J. Peter Burkholder

J. Peter Burkholder writes about how music is shaped by its historical circumstances, how it conveys meaning, and how it responds to other music. His writings explore what musicians are thinking about as they create music, what problems they face and try to solve, and how knowing that background can help us to understand their music. In his books and dozens of articles, he has focused on twentieth-century composers, especially American composer Charles Ives, and on issues of musical borrowing and musical meaning. His writings have won awards from the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, and have been translated and published in Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, Korean, Chinese, and Arabic.

Burkholder is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he taught for over three decades before retiring in 2019. He has served as President of the American Musicological Society and of the Charles Ives Society, and in 2010 he became the youngest person ever named an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society.

His books include:

Listening to Charles Ives: Variations on His America (Amadeus Press/Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)

A History of Western Music, 10th ed. (with Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca; W. W. Norton, 2019)

Norton Anthology of Western Music, 8th ed., 3 vols. (editor, with Claude V. Palisca; W. W. Norton, 2019)

Charles Ives and His World (editor; Princeton University Press, 1996)

Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition (coeditor, with Geoffrey Block; Yale University Press, 1996)

All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (Yale University Press, 1995)

Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music (Yale University Press, 1985)