[6] (Kerman's assessment echoed George Bernard Shaw's earlier description of Sardou's play La Tosca on which the opera was based as an "empty-headed turnip ghost of a cheap shocker".
With his wife, Vivian Kerman, he wrote the widely used textbook, Listen,[8] first published in 1972 and now in its sixth edition co-authored by Gary Tomlinson.
Described in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "a defining moment in the field",[1] the book has been credited as helping to shape a "new musicology" that is willing to engage with feminist theory, hermeneutics, queer studies, and post-structuralism.
[10][11][8] From 1997 to 1998 Kerman held the Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Chair at Harvard University, where he gave a series of public lectures on the importance of approaching musical texts and performances via a "close reading" similar to that used in literary studies, a theme that was central to many of his writings.
Critical essays written by Kerman from the late 1950s to the early 1990s are collected in his 1994 book, Write All These Down, which takes its title from a phrase in one of William Byrd's songs.
He could communicate so sparsely because one of his many gifts was to inspire you, as a writer, by the persuasiveness, energy, and beauty of his prose; you came to live for the—rarely bestowed—small check marks that signalled approval; the wavy line could keep you awake at night.
[17] They continue by reflecting on their own professional relationships with Kerman over the years: Joe published both of our first essays on opera in 19th-Century Music, the journal he helped to establish; he gave one of us a first academic job and lured the other to Berkeley as a visiting lecturer; he edited our first collaborative book; we dedicated our second to him.