Joseph Kerman

Listen

Turn-of-the-century modernists were involved, implicated, and often locked in a struggle with all the formidable legions of nineteenth-century music. The focus of this collection, essays originally published in the journal 19th-Century Music, is upon modernism in relation to its immediate heritage. Major composers whose reflections on the past come under consideration include Debussy, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, and Ives, while older composers such as Liszt and Wolf figure as precursors of modernist harmony and sensibility. The contributors include many leading musicologists, critics, and music theorists known for their work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Some of the essays deal closely with the new musical languages that evolved in that era others deal with reception and performance issues. Many of them bring together insights from various sub-disciplines to achieve a richer kind of composite scholarship than is available to traditional musical studies.

A 19th-century Music Reader

Music at the Turn of Century

Contemplating Music is a book for all serious music lovers. Here is the first full-scale of ideas and ideologies in music over the past forty years; a period during which virtually every aspect of music was transformed. With this book, Joesph Kerman establishes the place of music study firmly in the mainstream of modern intellectual history. He treats not only the study of the history of Western art music--with which musicology is tradtionally equated--but also sometimes vexed relations between music history and other fields: music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, and music criticism. Kerman sees and applauds a change in the study of music towarda critical orientation, As examples, he presents a fascinating vignettes of Bach research in the 1950's and Beethoven studies in the 1960's. He sketched the work of prominent scholars and theorists: Thurston Dart, Charles Rosen, Leonard B. Meyer, Heinrich Schenker, Miltion Babbit, and many others. And he comments on such various subjects as the amazing absorption of Stephen Foster's songs into the cannons of black music, the new intensity of Verdi research, controversies about performance on historical instruments, and the merits and demerits of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Comtemplating Music is fulled with wisdom and trenchant commmentary. It will spark controversy among musicologists of all stripes and will give many musicians and amateurs an entirely new perspective on the world of music.

Challenges to Musicology

Contemplating Music

A critical study of the structure, style, and significance of the sixteen string quartets.

The Beethoven Quartets

Passionate, witty, and brilliant, Opera as Drama has been lauded as one of the most controversial, thought-provoking, and entertaining works of operatic criticism ever written. First published in 1956 and revised in 1988, Opera as Drama continues to be indispensable reading for all students and lovers of opera.

Opera As Drama

If one name stands out among musicologists writing today, that name is Joseph Kerman. Eminent, wide-ranging, and wonderfully readable, Kerman's writing on musicology, opera, Beethoven, and Elizabethan music has informed and inspired an extensive audience both in America and abroad. There is much to interest both the general reader and the musicologist in this collection of twenty essays. Included are several notable pleas addressed by Kerman to his professional colleagues in an effort to get them to adopt a more critical orientation for their work. Other essays range from a moving account of William Byrd as a spokesman for the beleaguered Elizabethan Catholic minority to a discerning analysis of Beethoven's well-known obsession with the key of C minor. The controversial tenets of Kerman's classic Opera as Drama (1956) are reaffirmed in essays on Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, Tristan und Isolde, Ernani and I Lombardi. Kerman's legacy to a younger generation is here, too: in an exemplary writing style, he offers challenging models for a humane and historically informed music criticism. An added gem is the Preface, which provides an intellectual and anecdotal road map of the place of the essays in Kerman's academic and public expeditions. Joseph Kerman has been at the very center of musicology for almost four decades. This overview of his work will be warmly received and greatly valued.

Essays on Music

Write All These Down

Philip Brett

Davitt Moroney

Throughout his career, Philip Brett wrote about the music of the Tudor period. He carried out pathbreaking work on the life and music of William Byrd (c1540-1628). Collecting these influential essays, this volume is a tribute to Brett's agile mind and to his skill at synthesizing history and musical analysis.

Essays and a Monograph

William Byrd and His Contemporaries

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s new open access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Fugue for J. S. Bach was a natural language; he wrote fugues in organ toccatas and voluntaries, in masses and motets, in orchestral and chamber music, and even in his sonatas for violin solo. The more intimate fugues he wrote for keyboard are among the greatest, most influential, and best-loved works in all of Western music. They have long been the foundation of the keyboard repertory, played by beginning students and world-famous virtuosi alike. In a series of elegantly written essays, eminent musicologist Joseph Kerman discusses his favorite Bach keyboard fugues—some of them among the best-known fugues and others much less familiar. Kerman skillfully, at times playfully, reveals the inner workings of these pieces, linking the form of the fugues with their many different characters and expressive qualities, and illuminating what makes them particularly beautiful, powerful, and moving. These witty, insightful pieces, addressed to musical amateurs as well as to specialists and students, are beautifully augmented by performances made specially for this volume: Karen Rosenak, piano, playing two preludes and fugues fromTheWell-Tempered Clavier—C Major, book 1; and B Major, book 2--and Davitt Moroney playing the Fughetta in C Major, BWV 952, on clavichord; the Fugue on "Jesus Christus unser Heiland," BWV 689, on organ; and the Fantasy and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 904, on harpsichord.

Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–1750

The Art of Fugue

Vivian Kerman

Gary Tomlinson

Consistently praised as the best book of its kind, Listen uses readable, enjoyable prose and the highest quality recordings to introduce students to the art of focused listening. Captivating discussions and concise "Listening Charts" guide students through important musical works and cultivate listening skills. With informative images, useful historical and cultural background, and interesting biographical information, the text continues to offer students the best preparation to appreciate the styles and traditions of Western music. The seventh edition of Listen is more accessible than ever before with new, more teachable listening examples and a more focused and streamlined introduction to music fundamentals. An expanded range of formats for the text and recordings—including a new, affordable streaming music option and a new, all-inclusive e-book—gives you more flexible choices and more ways to listen.

Joseph Kerman

About

Books

Join the club