Walter Frisch is H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1982. He has written widely about music from the Austro-German sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the music and career of song composer Harold Arlen. His work on Brahms, which has developed various analytical approaches, includes the books Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (1984), Brahms: The Four Symphonies (2003), and Brahms and His World (as co-editor, 2009). His book German Modernism: Music and the Arts (2005) investigates relationships between different artistic movements in the years around 1900. Frisch served as general editor of a new series of period music histories from W. W. Norton, Western Music in Context. The series seeks to place Western classical music in its social, historical, and cultural contexts. His own volume in the series, Music in the Nineteenth Century, appeared in Fall 2012. Frisch has more recently written about American popular song of the mid-twentieth century. His book Arlen and Harburg’s Over the Rainbow appeared in 2017, and Harold Arlen and His Songs in 2024, both from Oxford University Press. His current project is a monograph on the 1964 French film musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. (Apr 2026)
