Write All These Down: Essays on Music

by Joseph Kerman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520213777
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/18/1998
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	359
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.75(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Joseph Kerman is Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a founding editor of the journal 19th-Century Music and author of several books, most recently Contemplating Music (1986).

Table of Contents

Preface
CRITICISM
1 A Profile for American Musicology
2 How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out
3 A Few Canonic Variations
4 Critics and the Classics
BYRD, TALLIS, ALFONSO FERRABOSCO
5 William Byrd and Elizabethan Catholicism
6 Byrd, Tallis, and the Art of Imitation
7 "Write All These Down": Notes on a Song by Byrd
8 The Missa Puer natus est by Thomas Tallis
9 An Italian Musician in Elizabethan England
BEETHOVEN
10 Tovey's Beethoven
11 An die ferne Geliebte
12 Taking the Fifth
13 Beethoven's Minority
OPERA AND CONCERTO 
14 Translating The Magic Flute 
15 Wagner: Thoughts in Season 
16 Verdi's Use of Recurring Themes 
17 Two Early Verdi Operas; Two Famous Terzetti 
18 Reading Don Giovanni 
19 Mozart's Piano Concertos and Their Audience 
20 Tristan und Isolde: The Prelude and the Play 
Acknowledgments