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.

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Socialist Realism in Greece amid the anti-fascist resistance and re-evaluates Skalkottas's works and his published and unpublished writings as testifying to these unique political and cultural circumstances.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.

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.