Joseph Kerman

Professor Emeritus, Musicology

Email: josephkerman@comcast.net
Office phone: 642-2691

Personal statement

Joseph Kerman (b. 1924) studied with Oliver Strunk at Princeton and came to Berkeley in 1951. He left to become Heather Professor of Music at Oxford in 1972 but returned in 1974. His memberships and honorary memberships include AMS, RMA, AAAS, APS, and the British Academy. He was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard in 1997 and twice winner of the AMS Kinkeldey Award.

          For an introduction to his work, read Write All These Down (1994), an essay collection sampling his several fields of activity, which include Elizabethan music (books: The Elizabethan Madrigal, 1962; The Masses and Motets of William Byrd, 1980); opera (Opera as Drama, 1956/1988, considered a classic); Beethoven (The Beethoven Quartets, 1967; The “Kafka” Sketchbook, edition, 1970; Grove Composers: Beethoven, 2005, with Alan Tyson), and criticism (Opera and the Morbidity of Music, 2008). An influential commentator on musicology (Contemplating Music, 1986), he was an early champion of criticism within the discipline.  Other books are Concerto Conversations (1999), The Art of  Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–1750 (2005), and Listen (textbook, with Vivian Kerman and Gary Tomlinson, 1974–2011). He wrote for general readers in Hudson Review (1948–62) and The New York Review of Books  (1978–).

          Retired since 1994, Kerman will be glad to consult with students informally on any of the above topics.

 

Compositions/Performances/Publications

Recent publications

 Books:  Opera and the Morbidity of Music, 2008

    —with Gary Tomlinson, Listen, Seventh [r. Tenth] Edition, 2011

    The Art of Fugue [2005], paperback, 2008

 Articles: “The Concertos” in Cambridge Companion to Schumann, 2008  

                “Fugue and its Discontents,” in Variations on the Canon: Essays . . .  in Honor                  of Charles Rosen,  2008

 Reviews: “Renaissance Man” [Josquin Companion,  Fallows, Josquin; Missa Pange lingua                                (Hyperion CD)], New Republic  - -  to appear

                “Undercover Composer”  [Harley, William Byrd], Times Literary Supplement,                   Nov.12, 2010