Newspaper Article

Obituary: Joseph Kerman: Musicologist, scholar, writer and critic, he described Tosca as a 'shabby little shocker'

Hewett, Ivan

2014

Overview

His scholarly interests broadened to include Verdi and, later, Beethoven. His first book, however, sprang more from his journalism than from his academic work. This was Opera and Drama (1956, revised 1988), a polemical book that contained the notorious line about Tosca. It was in response to \"a need to address the technical minutiae of music\" - and also, one senses, to escape from the shadow of that book - that [Joseph Wilfred Kerman] returned to Elizabethan music, producing a study of [William Byrd]'s Latin-text music whose tone was, as he put it, \"descriptive, objective and measured\". Work on the book necessitated long periods of study in Britain, a country he enjoyed because \"the general musical literacy over here is more concentrated and there's more of it\". His appointment as professor of music at Oxford in 1971 should have been the happy culmination of the love-affair, but Kerman chafed at the administrative burden placed on him. The university, for its part, was aggrieved to discover that Kerman still retained a post in Berkeley in his absence, though the fact that Kerman sold his house in Berkeley surely proved he was serious about the move to Oxford. During his time there, he published Listening, a primer in western art music for college students written in collaboration with his wife Vivian, whom he had married in 1945. In 1974, Kerman moved back to Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. Among his honours were an honorary fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music (1972) and a fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973). In Kerman's eyes, this application of analysis marked a failure of critical judgment. In formulating his goal of a critical musicology, Kerman's model remained the Edinburgh professor Donald Tovey, whose Essays in Musical Analysis had first inspired him. \"Tovey's final appeal was always to what he called the 'naive listener', the interested, earnest non-musician whom he could cajole again and again into appreciating the subtleties of tonality, invertible counterpoint at the twelfth, and so on - we need him to keep our criticism honest.\"

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Byrd, William / Kerman, Joseph Wilfred