Stephen Hinton

Contact

Telephone
(650) 723-0731
Office
Braun Music Center Rm. 214

Stephen Hinton

Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities
Department Chair
Professor
Area(s) of Expertise
Degrees / Education
Ph.D., University of Birmingham (1984)
B.A., University of Birmingham (1978)

Special fields: aesthetics, history of theory, music of Weill, Hindemith and Beethoven.

Stephen Hinton is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, Professor of Music and, by courtesy, of German. From 2011-15 he served 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 and in 2020-21 chairman of the Department of Music. Before moving to Stanford, he taught at Yale University and, before that, at the Technische Universität Berlin. His publications include The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik (1989); Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera for the series Cambridge Opera Handbooks (1990); the critical editions of Die Dreigroschenoper (2000) and Happy End (2020) for the Kurt Weill Edition; Kurt Weill, Gesammelte Schriften (edited with Jürgen Schebera, 1990, and issued in 2000 in an expanded second edition); and the edition of the Symphony Mathis der Maler for Paul Hindemith’s Collected Works (1991).

He has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history and theory, with contributions to publications such as Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Funkkolleg Musikgeschichte. He has also served as editor of the journal Beethoven Forum. Recent articles include “Beauty” (with Nick Zangwill) for The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (2020); “Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Historiography of the Middle” for The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow (2023); and “Weill's Cinematic Imagination” for The Works of Kurt Weill: Transformations and Reconfigurations in 20th-Century Music (2023). His monograph Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (UC Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Kurt Weill Prize for distinguished scholarship in musical theater, has been published in a revised German edition as Kurt Weills Musiktheater: Vom Songspiel zur American Opera (Suhrkamp, 2023). Together with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, he produced the series of edX online courses called Defining the String Quartet focusing on the music of Haydn (2016) and Beethoven (2019).