Write all these down
Subtitle: essays on music
By: Joseph Kerman.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 359
Subjects: Music -- History and criticism
Description: Joseph Kerman is one of the most eminent, wide ranging, and readable of today's writers on music. Admirers of his many books - on musicology, opera, Beethoven, and Elizabethan music - will find much to interest them in this collection of essays, taken from general journals, such as the Hudson Review and the New York Review of Books, as well as more specialized publications.

Included are several well-known 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 famous 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.

Beautifully written, this book offers challenging models for a humane and historically informed music criticism.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.