Books by Joshua Walden
Oxford University Press, Nov 2017
Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music explores th... more Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music explores the wide-ranging but under-examined genre of musical portraiture. It focuses in particular on contemporary and experimental music created between 1945 and the present day, an era in which conceptions of identity have changed alongside increasing innovation in musical composition as well as in the uses of abstraction, mixed media, and other novel techniques in the field of visual portraiture. In the absence of physical likeness, an element typical of portraiture that cannot be depicted in sound, composers have experimented with methods of constructing other attributes of identity in music, such as character, biography, and profession. By studying musical portraits of painters, authors, and modern celebrities, in addition to composers' self-portraits, the book considers how representational and interpretive processes overlap and differ between music and other art forms, as well as how music is used in the depiction of human identities. Examining a range of musical portraits by composers including Peter Ablinger, Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, György Ligeti, and Virgil Thomson, and director Robert Wilson's on-going series of video portraits of modern-day celebrities and his "portrait opera" Einstein on the Beach, Musical Portraits contributes to the study of music since 1945 through a detailed examination of contemporary understandings of music's capacity to depict identity, and of the intersections between music, literature, theater, film, and the visual arts.
The term 'Jewish music' has conveyed complex and diverse meanings for people around the world acr... more The term 'Jewish music' has conveyed complex and diverse meanings for people around the world across hundreds of years. This accessible and comprehensive Companion is a key resource for students, scholars, and everyone with an interest in the global history of Jewish music. Leading international experts introduce the broad range of genres found in Jewish music from the biblical era to the present day, including classical, religious, folk, popular, and dance music. Presenting a range of fresh perspectives on the subject, the chapters explore Jewish liturgy, Klezmer, music in Israel, the music of Yiddish theatre and cinema, and classical music from the Jewish Enlightenment through to the postmodern era. Additional contributions set Jewish music in context and offer an overview of the broader issues that arise in its study, such as questions of Diaspora, ontology, economics, and the history of sound technologies.
Published in the AMS Studies in Music series, Oxford University Press (2014), with the support of... more Published in the AMS Studies in Music series, Oxford University Press (2014), with the support of the Claire and Barry Brook Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Sounding Authentic considers the intersecting influences of nationalism, modernism, and technological innovation on representations of ethnic and national identities in twentieth-century art music. Author Joshua S. Walden discusses these forces through the prism of what he terms the "rural miniature": short violin and piano pieces based on folk song and dance styles. This genre, mostly inspired by the folk music of Hungary, the Jewish diaspora, and Spain, was featured frequently on recordings and performance programs in the early twentieth century.
Furthermore, Sounding Authentic shows how the music of urban Romany ensembles developed into nineteenth-century repertoire of virtuosic works in the style hongrois before ultimately influencing composers of rural miniatures. Walden persuasively demonstrates how rural miniatures represented folk and rural cultures in a manner that was perceived as authentic, even while they involved significant modification of the original sources. He also links them to the impulse toward realism in developing technologies of photography, film, and sound recording.
Sounding Authentic examines the complex ways the rural miniature was used by makers of nationalist agendas, who sought folkloric authenticity as a basis for the construction of ethnic and national identities. The book also considers the genre's reception in European diaspora communities in America where it evoked and transformed memories of life before immigration, and traces how many rural miniatures were assimilated to the styles of American popular song and swing. Scholars interested in musicology, ethnography, the history of violin performance, twentieth-century European art music, the culture of the Jewish Diaspora and more will find Sounding Authentic an essential addition to their library.
Representation in Western Music offers a comprehensive study of the roles of representation in th... more Representation in Western Music offers a comprehensive study of the roles of representation in the composition, performance and reception of Western music. In recent years, there has been increasing academic interest in questions of musical interpretation and meaning and in music's interactions with other artistic media, and yet no book has dealt extensively with representation's important role in these processes. This volume presents new research about musical representation, with particular focus on Western art and popular music from the nineteenth century to the present day. It assembles essays by an international assortment of leading scholars on a range of subjects including instrumental music, opera, popular song, ballet, cinema and the music video. Individual sections address representation, interpretation and musical meaning; music's relationships with visual forms of representation; musical representation in dramatic forms; and the functions of music in the representation of identity.
Selected Articles by Joshua Walden
Stanford Law & Policy Review, 2020
This article considers writings on the construction of cadenzas in mid-eighteenth- century German... more This article considers writings on the construction of cadenzas in mid-eighteenth- century German treatises in relation to contemporary treatises on hermeneutics published in Leipzig by Johann August Ernesti and Johann Martin Chladenius. The aim is to explore similarities between how theoreticians of the cadenza and of literary interpretation described the proper form, style, and content of their art. Through analysis of C. P. E. Bach’s surviving notated cadenza to his Concerto in D major for keyboard, Wq. 45, examined in light of this connection between treatises’ approaches to cadenzas and literary hermeneutics, the article considers how Bach’s cadenzas can be viewed as his interpretations of the composer’s own concertos.
This article explores the uses of the well-known four-note motif from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony ... more This article explores the uses of the well-known four-note motif from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the soundtrack of a five-episode narrative arc of Doctor Who, to argue that the motif's rich and varied reception history permits a hermeneutic reading of the ethical dimensions of the plot's engagement with questions of power and immortality. In particular, the motif illuminates the interpretation of fundamental messages – about the immorality of seeking absolute power on an epic scale; the distinction between heroic ambition for peace and hubristic ambition for empire; and the inescapability of fate – that underpin the storyline.
A Cole Porter Companion, 2016
Edited by Don Randel, Matthew Shaftel, and Susan Weiss. Awarded Certificate of Merit
in the 201... more Edited by Don Randel, Matthew Shaftel, and Susan Weiss. Awarded Certificate of Merit
in the 2017 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in Recorded Popular Music.
Molly Picon: Darling of Second Avenue
From the Bowery to Broadway: New York’s Yiddish Theater, 2016
Jewish Music and Media of Sound Recording
The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music, Nov 2015
Chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music
"Driven from Their Home": Jewish Displacement and Musical Memory in the 1948 Movie Long Is the Road
In Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture, ed. Tina Frühauf and Lily Hirsch... more In Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture, ed. Tina Frühauf and Lily Hirsch. Book was winner of the Ruth A. Solie Award for an edited volume of exceptional merit from the American Musicological Society.
In The Impact of Nazism on Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Erik Levi
Representation in Western Music, 2013
In Representation in Western Music, ed. Joshua S. Walden
Journal of the Society for American Music, 2012
Jascha Heifetz promoted a modern brand of musical eclecticism, recording, performing, and editing... more Jascha Heifetz promoted a modern brand of musical eclecticism, recording, performing, and editing adaptations of folk and popular songs while remaining dedicated to the standard violin repertoire and the compositions of his contemporaries. This essay examines the complex influences of his displacement from Eastern Europe and assimilation to the culture of the United States on both the hybridity of his repertoire and the critical reception he received in his new home. It takes as its case study Heifetz's composition of the virtuosic showpiece "Hora Staccato," based on a Romany violin performance he heard in Bucharest, and his later adaptation of the music into an American swing hit he titled "Hora Swing-cato." Finally, the essay turns to the field of popular song to consider how two of the works Heifetz performed most frequently were adapted for New York Yiddish radio as Tin Pan Alley-style songs whose lyrics narrate the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. The performance and arrangement history of many of Heifetz's miniatures reveals the multivalent ways in which works in his repertoire, and for some listeners Heifetz himself, were reinterpreted, adapted, and assimilated into American culture.
In Performers’ Voices Across Centuries, Cultures, and Disciplines, ed. Ann Marshman
Journal of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2009
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2009
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Journal of Musicological Research, 2008
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Books by Joshua Walden
Sounding Authentic considers the intersecting influences of nationalism, modernism, and technological innovation on representations of ethnic and national identities in twentieth-century art music. Author Joshua S. Walden discusses these forces through the prism of what he terms the "rural miniature": short violin and piano pieces based on folk song and dance styles. This genre, mostly inspired by the folk music of Hungary, the Jewish diaspora, and Spain, was featured frequently on recordings and performance programs in the early twentieth century.
Furthermore, Sounding Authentic shows how the music of urban Romany ensembles developed into nineteenth-century repertoire of virtuosic works in the style hongrois before ultimately influencing composers of rural miniatures. Walden persuasively demonstrates how rural miniatures represented folk and rural cultures in a manner that was perceived as authentic, even while they involved significant modification of the original sources. He also links them to the impulse toward realism in developing technologies of photography, film, and sound recording.
Sounding Authentic examines the complex ways the rural miniature was used by makers of nationalist agendas, who sought folkloric authenticity as a basis for the construction of ethnic and national identities. The book also considers the genre's reception in European diaspora communities in America where it evoked and transformed memories of life before immigration, and traces how many rural miniatures were assimilated to the styles of American popular song and swing. Scholars interested in musicology, ethnography, the history of violin performance, twentieth-century European art music, the culture of the Jewish Diaspora and more will find Sounding Authentic an essential addition to their library.
Selected Articles by Joshua Walden
in the 2017 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in Recorded Popular Music.