Princeton
Carolyn Abbate was an employee for whom before Mar 1992?
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 . Early life and education . Abbate was born to Dolores R . ( Kollmeyer ) and Russell V . Abbate ; she has two sisters . Abbate completed her BA at Yale University in 1977 . While 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 . Career . 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 , Kings College , Cambridge , and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton . Musicological work . Abbates dissertation , entitled The Parisian Tannhäuser , addressed historical and aesthetic issues related to the Parisian premiere of Richard Wagners opera in 1861 . A significant excerpt from this work was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1983 . In 1990 , she published a translation of Jean-Jacques Nattiezs Musicologie générale et sémiologie under the title Music and Discourse : Toward a Semiology of Music . Her first monograph , Unsung Voices : Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century , was published by Princeton University Press in 1991 and has since proved one of the most provocative and influential recent musicological studies . In this book , Abbate explores the metaphor of musical narrative in six extended case studies . She describes her work as follows : The six chapters that follow explore examples ranging from Paul Dukass Sorcerers Apprentice to Mozarts Marriage of Figaro and Wagners Ring , seeking out examples of narrative moments in music and developing critical apparatus based on an awareness of different registers of musical listening . For example , she pursues the question of operatic deafness : asking whether and when we can claim that operatic characters hear the same music that we do , and what the consequences of such an awareness might be . Her second monograph , In Search of Opera , reflects a close engagement with the aesthetic philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch , resulting in an exploration of the intersections of the ineffable and the performative aspects of opera . As in Unsung Voices , Abbate proceeds through a series of case studies , this time exploring works ranging from Mozarts Magic Flute to Wagners Parsifal and Debussys Pelleas et Melisande . Abbates engagement with Jankélévitch also yielded a translation of his La musique et lineffable in 2003 , as well as a provocative article in Critical Inquiry entitled Music--Drastic or Gnostic? . The latter offers a reappraisal of the value of hermeneutic musicological scholarship , favoring meditations on music as performance ( drastic ) to those on music as encoded meaning ( gnostic ) . Personal life . Abbate was married to Lee Clark Mitchell . She has 2 sons . Select publications . - Tristan in the Composition of Pelleas , 19th Century Music , v ( 1981–2 ) , 117–40 - Der junge Wagner malgre lui : die frühen Tannhäuser-Entwurfe und Wagners übliche Nummern … Wagnerliteratur – Wagnerforschung : Munich 1983 , 59–68 - The Parisian Vénus and the Paris Tannhäuser , Journal of the American Musicological Society , xxxvi ( 1983 ) , 73–123 - With Roger Parker : Analyzing Opera : Verdi and Wagner . Ithaca , NY , 1984 [ incl . Introduction : On Analyzing Opera , pp . 1–26 [ with Parker ] ; Opera as Symphony : a Wagnerian Myth , pp . 92–124 . - The Parisian Tannhäuser ( diss. , Princeton U. , 1984 ) - Eriks Dream and Tannhäusers Journey , in Reading Opera . Ithaca , NY , 1986 , pp . 129–67 - What the Sorcerer Said , in 19th Century Music , xii ( 1988–9 ) ,pp . 221–30 - Elektras Voice : Music and Language in Strausss Opera , in Richard Strauss : Elektra , ed . D . Puffett ( Cambridge , 1989 ) , pp . 107–27 - Wagner , On Modulation , and Tristan in Cambridge Opera Journal , i ( 1989 ) , pp . 33–58 - Dismembering Mozart in Cambridge Opera Journal , ii ( 1990 ) , pp . 187–95 - Music and Discourse : Toward a Semiology of Music ( Princeton , NJ , 1990 ) [ trans . of J.-J . Nattiez : Musicologie générale et sémiologie ( Paris , 1987 ) ] - Unsung Voices : Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century ( Princeton , NJ , 1991 , 2/1996 ) - Opera , or The Envoicing of Women , Musicology and Difference : Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship , ed . R.A . Solie ( Berkeley , 1993 ) , 225–58 - Mythische Stimmen , sterbliche Körper , Richard Wagner : “Der Ring des Nibelungen” : Ansichten des Mythos , ed . U . Bermbach und D . Borchmeyer ( Stuttgart , 1995 ) , 75–86 - In Search of Opera ( Princeton , 2001 ) - Music and the Ineffable ( Princeton , 2003 ) [ trans of . V . Jankélévitch : La musique et lineffable ( Paris , 1961 ) ] - Music--Drastic or Gnostic ? Critical Inquiry , xxx ( 2004 ) , 505-536 - Das Ephemere Übersehen , in Latenz : blinde Passagiere in den Geisteswissenschaften ( Göttingen , 2011 ) , 24-50 . - With Roger Parker : A History of Opera . New York : W . W . Norton , 2012