Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature and Musical Modernism (AMS Studies in Music) - Hardcover

Walden, Joshua S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199334668 ISBN 13: 9780199334667

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

Winner of the Award for Best Historical Research in Recorded Classical Music: Discography, from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections

About this title

About the Author

Joshua S. Walden is a member of the musicology faculty of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. He has held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins and a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, University of Oxford. He is the editor of Representation in Western Music (2013) and The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music (in progress) for Cambridge University Press. His articles appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and elsewhere.

From the Back Cover

"With the keen sensibilities of both a scholar and a musician Joshua Walden restores for us the familiarity and history of the rural miniature as a genre whose intimacy realizes many of our most personal encounters with musical modernism." -Philip V. Bohlman, University of Chicago

"Richly informative and methodologically bold, Joshua Walden's Sounding Authentic is a fascinating study of an overlooked dimension of modern European musical history. With one eye on the composers and another on their musical interpreters, Walden deftly demonstrates how the interplay between cultural nationalism, recording technology, and concert performance shaped the emergence of twentieth-century classical music across Hungarian, Spanish, and Jewish cultures." -James Loeffler, University of Virginia

"From Bartók's Romanian Dances to Achron's Hebrew Melody, and from Spain to St. Petersburg, Walden brilliantly shows that in order to come to monumental understandings about music we must look to miniatures." -Michael Beckerman, NYU

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0199334668
• ISBN 13: 9780199334667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320