Joseph Kerman

Joseph Wilfred Kerman (3 April 1924 – 17 March 2014) was an American musicologist and music critic. Among the leading musicologists of his generation, his 1985 book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (published in the UK as Musicology) was described by Philip Brett in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "a defining moment in the field". He was Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Life and career Kerman, the son of an American journalist, William Zukerman, was born in London and educated at University College School there. He then attended New York University where he received his BA in 1943 and Princeton University where he received his PhD in 1950. While at Princeton he studied under Oliver Strunk, Randall Thompson and Carl Weinrich and wrote his doctoral thesis on the Elizabethan madrigal. When young, he used Kerman as a pen-name, and then adopted it officially. (Kerman's assessment echoed George Bernard Shaw's earlier description of Sardou's play La Tosca on which the opera was based as an "empty-headed turnip ghost of a cheap shocker".

His doctoral thesis on Elizabethan madrigals was published in 1962 and was notable for contextualizing them in the preceding Italian madrigal tradition. He maintained an interest in the English madrigal composer William Byrd throughout his career, and wrote several influential monographs on his work.

Honours Joseph Kerman was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in 1972, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973, and member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. and continue:We share a very vivid memory of Joe as editor. It takes the form of a mysterious wavy line, which he was wont to draw in the margin of this or that paragraph we had nervously proffered. This undemonstrative graphic gesture would say it all: telling us to think again, to re-draft, to watch the rhythms, the cadence of the words. He could communicate so sparsely because one of his many gifts was to inspire you, as a writer, by the persuasiveness, energy, and beauty of prose; you came to live for the—rarely bestowed—small check marks that signalled approval; the wavy line could keep you awake at night.

They continue by reflecting on their own professional relationships with Kerman over the years:Joe published both of our first essays on opera in 19th-Century Music, the journal he helped to establish; he gave one of us a first academic job and lured the other to Berkeley as a visiting lecturer; he edited our first collaborative book; we dedicated our second to him. Ever patient, ever smiling, he formed us—sometimes sentence-by-sentence.

Selected bibliography

Opera as Drama (1952) The Elizabethan Madrigal (1962) The Beethoven Quartets (1967) The Kafka Sketchbook (1970) The Masses and Motets of William Byrd (1980) The New Grove Beethoven (1983) (with Alan Tyson) Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (1985) (UK title: Musicology) Write All These Down: Essays on Music (1994) Concerto Conversations (1998) The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715-1750 (2005) Opera and the Morbidity of Music (2008)