Write All These Down: Essays on Music

by Joseph Kerman

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.

Genres: Music

359 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Joseph Wilfred Kerman -- born Zukerman -- (1924 - 2014) was an American critic and musicologist. One of the leading musicologists of his generation, his 1985 book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (published in the UK as Musicology) was described by Philip Brett in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "a defining moment in the field." He was Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good number of these essays (all previously published) go deep into the weeds of musicology. Probably half of what I read sailed over my head. For the lay reader (by which I don't mean to suggest they are easy reading), the essays I would recommend are A Few Canonic Variations; Wagner: Thoughts in Season; perhaps Reading Don Giovanni; and Mozart's Piano Concertos and Their Audience. I would also recommend the four essays in the first section, titled Criticism, to get an idea of what Kerman means when he uses the terms musicology, analysis, musical canons, and repertory, even though it will only be 100% comprehensible to an expert.

I knew How We Got Into Analysis, and How to Get Out felt familiar - I read it in On Criticizing Music: Five Philosophical Perspectives, where it was called "The State of Academic Music Criticism."

Kerman discusses at length the critic-musicians Charles Rosen (and his famous book The Classical Style) and Donald Francis Tovey. The five essays in the second section are taken up by the Renaissance composers William Byrd, Tallis, and Alfonso Ferrabosco. The third section covers Beethoven. The last section's seven essays are on operas and concertos (six essays on opera, one essay on Mozart's piano concertos).

[Ralph Kleinman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a complicated book. Even essays on our Ed if music that I know well (as a music lover not as a professional or a professor) were hard to always follow. But I read it slowly, and learned much.