William Weber

William Weber, Ph.D.

I’ve enjoyed retirement enormously, traveling a lot and publishing on research topics. I’m still on the Editorial Board of The History Teacher, and the May 2012 included a piece where I trace the history of the journal as part of the movement to reform history education active since the 1960s. My main research has been the social history of music in the 18th & 19th centuries, taking me to nice places for talks—Paris, Berlin, Uppsala, Princeton, and Yale, for example. Linda Clark, my wife, being an historian of France1, we spend time enjoying Paris and seeing colleagues there. Right now I’m developing a collaborative book asking why opera repertoires got much older in the nineteenth century, in ways different from concert classics. And it’s so nice to chat with people in the history department about how they teach in challenging ways and have been publishing a lot of good stuff .The teacher preparation program continues to exercise national leadership.

Recent Presentations:
“The rise of music criticism in 18th-century Paris seen from a multi-disciplinary perspective” University of Durham and École des Hautes Études en Science Sociale, Paris, 2016
“How did German song mingle with other idioms and tastes, in London c. 1910?” Conference on German Song, Royal College of Music, London, 2016
“Haydn and the late French Enlightenment: How did a canon arise?” Conference on “Haydn, patronage and Enlightenment,” Stanford University, 2015
“Domestic versus Foreign Composers at the Opéra and the King’s Theatre in the 18^th Century,” Colloque, Les circulations musicales et théâtrales en Europe vers 1750=1815, University of Nice, 2014

Publications:
Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon, Oxford University Press, co-edited with Cormac Newark (Guildhall School of Music), in progress.
Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge University Press 2008), Translations: Spanish 2013, Japanese 2016.
“La critique patriotique de Rossinisme donnée par journaux quasi-libéraux dans les années 1820,” in Presse et opéra en France, 1750-1850 : Croisements, échanges, représentations, Colloque 13-15 November 2014, University of Lyon, to be published on www.media19.org.
“The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860-1910,” in The Art of Listening and its Histories, ed. Christian Thorau, forthcoming.
“Art Music and Social Class,” in Music Sociology Reader, ed. Kyle Devine (New York: Routledge, 2015).
“Beyond the Classics: Welche neue Musik Hörte das deutsche Publikum im Jahre 1910?” Komminikationschancen: Entstehung und Fragmentierung sozialer Beziehungen durch Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Sven Oliver Müller, Jürgen Osterhammel & Martin Rempe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 79-81
“The Evolution of The History Teacher and the Reform of History Education,” The History Teacher, 45 (2012): 329-57.
“The Opéra and Opéra-Comique in the Nineteenth Century: Tracing the Age of Repertoire,” in L’Opéra de Paris, la Comédie-Française et l’Opéra-Comique; Approches compares, eds. Sabine Chaouche, Denis Herlin and Solveig Serre (2012), 145-58.
“Cosmopolitan, Regional, and National Identities in Eighteenth-Century European Musical Life,” Oxford Handbook to the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane Fulcher, 2011.

Research Interests

My writing about music and society has ended up closely involved with the field of musicology. I helped Bob Judd, Executive Director of the American Musicological Society, put together a panel on “The Challenge of Studying Music & History Together” for the 2014 meeting of the American Historical Association. Presently I am working with a Francophone network studying 19th-century music criticism and with a set of French and American sociologists of music who are rethinking the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu. Cormac Newark of the University of Ulster is working with me in developing collaborative book on opera and canon since the early 18th century. I continue to serve on doctoral committees, now a total of thirteen, including Yale, Brown, University of California, Davis, and University of Paris IV, Sorbonne.

Please click here to view Dr. Weber’s curriculum vitae.