About

Carolyn Abbate writes about and teaches classes centered on opera as it has evolved over the past four centuries, with special emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work ranges widely, drawing from disciplines including linguistics and semiotics, philosophy, film sound and film music, and the history of science. Outside academia, she has worked as a dramaturge and director, and as a translator. Forthcoming projects include essays on microphonics in past historical eras, on musical efficacy, and on Richard Wagner’s entanglements with nineteenth-century organic chemistry.

Research topics

• Art
• Philosophy
• Humanities
• Aesthetics
• Visual arts
• Literature
• Art history
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Manifestations

  Portable Gray · 2025-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Jankélévitch’s Singularity

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2024-05-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Opera as Symphony, a Wagnerian Myth

  2023-11-06 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women

  University of California Press eBooks · 2023 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction:

  2023-11-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Music – Drastic or Gnostic?

  Bärenreiter-Verlag eBooks · 2022 · 32 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Humanities
  • Philosophy

  Der mit polemischem Impetus verfasste Aufsatz entstand als Postskriptum zu Carolyn Abbates Übersetzung von Vladimir Jankélévitchs Schrift La Musique et l’Ineffable (Paris 1961; engl. Übs.: Jankélévitch 2003). Es handelt sich um einen besonders häufig und kontrovers diskutierten Beitrag zum performative turn in der Musikforschung, der zugleich eine im selben Zeitraum vielfach ausformulierte Ästhetik der Präsenz- und Ereigniskultur (vgl. u. a. Gumbrecht 1996; Mersch 2002) auf den Musikdiskurs überträgt und dabei wesentliche anti- bzw. posthermeneutische Motive in die Debatte einbringt (vgl. Urbanek 2018, S. 59–66).

  PublisherDOI

• Certain Loves for Opera

  Representations · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The attraction of objects has motivated a swerve within the humanities—a move away from texts and exegesis, linguistics, and semiotics; a move toward the body, the senses, materiality, and physiology. A musical instrument, a scientific artifact, a collection of sounds, an antique postcard: yes, all these objects are expressive and sometimes aesthetically pleasing, and in being so they can be understood to embody an epistemology, with theories and realms of knowledge written into their every contour. Or they can be understood as traces of global exchange and displacement. But what if the object is not very good, not loveable at all? Crumbling, toxic paper or banal images, with no exit from a strange historical or cultural space, perhaps an uncomfortable space to which you feel averse (or at least, feel you should disdain, as beneath contempt)? Or what if the object is misdirecting? What if it is ephemeral, like sound, something that cannot be held? These questions are woven in this essay into a reflection on the forms taken by certain loves for opera, a reflection centered on some nineteenth-century material objects that relate to act 4 of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots (1836).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Ineffable (and Beyond)

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Aesthetics
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology

  Abstract Ineffability marks an intellectually productive, technologically mediated, and socially meaningful encounter with the experiential impact of musical sound. Repositioning ineffability in this way contests, in strong terms, previous scholarship associating ineffability with conservative conceptions of absolute music or prohibitions on speaking. In support of our argument, we foreground key elements of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s writings on improvisation and musical technique and stage a critique of Theodor Adorno’s treatment of the ineffable as needlessly attached to metaphors of language. We conclude by contending that this broadened conception of music’s ineffability may open a path towards a more inclusive musical aesthetics, one that is unmoored from normative conceptions of musical language, that is modest about music’s ability to enact scholarly ideals for political resistance, and that embraces the many ways music elicits vernacular forms of wisdom and speculation.

  PublisherDOI

• Overlooking the Ephemeral

  New Literary History · 2017-01-01 · 26 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay considers philosophical and aesthetic issues at stake in dealing with ephemeral arts such as performed music and exhibited film. Taking inspiration from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s writings on presence culture and meaning culture, it explores possible stances towards beautiful objects – stances that precisely do not treat them as texts to be explained – including extreme attitudes such as silence and reticence. Refusing to regret the ephemeral is proposed as a form of cultural optimism, one that was more common in earlier historical eras. Finally, in offering examples from German cinematic history, the essay also poses a question about attentiveness, about how professional deformations in academic culture can alter perception and engender forms of partial deafness and partial blindness.

  PublisherDOI

• A Note from the Guest Editors

  The Opera Quarterly · 2017-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Que le lecteur ne se scandalise pas de cette gravité dans le frivole. Operetta! Flowing champagne, ceaseless waltzing, risqué couplets, Graustarkian uniforms and glittering ballgowns, romancing and dancing! Gaiety and lightheartedness, sentiment and Schmalz. What does it mean to take operetta seriously? To scrutinize the diminutive, lowering suffix (the “etta” or “ette,” the “bouffe,” the perennial grey aria of the “comique”) that continues so often to separate it from a mainstream of twenty-first-century opera studies? To acknowledge and engage with not only operetta’s proximity to opera but also its differences from it; or even to approach operetta on its own terms—and this is a radical gesture—with opera consigned self-consciously to the margins? To what extent is it possible to weigh operetta’s intellectual impact and to excavate its significant footprint in historical grand narratives while making sense of its supposedly characteristic levity and kitsch? The latter term has been a frequent point of contention in reception theory, as something never transcending the “horizon of expectations” assumed to be typical of an audience lacking hauteur or sophistication.1 That is to say: we must contend with the fact that, for as long as it has existed, operetta has been understood by the vast majority of its producers, consumers, and critics as a type of musical theater that is merely “basically entertaining.”2

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Roger Parker

  388 shared

• Arthur Groos

  Cornell University

  381 shared

• Ellen Rosand

  380 shared

• D. G. Charlton

  380 shared

• Reinhard Strohm

  379 shared

• Philip Gossett

  377 shared

• Hugh Macdonald

  377 shared

• Julian Budden

  377 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Musicology

  Harvard University

  1984

• M.A., Musicology

  Harvard University

  1980

• B.A., Music

  Harvard University

  1976