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Socialist Realism in Greece amid the anti-fascist resistance and re-evaluates Skalkottas's works and his published and unpublished writings as testifying to these unique political and cultural circumstances.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

Naples suffered a significant loss of political and economic power following Italian unification, a decline seemingly echoed by the collapse of its opera buffa tradition. Yet Naples played a central role in generating an Italian operetta tradition across entertainment venues both old and new, with canzone napoletana becoming a key feature of operettas composed (and performed) across Italy. This article explores the crucial contribution of Naples and the Neapolitan song tradition to the development of Italian operetta, focusing particularly on composer Mario Costa. Neapolitan operetta, I argue, reveals the complex interplay between regional, national and international practices and discourses in constructions of ‘native’ Italian operetta, while exposing the generic and aesthetic ambiguity of Italian operetta within shifting hierarchies and changing repertoires c.1900. At the same time, the study of key figures such as Costa can revise and reorientate musical narratives of Liberal Italy that have typically focused on opera, the Giovane Scuola and the North.

This article examines the ‘operetta crisis’ that blighted the Italian operetta industry in the 1920s. Little has been written about the crisi dell’operetta in scholarship on Italian operetta to date, despite extensive coverage in contemporary sources. I attribute this neglect to the contested legacy of the composer, impresario and publisher Carlo Lombardo, at the height of his influence in the 1920s and responsible for most of the best-known Italian operettas today. Lombardo’s works embodied critical anxieties about operetta’s perceived artistic degradation, thanks to their overt sexuality and embrace of popular music (i.e. jazz). However, as I argue with reference to the 1925 operetta Cin-ci-là, narratives of artistic decline may miss the true significance of the crisis. Operetta, striving to be a ‘light’ form of opera but never fully accepted as such by the Italian establishment, was ultimately ill-equipped to survive in an entertainment landscape reshaping itself around popular music.

This article discusses how and why disorientation is used as an aesthetic strategy in breakdown sections of festival-house tracks and performances. Breakdowns in electronic dance music (EDM) have many sound layers removed from the mix. For house music at EDM festivals, this usually includes drums, therefore in many breakdowns it is easy for listeners to lose their metric entrainment. Breakdowns also often introduce a new sound layer, use metrical dissonance, and feature prominent ‘effects’. Through analyses and interviews, the article argues that festival-house breakdowns can be disorienting both physically and psychologically, but that this fulfils multiple purposes for performers, such as providing contrast that makes musical climaxes more exciting and allowing an opportunity for dancers to physically rest. Breakdowns also encourage visual interaction between performers and dancers and allow performers to communicate a narrative. The analyses in the article make interpretations about the meaning of tracks as communicated primarily in breakdown sections.

Franz Liszt's symphonic poem Mazeppa (1854) recreates a narrative that portrays Cossack commander Ivan Mazeppa's torturous Ride – bound naked to an unbroken horse – to miraculous survival and triumph. To evoke this legend, Liszt incorporated familiar musical tropes: persistent galloping triplets, fanfares, apotheosis and a march-like finale. These tropes illustrate a consistent story, but they risk sounding merely clichéd and mimetic. To appreciate how Liszt uses these tropes to create depth and compositional creativity in Mazeppa requires consideration of the myth's intertextuality. This article considers the broader sources that informed Liszt's Mazeppa and offers an interpretation that includes the programme's preface and an array of Mazeppa ‘texts’ that have appeared since the mid-eighteenth century. These texts include a quasi-historical narrative, poetry and visual art along with Liszt's original commentary for Mazeppa and his defence of programme music in his Berlioz and His ‘Harold’ Symphony essay. Taking all of this together, my approach in this article is to analyse Mazeppa as if listening for the protagonist and letting the character of his musical subject inform my interpretation. Hearing the musical subject in this work requires attention to voice, expressivity, motives, gestures, themes and extramusical intertexts to construct, layer by layer, an interpretation of Mazeppa's symbolic significance. I argue that connecting these threads of cultural history illuminates the piece's theme of suffering and death as inescapable companions in the life of the creative genius.

This article considers modular composition as an approach to engendering structural plasticity in musical works. Structural plasticity, in this case, is defined as the ability for the components of a musical work (e.g., events, ideas, sequences, textures, timbres) to vary in how and when they are presented. In this research, modular composition is the process for creating a collection of individual musical ideas (e.g., sequences, patterns, phrases) termed ‘modules’, and designing a dynamic system for their assembly into cohesive structures. This approach results in musical works that exist in a state of constant structural flux, allowing for real-time alteration while progressing beyond similar existing approaches observed in video game music and interactive music apps, from which this research takes inspiration. Approaches involving compositionally focused intelligent music systems are also observed, highlighting how modular composition bridges traditional compositional practices and the design of interactive music systems. Two of the authors’ own works are discussed with regard to how modular composition can be implemented in varying creative ways. The outcome of this work illuminates the creative possibilities of integrating traditional compositional practices with new digital approaches to arrive at a more structurally plastic and alterable form of music.

This is the third in a trilogy of articles for NTQ addressed to the ‘noises off’ supplied by Shakespeare’s earliest co-stars: the baited bears that competed for trade, fame, and patronage for the duration of his career as an actor-playwright. ‘Shakespeare and the Three Bears’ (NTQ 106, May 2011) sketched this context, exposing as a canard, via a mistakenly omitted comma, that there ever was a bear named Harry Hunks. ‘Shakespeare and the Naming of Bears’ (NTQ 135, August 2018) examined the influence of these rival entertainments on the structure and detail of Romeo and Juliet. ‘Shakespeare’s Polar Bears’ now expands that investigation by seeking to offer a long view of the dramatist’s association with, and attention to, such foul animal ‘sports’, and to supply a comprehensive context for the most famous stage direction in theatre history.