William Weber
William Weber, Ph.D.
Professor of History, Emeritus
California State University, Long Beach
1250 Bellflower Blvd.
Long Beach, CA 90840
william.weber@csulb.edu
Education
BA Harvard College (History)
PhD University of Chicago (History)
School Programs
I supervised student teachers, directed in-service training programs in the California International Studies Program, and served on the State Advisory Board of the California Council of the Social Sciences, the year-round school outreach program based at UC Davis. I am presently on the Editorial Board of The History Teacher, after being Editor 1995-2001 (see special issues on the National History Standards in 1995 & 1997). Between 2001 and 2004 I was the Vice-President of the American Historical Association in charge of its Teaching Division, responsible for the programs by which the AHA is involved with both school and university teaching.
Selected Publications
The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Comment on it by Alex Ross in “Why so serious?”, New Yorker, 8 September 2008.
The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700-1914: Managers, Charlatans and Idealists, which I edited for Indiana University Press, 2004, originally a conference at the William Andrews Clark Library, UCLA, in 2001.
The Rise of Musical Classics: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology, Oxford University Press, 1992.
Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, co-edited with David Large, Cornell University Press, 1984.
Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna, 1830-48, Croom Helm, London, 1975;2nd edition, Ashgate Press, 2004.
“Redefining the Status of Opera: London and Leipzig, 1800-1848,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 46 (2006), 507-532.
“Consequences of Canon: Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music, c. 1910,” Common Knowledge, 9 (2003), 78-99.
“The History of Musical Canons,” Rethinking Music, eds. Mark Everist and Nicholas Cook, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 340-59.
“Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century?” Early Music, 25 (1997), 678-91 (special issue, “Listening Practice”).
Review Essay: “Beyond Zeitgeist: Recent Work in Music History,” Journal of Modern History, 66 (1994), 321-45.
“L’Institution et son public: l’opéra à Paris et à Londres au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C., 48/6 (1993), 1519-40.
“Mentalité, tradition, et origines du canon musical en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C., 42 (1989), 849-75.
“La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien Régime,” Journal of Modern History, 56 (1984), 58-88.
“Learned and General Musical Taste in Eighteenth-Century France,” Past and Present, no. 89 (1980), pp. 58-85.