John Sargent Rockwell (born September 16, 1940) is an American music critic, dance critic and

arts administrator The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both h ...

. According to '' Grove Music Online'', "Rockwell brings two signal attributes to his critical work: a genuine admiration for all kinds of music and the arts, and the ability to fit a spirit of inquiry and enthusiasm for newer approaches to music into a reasoned overview of cultural history".

Early life and education

John Sargent Rockwell was born on September 16, 1940 to

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

attorney Alvin J. Rockwell (1908–1999) and Anna S. Hayward (1906–1983).Google Books, ''The International Who's Who''
(2004), 67th Edition, Europa Publications, 2003, , Library of Congress Catalog Card #35-10257, p. 1426. Retrieved April 30, 2018. He studied at Phillips Academy,

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, the

University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operatio ...

, and the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, earning a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

in German cultural history.

Career

Rockwell began his journalistic career at the ''

Oakland Tribune The ''Oakland Tribune'' is a weekly newspaper published in Oakland, California, by the Bay Area News Group (BANG), a subsidiary of MediaNews Group. Founded in 1874, the ''Tribune'' rose to become an influential daily newspaper. With the declin ...

'' and the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...

''. In 1972 he began writing at ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', first as a classical music critic and reporter, then also as the paper's chief

pop music Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form during the mid-1950s in the United States and the United Kingdom. The terms ''popular music'' and ''pop music'' are often used interchangeably, although the former descri ...

critic, and, from 1992 to 1994, as the European cultural correspondent. Between 1994 and 1998, he served as the first director of the

Lincoln Center Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (also simply known as Lincoln Center) is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has thirty indoor and outdoor facilities and is host to 5 milli ...

Festival. Rockwell returned to ''The New York Times'' to become the editor of the paper's Sunday Arts and Leisure section. In 2004, he was named the chief dance critic. He left the ''Times'' at the end of 2006 to pursue independent projects. Rockwell got his start in radio journalism at WHRB at Harvard and at KPFA in Berkeley. On

WNYC WNYC is the trademark and a set of call letters shared by WNYC (AM) and WNYC-FM, a pair of nonprofit, noncommercial, public radio stations located in New York City. WNYC is owned by New York Public Radio (NYPR), a nonprofit organization that ...

Radio, Rockwell examined cultural topics and events in the news for his weekly Monday-night segment, "Rockwell Matters", from October 2007 until May 2008. In January 2008, Rockwell was a Distinguished Visitor at the

American Academy in Berlin The American Academy in Berlin is a private, independent, nonpartisan research and cultural institution in Berlin dedicated to sustaining and enhancing the long-term intellectual, cultural, and political ties between the United States and Germany ...

. He is a ''Chevalier'' of the French Order of Arts & Letters.

Personal life

Rockwell currently lives in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

with his wife, Linda Mevorach. Their daughter, Sasha, resides in

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

Books

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rockwell, John 1940 births Living people 20th-century American journalists American dance critics American male journalists American music critics American music journalists Chevaliers of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Harvard University alumni Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni People from Washington, D.C. The New York Times people University of California, Berkeley alumni Writers from New York (state)