Representation in Western Music

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.

Preface Joshua S. Walden; Part I. Representation and the Interpretation of Musical Meaning: 1. Layers of representation in nineteenth-century genres: the case of one Brahms Ballade Matthew Gelbart; 2. 'As a stranger give it welcome': musical meanings in 1830s London Roger Parker; 3. 'Music is obscure': textless Soviet works and their phantom programmes Marina Frolova-Walker; 4. Representing Arlen Walter Frisch; 5. Video cultures: 'Bohemian Rhapsody', Wayne's World, and beyond Nicholas Cook; Part II. Sound and Visual Representations: Music, Painting, and Dance: 6. 'On wings of song': representing music as agency in nineteenth-century culture Thomas Grey; 7. Representation and musical portraiture in the twentieth century Joshua S. Walden; 8. Representational conundrums: music and early modern dance Davinia Caddy; Part III. Musical Representations in Opera and Cinema: 9. Allusive representations: homoerotics in Wagner's Tristan Laurence Dreyfus; 10. Der Dichter spricht: self-representation in Parsifal Karol Berger; 11. Memory and the leitmotif in cinema Giorgio Biancorosso; 12. Self-representation in music: the case of Hindemith's meta-opera Cardillac Hermann Danuser, translated by J. Bradford Robinson; Part IV. Music, Representation, and the Concepts of East and West: 13. Doing more than representing Western music Rachel Beckles Willson; 14. The persistence of Orientalism in the postmodern operas of Adams and Sellars W. Anthony Sheppard; Afterword: what else? Richard Taruskin.

Joshua S. Walden is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at The Johns Hopkins University and Peabody Conservatory. After earning his PhD at Columbia University, he held a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford. Walden's articles appear or are forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, the Journal of Musicological Research, the Journal of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, and elsewhere. Walden's primary area of research considers the intersecting influences of nationalism, modernism and technological innovation on representations of ethnic and national identities in twentieth-century art music. He has also published essays on film music, eighteenth-century music and intersections between music and the visual arts. He has taught at The Johns Hopkins University, the University of Oxford, Columbia University and the University of California, Davis.