Tim Carter

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Tim Carter (David G. Frey Distinguished Professor Emeritus) was born (1954) in Sydney, Australia, and studied in the United Kingdom at the University of Durham and then under Nigel Fortune at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on music in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy; on Mozart’s Italian operas; and on American musical theater in the mid-twentieth century. He is particularly concerned with the development of appropriate historical, analytical and critical tools to deal with problematic works that sit on several cusps and forge new musical languages; the careful garnering and analysis of sources and documentary evidence; the elucidation of text–music relationships, with particular reference to the influence of poetic structures on musical form and process; and the embedding of contemporary performances (and performers) within surviving scores and the intertextual and performative issues that arise.

Prior to moving to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001, he taught in the United Kingdom at the Universities of Leicester and Lancaster, and at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London. He has held fellowships at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence (1984–85), and the Newberry Library, Chicago (1986), and has occupied various positions within the Royal Musical Association, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, of which he was President (2003-6). He was also joint-editor of Music & Letters (1992–98) and continues to serve on numerous editorial and advisory boards. He was chair of the Music Departments at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College (1995–2000) and at UNC (2004–2009). In 2013 he received the Claude V. Palisca Award and the H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for his work on Kurt Weill’s Johnny Johnson and on Monteverdi; in 2015–16 he was a fellow at the National Humanities Center working on “political” musical theater in the United States in the 1930s.