Scholarship
Joshua recently completed his DPhil at Christ Church, Oxford where he was generously supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, and supervised by Professor Jonathan Cross. His research applies a computational approach to harmony in the music of Anton Webern. While at Oxford he was awarded a prestigious Mitacs Globalink Doctoral Partnership. This grant funded an exchange to the University of British Columbia for three months in 2022, where he worked with Professor Leigh VanHandel.
Joshua previously studied at King's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded an academic scholarship and various other prizes, including the Jasper Ridley Prize and the Bertram Faulkner Prize, as well as multiple grants to support his academic work.
All work below is © Joshua Ballance.
Conference Presentations & Proceedings
The Path to the New Note: Interval Distributions in the Music of Anton Webern - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM2021), July 28–30, 2021, Virtual Conference, GA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3469013. 3469021. (2021)
Pitch-Class Distributions in the Music of Anton Webern - Pitch-Class Distributions in the Music of Anton Webern. In Proceedings of The Workshop on The Computational Humanities, November 2020, Folgert Karsdorp, Barbara McGillivray, Adina Nerghes, and Melvin Wevers (Eds.), Vol. 2723. CEUR-WS.org, Amsterdam, 214–224.
The Viennese Trichord in the Music of Anton Webern - presentation given at the SMI/ICTM-IE Conference, January 2021.
Dissertations
A Computational Corpus Study of Harmony in the Music of Anton Webern - doctoral thesis written under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Cross. (2023)
Harmonic Syntax in Webern's Opp. 9, 10, and 11: A Digital Approach - dissertation written under the supervision of Prof. John Rink. The accompanying data (Appendix 2) can be found here. (2019)
Innovation in Sibelius's Sixth Symphony - dissertation written under the supervision of John Hopkins. (2017)
Essays
Britten's War Requiem in the Cold War - essay assessing the political context of this work. (2019)
Steve Reich's Tehillim: Jewishness and Identity - essay considering the implications of this work in the context of Reich's identity. (2019)
"Predominantly of a cheerful character"? Irony in the Final Movement of Mahler's Seventh Symphony - analytical essay positing an ironical interpretation of this movement. (2018)
De profundis - article adapted from a talk given at the Cambridge University Composers' Workshop about Joshua's composition of the same title. (2017)
Eine Alpensinfonie: A Symphony At All? - essay dealing with the symphonic characteristics of Strauss's Alpensinfonie. (2017)
Schoenberg: Farben - analysis of the pitch content and its structural ramifications, supervised by Prof. Julian Anderson. (2017)