Jonathan Donald Kramer was a U.S.

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 composer and music theorist.

Biography

Kramer received his B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 (1965) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Music from the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 (1967 and 1969). His composition teachers included Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

, Roger Sessions

Roger Sessions

Roger Huntington Sessions was an American composer, critic, and teacher of music.-Life:Sessions was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family that could trace its roots back to the American revolution. His mother, Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendent of Samuel Huntington, a signer of...

, Leon Kirchner

Leon Kirchner

Leon Kirchner was an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 3.Kirchner was born in Brooklyn, New York...

, Seymour Shifrin, Andrew Imbrie

Andrew Imbrie

Andrew Welsh Imbrie was an American composer of contemporary classical music.-Career:Imbrie was born in New York on April 6, 1921, and began his musical training as a pianist when he was 4. In 1937, he went to Paris to study briefly with Nadia Boulanger...

, Richard Felciano, Jean-Claude Éloy

Jean-Claude Éloy

Jean-Claude Éloy is a French composer of instrumental, vocal and electroacoustic music.In his work Éloy realized one of the most significant syntheses of 20th-century music: between electronic and acoustic music, between Western and non-Western traditions...

, Billy Jim Layton, Edwin Dugger, and Arnold Franchetti. He studied theory with David Lewin

David Lewin

David Lewin was an American music theorist, music critic and composer. Called "the most original and far-ranging theorist of his generation" , he did his most influential theoretical work on the development of transformational theory, which involves the application of mathematical group theory to...

, criticism with Joseph Kerman

Joseph Kerman

Joseph Wilfred Kerman is an American critic and musicologist. One of the leading musicologists of his generation, his 1985 book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology was described by Philip Brett in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "a defining moment in the field." He is...

, and computer music with John Chowning

John Chowning

John M. Chowning is an American composer, musician, inventor, and professor best known for his work at Stanford University and his invention of FM synthesis while there.-Contribution:...

.

Kramer was Professor of Composition and Theory at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 from 1988 until his death in 2004. He also taught at the Oberlin Conservatory, Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music

University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music

The University of Cincinnati – College-Conservatory of Music is the performing arts college of the University of Cincinnati and is one of the nation's leading music conservatories. In its most recent rankings, U.S. News & World Report ranked Cincinnati sixth nationally among university programs...

. He held visiting appointments at Wesleyan University

Wesleyan University

Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...

, King's College of the University of London, the Canberra School of Music, the University of Western Australia, the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio (Italy), the Center for New Music and Technology (Berkeley), May in Miami, the ISCM Summer Workshop for Composers (Poland), and the European Mozart Academy (Poland). He served four years as Program Annotator of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, was Annotator of the Cincinnati Symphony since 1980, and a collection of his program notes, Listen to the Music, was published by Schirmer Books. He was the Cincinnati Symphony's Composer-in-Residence and New-Music Advisor from 1984 to 1992 and served as artist in residence of The Moebius Ensemble since 1997. He produced and hosted several local and national radio programs and represented American Public Radio three times at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris.

His notable students include Robert Carl

Robert Carl

Robert Carl is an American composer who currently resides in Hartford, Connecticut, where he is chair of the composition department at the Hartt School of Music, University of Hartford.-Music:...

, R. Luke DuBois

R. Luke DuBois

Roger Luke DuBois is an American composer, performer, conceptual new media artist, programmer, record producer and pedagogue based in New York City.-Biography:...

, Jason Eckardt

Jason Eckardt

Jason Eckardt is an American composer. He began his musical life playing guitar in heavy metal and jazz bands and abruptly moved to composing after discovering the music of Anton Webern.-Compositions:...

 and Dalit Warshaw

Dalit Warshaw

Dalit Warshaw is a composer, pianist, and professor at Boston Conservatory. Warshaw was born in New York on August 6, 1974. Her works have been performed by dozens of orchestral ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic Orchestras , the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland...

.

Active as a music theorist, Kramer published primarily on theories of musical time and postmodernism. At the time of his death he had just completed a book on postmodern music

Postmodern music

Postmodern music is either simply music of the postmodern era, or music that follows aesthetical and philosophical trends of postmodernism. As the name suggests, the postmodernist movement formed partly in reaction to modernism...

 and a cello composition for the American Holocaust Museum.

Two funds were named in honor of Kramer upon his death: The Jonathan D. Kramer Memorial Fund for Young Composers, and The Jonathan D. Kramer Legacy Fund http://music.columbia.edu/jdkfund/.

Selected Publications (prose)

• The Time of Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988)
• Listen to the Music (New York: Schirmer Book, 1988); Spanish trans. Invitacion a la musica (Buenos Aires: Vargara, 1993)
• Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening (forthcoming)
• ed. Time in Contemporary Musical Thought, special issue of Contemporary Music Review (1989–93)
• "The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism," Current Musicology 66 (Spring 1999). Republished in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge, 2002)
• "Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time," Indiana Theory Review 17 (1997)
• "Durations from Nested Ratios and Summation Series: Toward an Approach to Rhythm Appropriate to Computer Composition," in Proceedings of the ACMA 1995 Conference (Melbourne: ACMA, 1995)
• "Beyond Unity: Toward an Understanding of Postmodernism in Music and Music Theory," in Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies (Rochester: U. of Rochester Press, 1995)
• "Unity and Disunity in Carl Nielsen's Sixth Symphony," in A Nielsen Companion (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1994)
• "Discontinuity and Proportion in the Music of Stravinsky," in Confronting Stravinsky (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1986)