Stephen Hinton

Stephen Hinton is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Music at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in German. His research focuses on aesthetics, the history of music theory, and the music of Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, and Beethoven.

He has held several leadership roles at Stanford, including Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute (2011–2015), Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts (2006–2010), and multiple terms as Chair of the Department of Music. Before coming to Stanford, he taught at Yale University and the Technische Universität Berlin. 

Hinton is the author of Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (winner of the 2013 Kurt Weill Prize), as well as numerous books, articles, and critical editions, including Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera in the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series. His work has appeared in major reference works and handbooks, and he has edited Beethoven Forum as well as volumes in the collected editions of both Weill and Hindemith. 

His recent projects include a revised German edition of his Weill monograph (Kurt Weills Musiktheater: vom Songspiel zur American Opera, Suhrkamp 2023) and the online edX courses on Haydn (2016) and Beethoven (2019) for the series Defining the String Quartet, created with the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

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