Listen

A classic music-appreciation text made fresh for today's students.

Listen makes music accessible to all with its concise historical and cultural context, compelling composer biographies, and clear Listening Charts. The redesigned Eighth Edition incorporates new perspectives on music since 1900, new repertory, and illuminating discussions to help students synthesize the important concepts of classical music and develop the listening skills to explore it further.

Joseph Kerman was a leading musicologist, music critic, and music educator from the 1950s to the 2000s. He reshaped our understanding and appreciation of Western classical music with his first book, Opera as Drama (1956), to his last, Opera and the Morbidity of Music (2008), including his studies on Bach, Beethoven, William Byrd, concertos, and more. He was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he served two terms as chair of the Music Department. He wrote Listen together with his wife, Vivian Kerman.

Gary Tomlinson taught at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Yale University in 2011, where he is now the John Hay Whitney Professor and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center. A former MacArthur Fellow, he has authored books on Claudio Monteverdi, Renaissance musical culture, the opera, and the singing rituals of the Aztecs and Incas. His latest book, A Million Years in Music, describes the evolutionary emergence of music.

Tomlinson and Kerman worked together on five editions of Listen before Joseph Kerman died in 2014 as this edition went to press, just shy of his ninetieth birthday.

Teaching was at the heart and soul of Kerman's musical career, and it remains so in Tomlinson's. Between them, their wide-ranging course offerings have encompassed harmony and ear-training, opera, world music, popular music, and interdisciplinary studies, including seminars in music history, criticism, anthropology, and―many times over―Introduction to Music for non-majors.