Sound Object Lessons

Carolyn Abbate is Professor of Music at Harvard University. She received a BA from Yale and a PhD from Princeton. She has held faculty positions at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, and as a visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, and held research fellowships and lectureships at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, Kings College Cambridge, the University of Hong Kong, and the Institute for Advanced Study. 

Outside academia, she has worked as a dramaturge and director. Many of her writings focus on opera, from its beginnings around 1600 through the twenty-first century. She has also published essays on musical automata, film music, ephemeral art, and operetta’s ethical frivolity. Her latest book, coauthored with Roger Parker, is A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years (2012). 

Her current project on sound in the Machine Age deals with issues that range from knowledge of the human sensorium and listening in past eras, and artisanal practices of supplying music in film exhibition, to how alternative, vernacular philosophies of musical meaning grew from cinematic sound design and its technologies in the 1920s and 30s. In 2014, she was named a University Professor, Harvard’s highest honor for a faculty member.

Poster