Rate My Professor Carolyn Abbate

Abbate writes about and teaches classes centered on opera over the past four centuries, emphasizing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work incorporates linguistics and semiotics, philosophy, film sound and film music, and the history of science. Current research examines mischievous sound technologies and acoustic artifacts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their place in histories of hearing and mishearing, along with microphonics in past historical eras, musical efficacy, and Richard Wagner’s entanglements with nineteenth-century organic chemistry. Her Harvard courses include film music and film sound technology, nineteenth-century music and Romanticism, and opera history. Key publications are Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (1991), In Search of Opera (2001), and A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years (2012, co-authored with Roger Parker), named Best Classical Music Book of the Year by The Sunday Times. Awards and honors include the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association (1993), Guggenheim Fellowship (1995), National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for Independent Study and Research (1986 and 1994), and the Everett I. Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award (2025). Recognized as one of the world’s most accomplished music historians, her scholarship profoundly influences the field.