Marco joined the Department of Music at King's on a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2022. Prior to this he was a Junior Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Music, Cambridge. He received his PhD in Music History (Distinguished) from Yale University in 2019, having previously obtained a BA and MPhil at the University of Cambridge. In early 2025 he will hold a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Hamburg in association with the DFG-funded project "Ton-Spuren verlorener Filmen. Gedruckte Filmmusiken bis 1918." 

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Twentieth-century musical culture in Italy
• Music and fascism
• Screen music and audiovisual media
• Histories of popular music

Marco’s research examines music in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on intersections between popular and elite musical traditions. He is currently completing his first book, Beyond Synchrony: Music in Italian Silent Cinema, c. 1900–1930, which examines musical accompaniment in Italian cinemas during the silent era through the lens of a key concept in film history and aesthetics: synchronization. His British Academy research project, ‘The Invention of Lightness, or, Musical Politics of 1920s Italy’ concerns the emergence of the concept of ‘light music’ (musica leggera) in Italy in the 1920s, considering the impact of novel repertoires of jazz-influenced popular music on Italian culture. A special issue of Cambridge Opera Journal devoted to the history of Italian operetta, co-edited with Dr Ditlev Rindom, is forthcoming in 2024.

Teaching

Dr Marco Ladd teaches topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music history and screen music studies.

Expertise and public engagement

Marco has written programme notes for Opera Rara and the Cleveland International Piano Festival, and educational materials for the Metropolitan Opera.

Selected publications

• “The Magician and the Showgirl: Carlo Lombardo and the Crisis of Italian Operetta, c. 1920–30,” Cambridge Opera Journal 36, no. 3 (forthcoming 2024).
• “Synchronization as Musical Labor in Italian Silent Cinema.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 75, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 273–317.
• “Review Article: The importance of being serious.” Cambridge Opera Journal 34 (2022): 124–34.
• “Film Music avant la lettre? Disentangling Film from Opera in Italy, c. 1913.” Opera Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2018): 29–64.