Write All These Down Essays on Music [Paperback]

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 classicOpera as Drama(1956) are reaffirmed in essays onDon Giovanni,The Magic Flute,Tristan und Isolde,ErnaniandI 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.

Joseph Kermanis Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a founding editor of the journal19th-Century Musicand author of several books, most recentlyContemplating Music(1986).

Rarely does one encounter in a single volume such a masterful and graceful display of intellectual virtuosity. Kerman's skill in illuminating musical texts, interpreting meaning, and fashioning historical insights vindicates his reputation as one of the few genuinely signifiló$