WALTER FRISCH is H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York, where he has taught since 1982. He has also been a guest professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has lectured on music throughout the United States, and in England, France, Spain, and Germany. His writings have been translated into French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian.
Professor Frisch is a specialist in the music of composers from the Austro-German sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Schubert to Schoenberg.
He has written numerous articles and two books on Brahms, including Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (1984) and Brahms: the Four Symphonies (1996). He served as editor of the volume Brahms and His World (1990) and was the founding president of the American Brahms Society in 1983. He is the co-author, with George S. Bozarth, of the Brahms article in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary (2000).
Professor Frisch's publications on Schoenberg include the book The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893-1908 (1993) and the edited volume Schoenberg and His World (1999). He also edited and contributed to a volume on Schubert's music, Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies (1986). Professor Frisch has twice won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for his writings. He has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
His most recent book, which appeared in July 2005 from University of California Press, is German Modernism: Music and the Arts, which investigates the relationships between music and its cultural context in Austria and Germany during the period 1880-1915. He is currently serving as general editor for a new series from Norton, Music in Western Culture, in which he will write a volume on nineteenth-century music.