Jeremy Eichler is the Inaugural Humanist-in-Residence at The Royal Conservatory

Published on March 27, 2024

This new role combines teaching, mentoring and public engagement

Distinguished writer, scholar, and critic, Dr. Jeremy Eichler is The Royal Conservatory’s 2023-24 Humanist-in-Residence. Dr. Eichler is the author of Time’s Echo, a critically-acclaimed book on music, war, and memory that was named “History Book of the Year” by The Sunday Times and hailed as “the outstanding music book of this and several years” by the Times Literary Supplement. Chosen as a “notable book of 2023” by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR, Time’s Echo recently won three National Jewish Book Awards including “Book of the Year”. It was a finalist for the UK’s premiere non-fiction award, the Baillie Gifford Prize, and the jury commented that Time’s Echo “warrants being classed as a masterpiece of nonfiction writing”.

During the 2023-24 academic year, students at The Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School have been immersed in a new course based on Time’s Echo, and taught by both Dr. Eichler and Dr. Sean Wang, Director of Academics, The Glenn Gould School.

Jeremy has written a book that brings history to life. It shows the extraordinary role music has played in serving cultural memory, which is nothing less than transformative. He has shown our young musicians, and wider communities, the power of music as living memory. He has lit a fire of interest in our school and reminded all of us of the importance and rich rewards for active listening that can only come from inspired scholarship and knowledge of historical context. In addition to his power of prose and brilliant scholarship, he is a gifted teacher that has immediately engaged our students, inspiring a sense of purpose and ongoing curiosity in the school. In his role as Humanist-in-Residence, he is having a profound and immediate impact on The Royal Conservatory.

Barry Shiffman, Associate Dean, The Glenn Gould School

In fall 2023, Dr. Eichler partnered with BroadBand Collaborative to introduce Time’s Echo Live, a new multimedia series exploring musical memory through narrative and live performance. Its premiere at the Goethe Institute was chosen as Musical America’s top Boston event of 2023, and will be reprised in March at Brown University. Dr. Eichler will also deliver endowed lectures or serve as a featured speaker at Yale, Tufts, Wellesley, Columbia, and the University of Virginia. In May, he travels to Hamburg for a special event with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra to celebrate the launch of the book’s German edition, one of eight language translations recently published or forthcoming.

Formerly an NEH Public Scholar, Eichler is the recipient of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music criticism and a fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He earned his PhD in modern European history at Columbia and has taught at Brandeis. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker and many other national publications, and since 2006, he has served as chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe.

This position is supported, in part, by a generous gift from Nance Gelber and Dan Bjarnason.