Walter Clark assumed the role of UC Riverside's faculty athletics representative in September of 2015.
Received his doctorate in musicology from UCLA (1992), where he wrote his dissertation under the guidance of the late Robert M. Stevenson. He also holds performance degrees in classical guitar from the North Carolina School of the Arts (B.M.), where he studied with Jesús Silva and performed in a master class with Andrés Segovia; and the University of California, San Diego (M.A.), where he was a student of Pepe and Celin Romero. Clark studied early music with lutenist Jürgen Hübscher and concertized in Germany for two years on a Fulbright grant (1984-86). Before coming to UCR, he was on the faculty at the University of Kansas for ten years, having previously taught various courses at Scripps and Pomona Colleges, California State University, Long Beach, and UCLA.
Prof. Clark’s specialty is the music of Spain and Latin America, and he is the founder/director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music at the University of California, Riverside. He is the series editor for Oxford University Press’s Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music and editor-in-chief of both the incipient New Grove Dictionary of Iberian and Latin American Music and the new refereed online journal Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review. He also serves on the editorial boards of Revista de Musicología, Monumentos de la Música Española, Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana, Música em Contexto, Soundboard Scholar, and the Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music (ABC-Clio/Garland, 2014). His research has appeared in The Musical Quarterly, Revista de Musicología, Journal of the Lute Society of America, Soundboard Magazine, Ópera Actual, Piano, Inter-American Music Review, Revista de la Fundación Juan March, MAR (Música de Andalucía en la Red), Anuario Musical, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (online version), Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (2nd ed.), and Latin Music: Musicians, Genres, and Themes (Greenwood, 2014). He is the author of Isaac Albéniz: A Guide to Research (Garland, 1998) and Isaac Albéniz: Portrait of a Romantic (Oxford, 1999; paperback, 2002), also available in Spanish translation (Turner, 2002). His book Enrique Granados: Poet of the Piano (Oxford, 2006; paperback 2011) won the 2006 Robert M. Stevenson Award in Iberian musicology from the American Musicological Society. He is the contributing editor of From Tejano to Tango: Latin American Popular Music (Routledge, 2002) and contributing co-editor (with Luisa Morales) of Antes de Iberia: de Masarnau a Albéniz (Asociación Cultural LEAL, 2009). In 2009, he edited a special issue of The Musical Quarterly devoted to Latin America. He has published research on topics as diverse as the lute and vihuela intabulations of Josquin’s Mille Regretz; Isaac Albéniz’s opera Merlin; the Hollywood musicals of Carmen Miranda; the choral, stage, and piano works of Enrique Granados; the guitar music of Fernando Sor, Francisco Tárrega, and Federico Moreno Torroba; choral music in nineteenth-century Ibero-America; music during the Franco dictatorship; and contemporary music in Latin America. He was the 1992 recipient of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Research Fellowship in England, and his essay on the opera Riders to the Sea appeared in Vaughan Williams Essays, edited by Byron Adams and Robin Wells (Ashgate, 2003); he also contributed an essay to Música y cultura en la Edad de Plata, 1915-1939, edited by María Nagore, Leticia Sánchez de Andrés, and Elena Torres (ICCMU, 2009), as well as a chapter on the Philippines and Ibero-America to Nineteenth-Century Choral Music, edited by Donna Di Grazia (Routledge, 2012). He has published reviews in American Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Music & Letters, Hispanic Review, Revista de Musicología, and Notes of the Music Library Association; he also served as a contributing editor to the Handbook of Latin American Studies. In addition, he has written liner notes for Hyperion, Naxos, DGG, BIS, Tritó, EMEC, and Decca. He has read papers at numerous conferences in Europe, Australia, and throughout the U.S.
Prof. Clark’s most recent projects have included bringing out a second edition of his Albéniz guide to research, Isaac Albéniz: A Research and Information Guide (Routledge, 2015); co-authoring (with William Krause) Federico Moreno Torroba: A Musical Life in Three Acts (Oxford, 2013); preparing the first-ever edition of Granados’s Catalan opera Follet (Tritó, 2013); co-editing (with Michael O’Connor) and contributing to a collection entitled Treasures of the Golden Age: Essays on Music of the Iberian and Latin American Renaissance in Honor of Robert M. Stevenson (Pendragon, 2012); and serving as contributing editor (with Robin Moore, managing editor) of the groundbreaking textbook Musics of Latin America (W. W. Norton, 2012). He is currently completing the manuscript of a new book, Los Romero: The Saga of an Andalusian Family of Guitarists, and making a critical edition of Granados’s three-act opera María del Carmen (Tritó). In addition, his Granados biography is being translated into Spanish and Catalan for publication in Spain (Boileau and Pagès, respectively), and the Torroba biography is now slated to be published in Spanish as well (Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales). He is a member of the program committee for the 2015 Bard Festival, devoted to Carlos Chávez. His future research plans include a biography of and guide to research on Joaquín Rodrigo, as well as revised editions of his Albéniz and Granados biographies.
Prof. Clark teaches a wide variety of courses, including Introduction to Western Classical Music (MUS 2), Latin American Folk and Popular Styles (MUS 15), Latin American Classical Heritage (MUS 16), Music of Spain (MUS 18), History of Western Music (MUS 112A-C), Representations of Spain in Music and Dance, 1700-Present (MUS/DNC 155E, with Prof. Linda Tomko, Dance), Bibliography and Research Methods (MUS 200), Proseminar in Musicology (MUS 206), as well as graduate seminars (MUS 262-63) on Flamenco and Spanish Nationalism; the Tango and Piazzolla; and Music Theory from Antiquity to the Renaissance. As a guitarist, he has devoted many years to the study of flamenco, in both the U.S. (with Michael Hauser and René Heredia) and Spain (with Ricardo Modrego), and he performed frequently as guitar accompanist and soloist with the flamenco dance troupe Olé in Kansas City. He developed the educational video Flamenco: Art and Soul in collaboration with Eugene Enrico and his Early Music Television production company at the University of Oklahoma, serving as author and narrator of the DVD, which was filmed on location in Sevilla in 2005 (available at earlymusic.ou.edu). He has also assisted in the production of and been interviewed for documentaries on Granados (2008), Torroba (2012), and Falla (2012) by Halpern Productions in New York (available at Amazon.com and Vimeo.com). Other Halpern documentaries with which he is involved, on Fernando Sor and on Albéniz’s Iberia for piano, are currently in preparation.
