Abbate's dissertation, entitled The "Parisian" Tannhäuser, addressed historical and aesthetic issues related to the Parisian premiere of Richard Wagner's opera in 1861. A significant excerpt from this work was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1983. In 1990, she published a translation of Jean-Jacques Nattiez's Musicologie générale et sémiologie under the title Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music.

Music--Drastic or Gnostic?". The latter offers a reappraisal of the value of hermeneutic musicological scholarship, favoring meditations on music as performance ("drastic") to those on music as encoded meaning ("gnostic").[citation needed]

born November 20, 1956) is an American musicologist, described by the Harvard Gazette as "one of the world’s most accomplished and admired music historians".[1] She is currently Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University.[1] A practitioner of the field’s traditional methodologies, she challenged their limits, mobilizing literary theory and philosophy to provoke new ways of thinking about music and understanding its experience.[2][3] From her earliest essays she has questioned familiar approaches to well-known works, reaching beyond their printed scores and composer intentions, to explore the particular, physical impact of the medium upon performer and audience alike. Her research focuses primarily on the operatic repertory of the 19th century, offering creative and innovative approaches to understanding these works critically and historically. Some of her more recent work has addressed topics such as film studies and performance studies

Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, King's College, Cambridge, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.[citation needed]

Abbate completed her BA at Yale University in 1977. While still an undergraduate at Yale, she reconstructed the score of Claude Debussy’s La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of