Lawrence Kramer

Lawrence Kramer grew up in Philadelphia and New York and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. His teaching career has been spent primarily at Fordham University, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Music. He works at the crossroads of words and music, both as an author and as a composer. Recent books include Experience: A History (2026), Experiencing Sound (2024), and Music and the Forms of Life (2022). His chamber opera The Dreaming of the Bones premiered in New York City in September 2026. Kramer’s writings seek to understand music, especially classical music, in its fully humanistic dimension: not only as sonic architecture, but also as a means of expressing how we experience our involvement with history, culture, society, and the chances and mischances of life. Since the publication of The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening in 2019, Kramer has steadily widened his scope, moving from the experience of sound and the concept of life to the phenomenon of experience itself in Experience: A History. Kramer lives in Rhinebeck, New York, with his wife, Nancy Leonard.