Representation in Western Music

This volume assembles leading scholars to provide a comprehensive study of representation in music from the nineteenth century to today.

Joshua S. Walden (Edited by)

9781316601082, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 August 2015

334 pages, 14 b/w illus. 6 tables 26 music examples
24.5 x 17 x 2 cm, 0.58 kg

'How music goes about representing or reflecting certain ideas, individuals, or aspects of other art forms is the overarching subject of this collection. The contributors are an international, extensively published group of scholars, experienced in teaching and writing in their respective fields … Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.' J. E. Wickell, Choice

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.

Subject Areas: Western "classical" music [AVGC], Music reviews & criticism [AVC], Music [AV]