Stephen Hinton


Stephen Hinton is a British-American musicologist at Stanford University. A leading authority on the composer Kurt Weill, he has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history, with contributions to publications such as , The [New Grove Dictionary of Opera], The [New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians], Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Musikgeschichte. His most recent book, Weill's Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, the first musicological study of Weill's complete stage works, received the 2013 Kurt Weill Book Prize for outstanding scholarship in music theater since 1900. The reviewer for the Journal of the American Musicological Society described the book as "a landmark in the literature on twentieth-century musical theater."

Academic career

Hinton graduated from the University of Birmingham with a BA in Music and German in 1978, and with a PhD in Musicology in 1984. He is currently the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, Professor of Music and, by courtesy, of German. He also serves as the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. From 2006–2010 he was Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts, and from 1997–2004 chairman of the Department of Music. Before moving to Stanford, he taught at Yale University and, before that, at the Technische Universität Berlin. At the TU Berlin he held positions as Tutor in Musicology, research assistant to Carl Dahlhaus, postdoctoral scholar of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and wissenschaftlicher Assistent.

Selected publications

  • The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik
  • Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera
  • "Natürliche Übergänge: Heinrich Schenkers Begriff von der Sonatenform", Musiktheorie, 4 : 101–16
  • Gebrauchsmusik
  • Neue Sachlichkeit
  • Paul Hindemith, Orchesterwerke 1932–34: Philharmonisches Konzert; Symphonie Mathis der Maler
  • "Defining Musical Expressionism: Schoenberg and Others", Expressionism Reassessed, ed. S. Behr, et al., 121–9
  • "Adorno's Unfinished Beethoven", Beethoven Forum 5, 139–53
  • "Hanns Eisler and the Ideology of Modern Music", New Music and Ideology, ed. M. Delaere, 79–85
  • "Adorno's philosophy of music", in Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. M. Kelly
  • "Not Which Tones? The Crux of Beethoven's Ninth", in 19th-Century Music, 22:1 : 61–77
  • "Hindemith, Bach and the Melancholy of Obligation", in Bach Perspectives 3: Creative Responses to Bach from Mozart to Hindemith., 133-15; reprinted in Hindemith-Jahrbuch 1998
  • Kurt Weill, Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften ; revised and expanded edition published as Musik und musikalisches Theater: Gesammelte Schriften
  • Analyse statt Ästhetik
  • Wider das bürgerliche Konzertleben
  • "Romantische Ironie in der Musik?" Beiträge zur Kleist-Forschung, 16, 21–35
  • "Zur Epistemologie des Ursatzes", Musik und Verstehen, ed. Christoph von Blumröder and W. Steinbeck, 74–83
  • Kurt Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper, Kurt Weill Edition I/5 ; published in a revised edition as study score with a new Preface
  • "The Emancipation of Dissonance: Schoenberg's Two Practices of Composition", Music & Letters, 91, no. 4 : 568–79
  • "Schoenberg's Harmonielehre: Psychology and Comprehensibility", Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice, ed. F. Wörner, U. Scheideler and P. Rupprecht, 113–24.
  • ''Weill's Musical Theater: Stages of Reform''