Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music Joshua S. Walden 9780190653507

Joshua S. Walden's 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, Gyoergy 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.

About the Author
Joshua S. Walden is the author of Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature and Musical Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2014) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music (2015) and Representation in Western Music (2013). His writings on music have received awards from ASCAP and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.

Reviews
Walden's book is still to be highly commended, since its unique aim -- to show how music has depicted individuals throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries -- has certainly been achieved. * Maurice Windleburn, Context *
This is the first study to delve deep into the intersection of musical and artistic portraiture. The specialized nature of this volume makes it most valuable to those doing focused work on the arts and portraiture. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. * CHOICE *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190653507
Author Joshua S. Walden
Format Hardback
Page Count 200
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 408g
Dimensions(mm) 241mm * 163mm * 21mm