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About

The Joseph Kerman Fund was established in conjunction with the OPUS campaign by the Board of Directors of the American Musicological Society to honor one of the most brilliant essayists of the Society’s first seventy-five years.

Joseph Kerman (b. 1924) studied with Oliver Strunk at Princeton and came to Berkeley in 1952. He left to become Heather Professor of Music at Oxford in 1972 but returned in 1974, retiring in 1994. He likes you to begin with Write All These Down (1994), an essay collection sampling his several fields of activity: Elizabethan music (The Elizabethan Madrigal, 1962; The Masses and Motets of William Byrd, 1980), Beethoven (The Beethoven Quartets, 1967; The Kafka Sketchbook, 1970; The New Grove Beethoven, 1983, with Alan Tyson), opera (Opera as Drama, 1956/1988), and criticism. An influential commentator on musicology (see Contemplating Music, 1986), he was an early champion of criticism within the discipline. He writes for general readers in the Hudson Review (1948-62) and New York Review of Books (1970– ). Other books are Concerto Conversations (1998) and The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715-1750 (2005). He is also author, with Gary Tomlinson, of the textbook Listen.

Ruth Solie describes Kerman as “a kind of bellwether for musicological writing, one who has offered the discipline various kinds of programmatic challenges and then shown us how to meet them: . . . graceful, insightful, humane, even funny ways to get ‘out of analysis’ and into understanding musical meaning.” For more on the life and work of Joseph Kerman see his New York Times obituary and AMS memorial in Musicology Now.

Proposals appropriate for the Joseph Kerman Fund are accepted by the AMS Publications Committee regularly. See AMS Publication Subventions for further details.

Contributions to the Joseph Kerman Fund are warmly invited. Your support demonstrates an important commitment to the ideals and legacy of Joseph Kerman.

Joseph Kerman
Joseph Kerman

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