Carolyn Abbate

Carolyn Abbate (born November 20, 1956) is an American musicologist, described by the Harvard Gazette as "one of the world’s most accomplished and admired music historians". She is currently Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University. A practitioner of the field’s traditional methodologies, she challenged their limits, mobilizing literary theory and philosophy to provoke new ways of thinking about music and understanding its experience. From her earliest essays she has questioned familiar approaches to well-known works, reaching beyond their printed scores and composer intentions, to explore the particular, physical impact of the medium upon performer and audience alike. Her research focuses primarily on the operatic repertory of the 19th century, offering creative and innovative approaches to understanding these works critically and historically. Some of her more recent work has addressed topics such as film studies and performance studies more generally.

Born in New York City, Carolyn Abbate completed her BA at Yale University in 1977. Whilst still an undergraduate at Yale, she reconstructed the score of Claude Debussy’s La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher) – a work long regarded as unsalvageably incomplete. She continued her studies in Munich and Princeton, completing her PhD at Princeton University under J. Merrill Knapp in 1984.

She took a position in the Music Department at Princeton that year, and was named full professor in 1991, becoming at that time the youngest humanities faculty member appointed to that rank. She was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association in 1993, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994. In 2005, she accepted an appointment at Harvard University and from 2008 to 2012 taught in the Music Department at the University of Pennsylvania as the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Music. In 2013, she returned to Harvard, where she was named Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor in 2014. She has also held appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Freie Universität in Berlin, and has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, King's College, Cambridge, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

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