossing musicians. This venue was destroyed by the police just before CLETA was to inaugurate it as part of the rebel Zapatista movement. Several days later, a musician from CLETA was assassinated. Responding to the material turn in music studies, this article combines ethnographic and archival research to explore articulations between rubble and censorship. The venue's destruction disempowered and disarticulated CLETA, to the extent that an unsettling silence emerged about this act on the site of the venue itself. Equally, constructive responses to the complexities of censorship may also emerge from acts of material and ideational de-structuration.

This study examines Luciano Berio's integration of twentieth-century linguistic and semiotic concepts in his works Sinfonia and Coro, focusing on the interplay between sound, meaning, and structure. It highlights Berio's exploration of the unconscious mind and the idea of ‘universality of experience', suggesting that humans may possess an innate musical ability similar to that of language. The article also discusses the concept of the ‘theatre of the mind', where Berio combines musical and textual elements to evoke images or situations for the audience's interpretation. Through an analysis of the third movement of Sinfonia and Coro, the study illustrates how Berio implicitly develops a system of signification that evokes meaning, showcasing both musical and textual productivity, along with the notion of ‘the infinite use of finite means’. This exploration contributes to understanding how twentieth-century linguistics and semiotics can inform contemporary music and signify meaning within it.

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.

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.

The career of the composer, performer, educator and diplomat Hans-Joachim Koellreutter was exceptionally varied, taking place over three continents. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he is primarily known for introducing serialism to Brazil. However, he not only returned to his native Germany for a short period but also lived and worked in India and Japan, before going back to Brazil. His life and work epitomize the role played by migrants in constructing a global diasporic network, illustrating both the promises and the shortcomings of global musical modernism. The consequences he drew, however, drove him to embrace a form of universalism that was at odds with the increasing ideological polarization of the 1970s and 1980s, notably in a Latin American intellectual climate dominated by dependency theory.

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.

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.

In his early serialist composition style, Einojuhani Rautavaara expressed indebtedness to the flexible usage of the twelve-tone system that was adapted by Alban Berg. The trace of Berg's influence becomes dramaturgically reminiscent when investigating the philosophical impact that Berg's opera Wozzeck had on Rautavaara's opera Vincent. This study aims to analyse the symbolic content of the Vincent libretto, with a secondary depiction of parallel attributes found in the libretto of Wozzeck. This examination demonstrates how the operas share a philosophical foundation that is based on an expression of metaphysical temporality inherent within the plots of both operas, which juxtapose the duality of the two temporal planes of empirical reality and metaphysical illusion. The outcome of such a comparison illustrates how Rautavaara's opera can be interpreted in a new framework of understanding that is based on the Finnish composer's mirroring of Berg's operatic and dramatic style as seen in Wozzeck.