Joseph Kerman, retired professor of music emeritus at UC, Berkeley, eminent musicologist and, at times, provocative critic, died March 17, 2014. He was 89.
After graduating from NYU in 1943 with a bachelor’s degree in physics and working for the Navy in World War II, Kerman entered Princeton and earned a Ph.D. in music in 1950. He then worked as a professor at Berkeley from 1951 until he retired in 1994. He was the Heather Professor of Music at Oxford University from 1971 to 1974, in addition to being a visiting fellow at Princeton, Cornell, and Cambridge.
According to the faculty of music at Oxford, “Kerman was a major voice in Anglophone musicology, and a ... founding figure in the emergence of the so-called ‘new musicology.’” In his books and essays (admired for their intellectual and scholarly depth), he criticized what he viewed as the intellectual isolation of musicology and advocated a more multidisciplinary approach.
Among Kerman’s honors, he was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He was predeceased by his wife, Vivian, in 2007. He is survived by two children, Peter and Lucy, and five grandchildren. A son died in 1993.
Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.