Reviews: Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature and Musical Modernism

Abstract

Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature and Musical Modernism , by Joshua S. Walden. AMS Studies in Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. x, 308 pp. In Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature and Musical Modernism , Joshua Walden makes the bold claim that a category of short, light recital pieces from the first decades of the twentieth century holds an important relationship to musical modernism through these works' connection to the discourse of authenticity. He gives such pieces the genre designation “rural miniature,” which in his definition includes compositions as diverse as Joseph Achron's Hebrew Melody for violin and piano on a tune supposedly collected in Russia's Pale of Settlement, Bela Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances for piano based on instrumental folk music collected in Transylvania, and Manuel de Falla's Siete canciones populares espanolas , a song cycle for voice and piano inspired by music associated with Andalusia.1 Although many of the rural miniatures Walden discusses are arrangements of music collected as part of ethnographic projects meant to preserve the memory of cultures seen as being on the verge of extinction (“salvage ethnography” [p. 25]), his definition of the genre requires no folk source. It requires only that a piece have the aura of an authentic connection to a folk culture—as his title proclaims, that it sounds authentic. The key to the genre is what Walden dubs “musical realism,” which he defines as “an aesthetic mode according to which musicians depicted folk-music traditions in a manner that was interpreted by many listeners, critics, and other musicians as accurate and objective” (p. 7). “Objective” is the key here, for this is what connects rural miniatures to musical modernism, the sound of which is generally conceived of as less accessible than the generally catchy numbers Walden cites. This relativist emphasis on audience as arbiter of a work's authenticity allows pieces to be grouped together that could be seen as opposites on other terms. Rural miniatures include not only arrangements of …