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Jeremy Eichler
Jeremy Eichler
Born	Jeremy Adam Eichler; August 13, 1974 (age 50); Boston, Massachusetts
Alma mater	Brown University; Columbia University;
Occupations	Music critic; cultural historian;
Notable credits	The Boston Globe; The New York Times;
Website	jeremy-eichler.com

Jeremy Adam Eichler (born August 13, 1974) is an American music critic and cultural historian.^[1] From 2006 to 2024, he was the chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, with the "Third Ear" column. He is set to take on a newly created professorship in music history and public humanities at Tufts University.

Having written for a variety of newspaper publications, Eichler has received numerous awards and fellowships. His book Time's Echo (2023) explores music and the cultural memory of the Second World War. It was named to the shortlist of the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize, considered the UK's premier annual prize for non-fiction books.

Life and career

Jeremy Adam Eichler was born on August 13, 1974.^[1]^[2] Growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, he played violin and viola in his youth, playing the latter in youth orchestras.^[3] He received an undergraduate degree from Brown University,^[3] where he co-founded the Nahanni String Quartet.^[1]

"You try your best not only to say what happened onstage, but to convey those ineffable aspects of listening to this particular music at that time and place. I’ve always felt the best writing on music can set the air vibrating once more, as if the prose has somehow been charged by the energy of the original listening experience."

Jeremy Eichler, March 2017
In The Harvard Gazette^[3]

In 2003 Eichler began writing music criticism for The New York Times, including reviews and features.^[3] He then succeeded Richard Dyer as chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe in 2006, where Eichler wrote daily for nearly two decades.^[1]^[4] According to the musicologist Andrea F. Bohlman in Grove Music Online, he "draws attention to local performers and the city’s conservatory students alongside more established musicians".^[1] Eichler find music criticism a continuously challenging and demanding practice, but credits this as its appeal.^[3] His concert reviews often both narrate and review the event in question and in doing so they promote the merit of live performances.^[1] At the Globe Eichler also writes his own column, "Third Ear", which connects "music with broader worlds of history, politics, and culture."^[5]

He has contributed to a multitude of other publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Slate, the Washington Post and Vanity Fair.^[1]^[6] ASCAP awarded him the Deems Taylor Award for Music Criticism in 2013.^[7] He has received a fellowship from the Center for Jewish History, a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service and has taught at Brandeis University.^[8] He was also a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies of Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Humanities named him a "public scholar" in 2018.^[6] He is also a cultural historian.^[6]^[8]

Eichler subsequently relocated to New York, where he earned a doctorate in history from Columbia University; his doctoral dissertation was on the composer Arnold Schoenberg.^[3]^[8] Published in 2015, the topic in discussion was Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, a large-scale cantata that was the earliest Holocaust musical memorial from a major composer.^[3]^[9] His dissertation won the Columbia University's Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize for Jewish Studies.^[3] Eichler's 2023 book Time's Echo^[6] examines the "relationship of cultural memory and music composed in the wake of the Second World War".^[8] Among the works discussed are Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13, Babi Yar and Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss.^[8] It was published by Alfred A. Knopf and Faber and Faber in North America and the United Kingdom respectively.^[10] Time's Echo was named to the shortlist of the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize, considered the UK's premier annual prize for non-fiction books.^[11] Eichler is fellow at MacDowell, an artists' residency and workshop where he has worked on the publication.^[6]

In June 2024 Eichler announced that he would be leaving The Globe and taking up a newly-created professorship in music history and public humanities at Tufts University.^[4]

Selected writings

Eichler, Jeremy (2015). The Emancipation of Memory: Arnold Schoenberg and the Creation of 'A Survivor from Warsaw' (Ph.D.). New York: Columbia University. OCLC 982310805.
—— (2023). Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-525-52171-6.