Marco Ladd

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I'm a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London. I received my PhD in Music History from Yale University in 2019, and between 2019 and 2022 was a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

I'm currently writing a book developed from my doctoral work, which examines music in Italian silent cinema through the lens of synchronization—a key concept in cinematic aesthetics since its inception. I'm also working on a new project which will investigate the emergence of the concept of light music (musica leggera) in Italy in the 1920s.

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Luca Battioni

Marco Targa

Università della Calabria

Elsa Marshall

University of Ottawa | Université d'Ottawa

Claudia Bullerjahn

Justus-Liebig-University Giessen

Leslie Sprout

Drew University

Pablo Mendoza

Claus Tieber

Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien (MUK)

Hans Jürgen Wulff

Hannah Lewis

The University of Texas at Austin

Annarita Colturato

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Articles by Marco Ladd

Ladd: "Synchronization as Musical Labor in Italian Silent Cinemas"

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2022

This article examines a series of lawsuits that consumed Italy’s legal establishment between appr... more This article examines a series of lawsuits that consumed Italy’s legal establishment between approximately 1924 and 1933. Resulting from a protracted labor dispute between instrumental musicians who worked in cinemas and the exhibitors who employed them, the lawsuits turned on a question of employment law: whether musicians ought to be considered full-time employees—entitled to various benefits and protections against unfair termination—or more precariously situated freelancers whom exhibi- tors could hire and fire at will. As a consequence of the vagaries of existing Italian labor law and new Fascist legislation governing labor relations, musicians were already at a disadvantage in this dispute. Unexpectedly, their situation was further undermined by the judiciary, as Italy’s highest court made their employee status conditional on the perceived aesthetic value of cinema and its associated music making. That is, musicians had to prove that their musical abilities were integral to the artistic outcome of any given film screening—a tall order in the context of silent cinematic exhibition, where musical accompaniment was materially distinct from the projected film. Precisely because the courts valorized the fusion of music and image, however, the Italian musicians’ lawsuits illuminate a fundamental parameter of cinematic aesthetics—synchronization—and reveal something significant about the nature of film music. Public recognition for effecting music-image synchronization in film conferred symbolic, but also literal, capital; thus I contend that synchronization ought to be understood as a form of musical labor, both in the silent era and beyond.

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The Importance of Being Serious

Cambridge Opera Journal, 2022

What exactly is operetta? As a genre it seems defined by its lack of definition, by its inherent ... more What exactly is operetta? As a genre it seems defined by its lack of definition, by its inherent in-betweenness. On an aesthetic scale defined by opera at one end and music hall, revue and burlesque at the other, it lies somewhere in the middle. But where? True, it is difficult to disentangle operetta from the various kinds of variety theatre; it shares their fondness for a chorus line and a catchy refrain. On the other hand, the name operetta suggests a love-hate relationship with opera, its highbrow relative. 'Little opera' is generally shorter than opera (though what about concise classics of 'big opera' such as La bohème?), funnier than opera (though what about comic touchstones such as Il barbiere di Siviglia?) and less serious than opera (though the satirical bent of some operettas can be taken seriously). Perhaps, then, the difference is that it takes itself less seriously, with fewer pretensions to grandeur and more concessions to popular taste. Capitalising unashamedly on its popularity through promotional tie-ins, flaunting musical numbers poised to become well-known hits on the bandstand or on the mechanical piano, and almost invariably giving spectators the happy ending they desire: operetta is selling out, in all senses of the phrase. Whether or not to take operetta seriously has been a recurring theme in critiques of the genre, not least in the century or so in which it was a major cultural force (c.1850-1950). Such critiques are built into the historiography of the genre itself, with the master-trope of operetta history being the periodisation that divides the genre into a nineteenth-century 'Golden Age' and twentieth-century 'Silver Age'. Golden Age operetta, represented by such notable figures as Jacques Offenbach and Johann Strauss the younger (with an honourable mention for Gilbert and Sullivan), was characterised by a commitment to satire and a tone of ironic detachment. After a period of supposed decadence at the end of the nineteenth century, Franz Léhar's global megahit Die lustige Witwe (1905) inaugurated a new Silver Age, whose works were marked by a turn away from satire and irony and an embrace

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Film Music avant la lettre? Disentangling Film from Opera in Italy

Opera Quarterly, 2018

Scholars have long sought to trace the ancestry of film music in the music-theatrical genres that... more Scholars have long sought to trace the ancestry of film music in the music-theatrical genres that preceded the cinematic medium. Two lineages of influence predominate. On the one hand, opera served as an aesthetic ideal to which filmmakers and critics aspired, in cinema’s early decades. On the other, pantomime and melodrama provided practical models of musical accompaniment that guaranteed quintessentially filmic forms of audio-visual synchronization. Yet at the level of individual scores, the distinctions between these two genealogies become blurred; and the notion of film evolving from preceding genres remains unquestioned. This article re-examines this historiographical tendency, making a case study of Carlo Graziani-Walter’s specially-composed score for _Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei_ (1913), a major historical epic from the “Golden Years” of Italian cinema. Graziani-Walter’s score, I argue, is clearly influenced by Italian opera—especially in three key scenes, which were to be accompanied by live singing. Operatic aesthetics are notably absent, however, in the two published extracts from the score, both of which draw on popular idioms. The juxtaposition and tension between opposing styles—between the operatic and the popular—in the score to _Gli ultimi giorni_ suggests that a new, distinctly filmic form of music was already emerging.

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Ladd: "Synchronization as Musical Labor in Italian Silent Cinemas"

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2022

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The Importance of Being Serious

Cambridge Opera Journal, 2022

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Film Music avant la lettre? Disentangling Film from Opera in Italy

Opera Quarterly, 2018

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Marco Ladd

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