Joseph Kerman Professor Emeritus
email: josephkerman@comcast.net

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) and The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715-1750 (2005), and Listen (textbook, with Vivian Kerman and Gary Tomlinson, 1972ˆ2008). He wrote (writes) for general readers in Hudson Review (1948 -62) and New York Review.

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

Books

• Opera and the Morbidity of Music, 2008
• with Gary Tomlinson: Listen, Sixth [r. 9th] Edition, 2008
• The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715-1750 [2005], paperback, 2008

Edited

• with Davitt Moroney: Philip Brett, William Byrd and his Contemporaries, 2007

Articles

• "The Concertos" in Cambridge Companion to Schumann, 2008
• "Thematic Return in Late Bach Fugues," Music & Letters vol. 87, 2006
• "Verdi and the Undoing of Women," Cambridge Opera Journal vol. 18, 2006
• "Mozart's Magic Marriage" [on The Magic Flute], New York Review Jan. 12, 2006

Reviews

• "Playing in Time" [Griffiths, A Concise History of Music], NYR May 15, 2008;
• [Ross, The Rest is Noise], New Republic Dec. 31, 2007

Updated 4/24/2008