Fabio Morabito, PhD, MA, BA

Area of Study / Keywords

Euro-colonial music in the 18th and 19th centuries canon formation historiography materiality music collecting and annotating history of musicology philosophies of knowledge-production elitism posthumanities

About

Fabio Morabito is Assistant (from July 2025 Associate) Professor of Musicology. He joined the Department of Music at the University of Alberta in 2020. He was the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at the University of Oxford (2017-2020), and previously taught at Durham University and Kings College London, where he completed his PhD in historical musicology. The dissertation won the Ralph Gibson Award of the Society for the Study of French History. His earlier trainings in music and musicology took place at the University of Pavia-Cremona, in Italy, and the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar, in Germany.

Fabio’s research focuses on cultures of Western art music in the late 18th and early 19th century, exploring issues of canon formation and the origins of celebrity (for instance, how musicians engaged with ever-wider publics); music and cultures of sociability; music collecting and annotating; and the role played by musicologies of the past and the present in shaping musical identities. Other interests include ideals of 18th- and 19th-century chamber music; concepts of modern musical authorship; materiality; "new historicism" and historiography; and the history and future of the humanities. His most recent articles are forthcoming or out in the 2025, 2022, 2021 and 2020 issues of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Critical Inquiry, 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters and the Journal of Musicology, and he is at work on a monograph entitled “Making the European Composer Modern,” which considers both canonical and non-canonical figures of the nineteenth century in their attempts to “make themselves” in the eyes and ears of the public and posterity. Fabio was the Principal Investigator of the project 19th-Century Musicians as Annotators (University of Oxford 2019-21) funded by the British Academy and fostering collaborative research between music historians, historians of the book and the British Library.

Books

F. Morabito and L. de Raymond (eds.), Antoine Reicha and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Composer (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2021).

Articles in peer-reviewed journals

F. Morabito, Kate van Orden, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Tom Stammers, Erin Johnson-Williams, “On Keeping Things as Books,” Critical Inquiry 51/2 (2025), 365-396.

F. Morabito, “Review: Ludwig van Beethoven, Trio in B-flat major for Pianoforte, Violin and Violoncello, op. 97, ed. Jonathan Del Mar (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2022),” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 20/2 (2023), 649-655.

F. Morabito, “Endless Self: Haydn, Cherubini and the Sound of the Canon,” 19th-Century Music 46/2 (2022), 91-124.

F. Morabito, “Musicology Without Heroes,” Music & Letters 102/2 (2021), 347-361.

F. Morabito, “Rehearsing the Social: Beethoven’s Late Quartets in Paris, 1825-1829,” Journal of Musicology 37/3 (2020), 349-382.

F. Morabito, “Theatrical Marginalia: Pierre Baillot and the Prototype of the Modern Performer,” Music & Letters 101/2 (2020), 270-299.

F. Morabito, “Review: Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730-1830, ed. Emily H. Green, Catherine Mayes (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2017),” Eighteenth Century Music 16/1 (2019), 60-63.

F. Morabito, “The Score in the Performer’s Hands: Reading Traces of the Act of Performance as a Form of Analysis?” Music Theory Online 22/2 (2016).

F. Morabito, “I manoscritti autografi di Luigi Cherubini: cataloghi, storia ed acquisizione del lascito presso la Königliche Bibliothek di Berlino,” Acta Musicologica 84/2 (2012), 167-198. 

Short Films and Public Musicology

F. Morabito (writer and director): 10 min short film Handling Music before the Invention of the Phonograph (2022) in the permanent digital exhibition “Discovering Music: the 19th century,” The British Library, London, UK.

F. Morabito (writer and director): 10 min short film Annotating Music (2022) in the permanent digital exhibition “Discovering Music: the 19th century,” The British Library, London, UK.

F. Morabito (writer): article “The 19th-Century Musical Album,” (2022) in the permanent digital exhibition “Discovering Music: the 19th century,” The British Library, London, UK.

F. Morabito (writer): article “Musical Autograph Collectors of the 19th Century,” (2022) in the permanent digital exhibition “Discovering Music: the 19th century,” The British Library, London, UK.

Book chapters

F. Morabito and L. de Raymond, “The Composer as Process,” in Antoine Reicha and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Composer, ed. Fabio Morabito and Louise de Raymond (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2021), vii-xxix.

F. Morabito, “Making the Modern Composer in Haydn’s Image,” in Antoine Reicha and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Composer, ed. Morabito and de Raymond (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2021), 3-26.

M. Ward and F. Morabito, “Texture as Structure: Sonata and Concerto Elements in the String Quartets by Rodolphe Kreutzer, Pierre Rode and Antoine Reicha,” in Antoine Reicha and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Composer, ed. Morabito and de Raymond (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2021), 27-70.

F. Morabito, “Évaluer le génie sur son lit de mort: la biographie critique de Méhul par Luigi Cherubini,” in Le Fer et les Fleurs: Etienne Nicholas Méhul (1763-1817), ed. Alexandre Dratwicki and Etienne Jardin (Paris: Actes Sud, 2017), 481-508.

F. Morabito, “Luigi Cherubini auf der Suche nach dem eigenen Quartettstil: das unvollendete Quatuor second und die späten Streichquartette,” in Luigi Cherubini: vielzitiert, bewundert, unbekannt, ed. Helen Geyer (Sinzig: Studio Verlag, 2016), 105-118.

F. Morabito, “Il processo compositivo di Cherubini: il caso dei quartetti,” in Cherubini al “Cherubini” nel 250° della nascita, ed. Sergio Miceli (Firenze: Olschki, 2011), 167-188.

F. Morabito, “I quartetti per archi di Alessandro Rolla: osservazioni sulla macrostruttura e sulla tecnica compositiva,” in Alessandro Rolla (1754-1841): un caposcuola dell’arte violinistica lombarda, ed. Mariateresa Dellaborra (Lucca: LIM, 2011), 277-284.

Teaching

Upcoming special topic courses are listed below. They can be taken by both undergraduate and graduate students. Interested in knowing more about these courses? Please email me to ask for a course description or the syllabus.  

Fall 2025
MUSIC 501 Seminar in Music History: What Makes Music Last?
Monday 2:00pm - 4:50pm 

Ever wondered...
what's fan-culture and how does it work?
why is "classical" music called so?
do the bodies of musicians/artists matter for their success?
what are the origins of today's celebrity culture?
why do musicians/artists create lasting images of themselves?
why are greatness and genius often gendered as male?

Take MUSIC 501 to find out!

Course Description: For the past two centuries, the culture of Western art music has consisted largely of the consumption of earlier repertoires: music surviving its own time, heard and reheard as a model of excellence. J. S. Bach is still celebrated today, but his wife (also a competent musician) is not; Mozart is, but his just-as-prolific contemporary Antonio Rosetti isn’t. This is why, in common parlance, we refer to Western art music simply as “classical.” It is – for better or worse – a selection of musical monuments. The idea of an artistic canon (treating certain pieces of music and certain musicians as worthy of continued appreciation) is one of the most complex historical structures of the West, yet one we tend to take for granted. Who chose/chooses the monuments and how? Who is excluded and why? This class offers an exploration of key issues and conceptual tools to evaluate notions of authorial immortality/greatness in Euro-colonial environments since the eighteenth century. To this period date many practices that shaped our enduring fascination with these larger-than-life figures: from biographies boasting heroic accounts of musicians’ lives and compositional progress, to thinking of artistic creativity as a product of masculine prowess and virility, which sustained the creation of a male-dominated artistic canon.

Winter 2026
MUSIC 614 Proseminar in Musicology
Friday 1:00pm - 3:50pm 

Ever wondered...
how can music be an object of study?
is music inherently human?
how do issues of gender, sexuality, race and social justice impact music studies?
what is the future of music education?
can music save the environment?

Take MUSIC 614 to find out!

Course Description: This is a proseminar studying current debates in musicology. It sets out to survey the history, issues, methodologies and latest directions of research in this field. One of the proseminar aims is to study methodology and epistemology, asking what the study of music should do and be. Another aim is to ensure familiarity with a wide range of approaches and tools used in research on music today. Topics will include: the beginnings of the discipline in the nineteenth century; questions of historiography, such as what is a fact of music history; questions of materiality and ontology, such as what is a musical object; debates on the role of musical literacy in higher education today; methods to study the act of performance – or that of listening – rather than just that of composition; postcolonial perspectives and the project of a global music history; issues of gender, sexuality, race, ecocriticism and social justice; and the future of music studies.

MUSIC 186 - Musical Life Today

Explores how people engage with music across different traditions, cultures and localities. The course considers engagements of all kinds, from practicing for a concert to whistling at the bus stop or dancing at a community drum circle.

MUSIC 284 - Western Art Music, 1800-Present

A study of music history and culture in the West from circa 1800 to the present, exploring social, stylistic, material and intellectual perspectives with attention to listening, score reading, research, critical thinking, and communication skills. Prerequisite: MUSIC 186 or consent of the department. Not available to students with credit in MUSIC 282.

MUSIC 501 - Music History Seminar I

Prerequisite: consent of Department.

MUSIC 614 - Proseminar in Musicology

An overview of history, methodologies, and current issues in musicology. Prerequisite: MUSIC 505.

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