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

Gary Tomlinson did the same at the University of Pennsylvania before he moved 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, opera, and the singing rituals of the Aztecs and Incas. His latest book, A Million Years of Music, describes the evolutionary emergence of music.

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

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