Professor Emeritus of Music

Overview

David Josephson received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in music from Columbia, where he also directed the Concert Band for three years and helped edit the journal Current Musicology. He taught at Brown from 1972 until his retirement in 2016. He founded and directed the Brown Early Music Group in 1972-1979, chaired the Music Department in 1979-1985, was instrumental in the creation of the Orwig Music Library, initiated an artists-in-residence program around a campus-based string quartet, supported creation of a jazz program, and brought Brown its first professional music theorist. He is author of Torn Between Cultures: A Life of Kathi Meyer-Baer (2012), Conversations with Ella Grainger (1993), John Taverner: Tudor Composer (1979), and numerous articles and review-essays on the musical emigration from Nazi and Fascist Europe, the composer/pianist Percy Grainger, and Taverner. He is also recipient of the Festschrift, On the Third Hand (2016). He taught courses on Baroque and Classic music, Mozart, Beethoven, conductors and conducting, the culture of death in nineteenth-century Europe, liturgical and religious music, the sociology of twentieth-century music, and the European musical emigration of the 1930s. He plans to write a book on the émigré music scholars. 

Brown Affiliations