| 1 | Name: | Dr. Joseph Kerman | |
| Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | ||
| Year Elected: | 2002 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 404. History of the Arts, Literature, Religion and Sciences | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1924 | ||
| Death Date: | March 17, 2014 | ||
Joseph Kerman was a central figure in American musicology during the discipline's ascendancy in the second half of the twentieth century. He was a student of Oliver Strunk at Princeton; major influences were D.F. Tovey, William Arrowsmith, and E.T. Cone. After joining the University of California, Berkeley in 1951, he worked to consolidate its leading position in musicological studies. In 1972-74 he held the Heather Professorship of Music at Oxford and in 1987-88 delivered the Charles Eliot North Lectures at Harvard (published as Concerto Conversations). A self-described "critic and musicologist", he always addressed general readers as well as specialists; his first book, Opera as Drama, reached a broad readership. He wrote for general readers in Hudson Review (1948-62) and New York Review (1970-). He also urged that criticism should assume a role within "official" musicology; the hasty evolution of the discipline in the 1980s was spurred both by his polemical book Contemplating Music and his editorship of the innovative journal 19th Century Music. He wrote on a variety of topics in classical music up to the twentieth century, with specialties in Elizabethan music and the music of Beethoven (books: The Elizabethan Madrigal and The Masses and Motets of William Byrd; Beethoven, with Alan Tyson, and The Beethoven Quartets). Other books are The Art of Fugue, a critical edition of Beethoven's "Kafka" sketchbook, the long-running textbook Listen, and the essay collections Write All These Down and Opera and the Morbidity of Music. Joseph Kerman died March 17, 2014, at the age of 89 in Berkeley, California. He had been elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. | |||