Joseph Kerman
Joseph Kerman | |
---|---|
Born | London, United Kingdom | April 3, 1924
Died | March 17, 2014 Music critic | (aged 89)
Organizations | Harvard University |
Joseph Wilfred Kerman (3 April 1924 – 17 March 2014) was an American
Life and career
Kerman, the son of an American journalist, William Zukerman, was born in London and educated at
He based his first book, Opera as Drama (1956), on a series of essays written for The Hudson Review beginning in 1948.[1] Published in several languages and multiple editions, Opera as Drama expresses Kerman's view that an opera's story is key and provides the basis for the structuring of both the librettist's text (which expresses the narrative) and the composer's music (which expresses the emotions in the story). For Kerman, the value of an opera as drama is undermined when there is a perceived disconnection between text and music.[5] Among the operas Kerman discussed in the book was Puccini's Tosca which he controversially described as a "shabby little shocker".[6] (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".[7]
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
From 1997 to 1998 Kerman held the Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Chair at Harvard University, where he gave a series of public lectures on the importance of approaching musical texts and performances via a "close reading" similar to that used in literary studies, a theme that was central to many of his writings.[1][12] The Norton lectures were published in 1998 as Concerto Conversations.[13] Kerman has written regularly for The New York Review of Books since 1977 and was a founding editor of the journal, 19th-Century Music. Critical essays written by Kerman from the late 1950s to the early 1990s are collected in his 1994 book, Write All These Down, which takes its title from a phrase in one of William Byrd's songs.[12]
Honours
Joseph Kerman was elected Honorary Fellow of the
Death and obituaries
Kerman died at his home in Berkeley on 17 March 2014. He was 89.[16]
In addition to obituaries which appeared in the days following his death, two of his former associates in the field of musicology, Roger Parker and Carolyn Abbate, published some additional comments about working with Kerman in the obituary which they wrote for the British magazine, Opera. There, they conclude that "the usual obituary language would not work"[17] 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 his prose; you came to live for the—rarely bestowed—small check marks that signalled approval; the wavy line could keep you awake at night.[17]
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.[17]
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)
References
Notes
- ^ a b c d e f g Brett 2001
- ^ a b Hewett 2014
- ^ Colby 1991, p. 481.
- ^ Kerman 1994, p. ix.
- ^ Pratt 2009, p. 74.
- ^ Kerman 2005, p. 205; Nicassio 2002, p. 311; Tambling 1994, p. 16; Evans 1999, p. 56; Wingell & Herzog 2001, p. 169
- ^ Budden 2005, p. 181.
- ^ a b c Anon. 1997.
- ^ Kerman, Tomlinson & Kerman 2007.
- ^ Brett 2001.
- ^ Alperson 1998, p. 156.
- ^ a b Lorraine 1995, pp. 505–507
- ^ Rothstein 1999.
- ^ Cummings 2003, p. 295.
- ^ Anon. n.d.
- ^ Kosman 2014.
- ^ a b c Abbate & Parker 2014
Sources
- Abbate, Carolyn; Parker, Roger (June 2014). "Obituary: Joseph Kerman". Opera. Vol. 65, no. 6. London. pp. 705–706.
- Alperson, Philip (1998). Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music. Penn State University Press. ISBN 0-271-01769-4.
- Anon. (n.d.). "Dr. Joseph Kerman". APS Member History. American Philosophical Society. Retrieved 8 July 2021.
- Anon. (22 May 1997). "Norton Lectures to Be Delivered by Musicologist". Harvard University Gazette. Archived from the originalon 29 June 2011.
- ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0.
- ISBN 0195179749.
- Colby, Vineta (1991). World Authors, 1980–1985. H. W. Wilson. ISBN 0-8242-0797-1.
- Cummings, David (2003). "Kerman, Joseph (Wilfred)". International Who's Who of Authors and Writers. Routledge. pp. 294–295. ISBN 1-85743-179-0.
- Evans, David Trevor (1999). Phantasmagoria: A Sociology of Opera. Ashgate. ISBN 1-85742-209-0.
- Hewett, Ivan (16 April 2014). "Joseph Kerman obituary". The Guardian.
- Kerman, Joseph (1994). Write All These Down: Essays on Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-08355-5.
- Kerman, Joseph (2005) [1956, New York: Alfred A. Knopf]. Opera as Drama. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-24692-6.
- Kerman, Joseph; ISBN 978-0-312-43419-9.
- Kosman, Joshua (19 March 2014). "Joseph Kerman, musicologist, critic, cultural shaper, dies". SFGate.
- Lorraine, Renée Cox (December 1995). "Review: Write All These Down: Essays on Music by Joseph Kerman"". JSTOR 899075.
- Nicassio, Susan Vandiver (2002). Tosca's Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-57972-7.
- Project MUSE.
- Rothstein, Edward (30 October 1999). "The Concerto as a Metaphor for the Individual in Society". The New York Times.
- ISBN 0-86196-466-7.
- Wingell, Richard; Herzog, Silvia (2001). Introduction to Research in Music. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-014332-4.
External links
- Joseph Kerman, Professor Emeritus, Musicology, Department of Music, University of California, Berkeley
- Erich Leinsdorf, "Culture and Musical Thinking" (review of Kerman's Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology), The New York Times, 26 May 1985