It is imperative that we create; we, people from this epoch and this generation, because we have the duty to make the face of the Fatherland unknowable both spiritually and materially. In ten years, comrades, Italy will be unrecognizable! This will be because we will have transformed it, we will have made a new one, from the mountains which we will have covered with their green coat, to the fields which will be completely reclaimed…. (Mussolini 1926)

Nature conservation is a complex venture, with a great impact, among other things, on local and national power relationships. Nature conservation also depends on a wide set of variables to determine any one planned initiative's long-term success or failure. This article explores what made the difference between success and failure in the history of nature conservation under Mussolini's regime. Many parks were planned in those years in Italy, but only a handful were effectively instituted. This essay will address the following questions: What were the reasons behind the planning and creation of these national parks? What was the role of Fascist ideology in determining the long-term success of a park proposal? Was there anything specifically Fascist in Italian nature conservation in the 1920s and 1930s? Which other variables impacted on the involved decision-making processes?

This article explores Steve Reich's relationship with New York City's downtown artworld during the latter half of the 1960s, aiming to nuance aspects of early minimalism by tracing diachronic connections with the Park Place gallery, the exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, and movements such as process art and conceptualism. I suggest that, rather than revealing Reich's prior compositional philosophy, his 1968 treatise ‘Music as a Gradual Process’ demonstrated aesthetic cohesion with the stance of a particular milieu, mirroring a broader linguistic turn in contemporaneous art and revealing a certain discrepancy between theory and praxis. Drawing on newspaper reception, I explore Reich's compositions from Melodica (1966) to Pendulum Music (1968), arguing that these pieces gained both aesthetic value and institutional credibility through being understood in relation to concurrent artwork and ideas, affording productive horizons of expectation.

This article considers the twentieth- and twenty-first-century practice of presenting Johann Sebastian Bach's Passion compositions on stage, in light of recent debates about performativity, presence and liveness. By tracing the history of such stagings from Ferruccio Busoni's plans in the 1920s to contemporary versions by Peter Sellars, Alain Platel, and others, I explore the increasing tendency to turn these canonical works into politically or aesthetically relevant events. Through a close reading of the critical reception of each production, I show how stagings have the capacity to challenge productively our easy familiarity with these pieces outside their initial liturgical setting. Unlike a standard concert presentation, staged performances tend to confront audiences more immediately with the violent imagery and spiritual demands of the Passions, thereby continually renewing the dialogue between Bach's works and later audiences. The article thus offers a contribution to an anthropological enquiry into the present-day cult of Bach and the particular forms of aesthetic pleasure that classical music affords its twenty-first-century devotees.

This article responds to Alan Lomax's pronouncement that the mid-twentieth century constituted ‘the age of the golden ear’, when ‘a passionate aural curiosity overshadowed the ability to create music’. It examines a project born out of Lomax's own aural curiosity and his foregrounding of recording technology – the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music (1955) – using it to sound out the history of mid-century ethnographic field recording. By retracing the production of the World Library, this article explores the various agencies compressed into the audible exteriors of field recordings, as they were produced by and for specific technologies and formats, circulated through international networks, and as they became part of the aural public sphere of post-war Europe. It concludes by considering some of the implications of this sonic labour as field recordings find their way into new, digital, listening environments.