Kramer is auteur van een vijftigtal muziektheoretische boeken. Hij was lange jaren muziekcriticus voor het San Francisco Symphony Orchestra alsook voor het Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
Als componist schreef hij werken voor verschillende genres. Kramer was van 1984 tot 1992 huiscomponist van het Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Hij achterliet twee stichtingen (Foundations).[1]
Tonality in the Music of Bartók's Middle Period, Honors thesis Harvard University, 1965. 90 p.
Variations for Band, Thesis Ph.D. - University of California, Berkeley, 1969.
Discontinuity and Proportion in the Music of Stravinsky, in: "Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist", Jann Pasler, University of California Press, 1986. ISBN 978-0-520-05403-5 pp. 174-194
Listening to Music - The Essential Guide to the Classical Repertoire, London: Lime Tree, 1988. 798 p., ISBN 978-0-413-45331-0
Listen to the Music - A self-guided Tour through the Orchestral Repertoire : based on Program Notes written for the "Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra", 1980-89, New York: Schirmer Book; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1988. 816 p., ISBN 978-0-028-71842-2ISBN 978-0-028-71841-5; ook in Spaanse vertaling: Invitación a la música, Buenos Aires: Vergara, 1993.
Uitgever van: Time in Contemporary Musical Thought, Chur; New York: Harwood Academic Publishers; London, England: Distributed by STBS, 1993. 254 p., ISBN 978-3-718-65364-5
Beyond Unity: Toward an Understanding of Postmodernism in Music and Music Theory, in: Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1995. pp. 11-33
The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism Current Musicology 66 (Spring 1999). Republished in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner, New York: Routledge, 2002; Spaanse vertaling: La naturaleza y los orígenes del posmodernismo musical, in: Hueso húmero, No. 60, Dic. 2012. pp. 72-89
Analytic interlude: Anton Webern's opus 29, in: Time of music, pp. 183-200
Concepts postmodernes du temps musical, in: Le temps et la forme, pp. 297-322
Sylvia Levine Ginsparg: Never Again: Echoes of the Holocaust As Understood Through Film, Xlibris Corporation, 2010. ISBN 978-1-456-80964-5
Wolfgang Suppan, Armin Suppan: Das Neue Lexikon des Blasmusikwesens, 4. Auflage, Freiburg-Tiengen, Blasmusikverlag Schulz GmbH, 1994, ISBN 3-923058-07-1
Paul E. Bierley, William H. Rehrig: The Heritage Encyclopedia of Band Music - Composers and Their Music, Westerville, Ohio: Integrity Press, 1991, ISBN 0-918048-08-7
E. Ruth Anderson: Contemporary American Composers - A Biographical Dictionary, Second edition, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982, 578 p., ISBN 978-0-816-18223-7