Joseph Kerman > Quotes

“Concerto soloists need applause. Though virtue is said to be its own reward, no one ever said that about virtuosity.”
― Joseph Kerman, Concerto Conversations: With a 68-Minute CD

“Not even the stretto fugues of The Art of Fugue are as single-minded as the Fugue in C Major, whose twenty-seven bars include no episodes and, apart from subject entries, no more than a total of two bars of transitional music preparing the fugue’s three cadences . . . plus a miniature peroration in which the whole thing gently goes up in smoke, up to a high C we have never heard before.”
― Joseph Kerman, The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–1750

“Schoenberg came to the crisis of modernism from a standpoint diametrically opposed to that of Schenker and Tovey: not with his finger in the dyke but with his whole frame spreadeagled on a board swept along by the surf of history.”
― Joseph Kerman, Musicology