Description: Contemplating Music is a book for all serious music lovers. Here is the first full-scale compendium of ideas and ideologies in music over the past forty years, a period during which virtually every aspect of music was transformed.
Brief description: Joseph Kerman is Professor of Music, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University for 1997-98.
Review Quotes: A masterly exposition of what Kerman views as the pivotal intellectual issues surrounding postwar musical studies--an exposition that even his critics would readily concede him to be uniquely qualified to undertake. Musicians of all sorts ought to view this as a challenge...to give music the balanced critical attention it deserves.--Robert Winter "New York Review of Books"