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Joseph Kerman at 60 |
Just before his 60th
birthday, after Andrew Porter had (yet again) cited Opera as Drama
in that week's New Yorker, I asked Joe what it what it
was like to be so remembered, so notorious, for what amounted to
one's opening salvo—and for three words of that salvo, no less. He
shrugged and said “I haven't really thought that much about Puccini
since then: other things to do.”
(Opera
as Drama appeared in 1956 and
has been in one or another form of print ever since. A
50th-anniversary edition was published by the University of California
Press in 2006.)
We had moved to California in 1973, and
I suppose stayed here in part because of Joe and Vivian, who had
welcomed us from the first and who were the patina on those
early years of discovering an unknown land. For two decades we talked
or corresponded—toward the end, e-mailed—almost every day, mostly
about 19th-Century Music, the journal we founded together with
Robert Winter in 1977.
In the introduction to Essays for Joseph Kerman (19th-Century
Music 7/3, a double issue
published on April 3, 1984—his birthday), I tried to evoke the
merry circumstances of the magazine's birth and something of the
power of his pen. He was, as noted elsewhere on this site, the brains
behind the original “Dear Abbé,” and a certain amount of Writing
about Music (3rd edn. 2014, first published 1988 for the tenth anniversary of the
magazine).
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19th-Century Music founders DKH, JK, Cynthia Bates (ed. asst.), RW |
I
chose his textbook, Listen (1972),
for my first large-lecture class in 1975—largely for its gripping
treatment of “Wotan's Farewell,” and the one-line score thereof—and used it, for nearly two decades, as we built the course into our
campus's foundational curriculum. The inevitable result was a
textbook of my own: I reveled in the notion of meeting JK on the
field of commerce, though knew in advance the certain outcome. The close of
Masterworks (1998,
still going in its e-version), was meant as a salute to the Kerman style: “Art,
properly done, will sustain you, challenge you, comfort you. And it
may show you a path. Listen to it.”
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Joe has at a typescript |
Joe relished being a shocker himself, now and then. You saw it in his titles—“How We Got into Analysis,” “Taking the Fifth”—and in the pleasure he took in shaking things up in general and the zinger in particular. When he was on the verge of retirement, we hosted an afternoon symposium in Davis on critics and criticism, with Joe and David Cairns and Richard Swift and maybe Michael Steinberg. In the Q&A I asked him what he was looking forward to most about retirement, to which he replied, without pause, “not going to concerts.”
You
simply didn't know what to think, and by the time you did, he was off
on his compelling list of reasons why sitting in tidy rows to worship
the Great Masters in silence had to change. And he was right, or
pretty close to it.
I had already decided that the concept
of finding one's voice would end this short essay when I re-read the
preface to Write all These Down,
where Kerman on Kerman says it all. His first voice,
that of the Hudson Review
and Opera as Drama,
“was descriptive and evaluative, often enthusiastic and often
judgmental. After the mid-1950s my work was addressed less to the
Hudson Review
readership and more to musicologists (and, one always hopes, to
practical, performing musicians).”
The
need to speak technically—that is, in close detail—about music
began to seem a more urgent matter than the intellectual and artistic
common ground that I felt (or vaguely imagined) I shared with the
Hudson readerships. I
was also experiencing more and more difficulty coping with
contemporary music—music past Elliott Carter—and felt as a result
more and more uncomfortable with my stance as a critic. …
The
scholarly voice cultivated after around 1960 was not a new voice—it
had already been used for a dissertation and an AMS paper, inter
alia—but it was now heard more
often. The mode was descriptive, objective, and measured. ...
One cannot define criticism; one must be content with exemplifying it—bearing witness, as it were—and, sometimes, writing around it.
One cannot define criticism; one must be content with exemplifying it—bearing witness, as it were—and, sometimes, writing around it.
Professing,
one might say. The memory of Joe that rings truest is that of his
voice—rich-hued in sound, grand in the manner of Charles Rosen,
gentle as Michael Steinberg. It is at once musical and
musicianly: commanding, compelling, and comforting. Transfiguring.
Listen to it.
LINKS:
- Memories gathered from American musicologists (see below)
(Sarah Fuller, Andrew dell'Antonio, Bruce A. Brown, James Parsons, Alejandro Planchart,
David Rosen, Lester Siegel, Chris Williams
POST A COMMENT below.
- New York Times obituary (25 March 2014)
- San Francisco Chronicle obituary (20 March 2014)
- Oxford University: Music obituary (19 March 2014)
- Joseph Kerman Endowment supporting publications in musicology
(American Musicological Society). GIFTS TO SAME (choose Joseph Kerman Endowment).
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