Jeremy Eichler

Jeremy Eichler (born August 13, 1974) is an American music critic and cultural historian. He teaches at Tufts University, and from 2006 to 2024 he was the chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe.

Eichler’s book Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War (2023) has garnered wide recognition. Named “History Book of the Year” by the Sunday Times, Growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, he played violin and viola in his youth, playing the latter in youth orchestras. He received an undergraduate degree from Brown University,

Eichler worked as a freelance journalist in New York, contributing to numerous publications including The New Republic, The Nation and The New Yorker, and in 2003 began writing music criticism for The New York Times. His column, titled "Third Ear", connected "music with broader worlds of history, politics, and culture." The historian Lizabeth Cohen said of Eichler’s criticism, “In his hands, cultural history and music criticism become entryways to better understandings of the past and the present.”

Eichler is also a cultural historian. He earned a doctorate in history from Columbia University; his doctoral dissertation was on the composer Arnold Schoenberg. According to Eichler, it invites readers to consider how "classical music in particular can serve as a gateway to the past, deepening our sense of understanding, empathy, and felt contact with history." The narrative focuses on the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and among the works discussed are Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13, Babi Yar and Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss. and has been translated into ten languages. In 2024-25, Eichler served as the first Writer-in-Residence of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which devoted its season to exploring the relationship between music and memory.

Awards and honors

ASCAP awarded Eichler the Deems Taylor Award for Music Criticism in 2013. He has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies of Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Humanities. and three National Jewish Book Awards, Time's Echo was named “History Book of the Year” by the Sunday Times and described as “the outstanding music book of this and several years” by the Times Literary Supplement. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize, considered the UK's premier annual prize for non-fiction books.

Selected writings

Articles

Reprinted as "Beethoven wandering" on Eichler's website.