About

Kerry O’Brien is a musicologist, specializing in experimental music, minimalism, and countercultural spirituality. She has taught at Yale University and Indiana University (where she earned her PhD in musicology). She currently teaches at Cornish College of the Arts and is affiliate faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her writings have appeared in the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Tempo, NewMusicBox, the Chicago Reader, VAN Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker online, and the edited collection Rethinking Reich. 

Her book On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement, a collaboration with William Robin, is now available via UC Press. It has been featured on All Things Considered, reviewed in magazines including The Wire and Gramophone, on the “bookshelf” of The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, and was named one of NPR’s Books We Love of 2023.