Karol Berger - Biography#

A native of Poland, Karol Berger studied musicology at the University of Warsaw, 1965-68. In 1968, driven away by the wave of the government-sponsored anti-Semitism, he emigrated to the USA, where he pursued graduate musicological studies at Yale University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1975. From 1975 to 1982, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Boston University. Since 1982, he teaches in the Department of Music at Stanford University, where he holds the chair of the Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts. In addition, he has held visiting appointments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Hanes-Willis Lecturer, 1995), Universität-Gesamthochschule Paderborn (Visiting Professor, 1996), University of Oxford (Astor Visiting Lecturer, 1999), and Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Robert Lehman Visiting Professor, 2005-2006). He has been awarded research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980-81), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (1988-89), American Council of Learned Societies (1992-93 and 2003-2004), Stanford Humanities Center (2003-2004), the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center (2005), the European Institutes for Advanced Study with residency at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna (2011-12), and Humboldt Research Award (2014).

His books include Musica Ficta (Cambridge University Press 1987; recipient of the 1988 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society), A Theory of Art (Oxford University Press 2000), Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow (University of California Press 2007; recipient of the 2008 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award of the Mozart Society of America), and Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche (University of California Press 2017; recipient of the 2018 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society). In 2011 he received the Glarean Prize of the Swiss Musicological Society and in 2014 the Humboldt Research Award of the Humboldt Foundation. Since 2009, he is a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences; since 2013, an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society; since 2014, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.