Rate My Professor Robert Shay

Robert Shay is Professor of Musicology and Chair of the Musicology Department in the College of Music at the University of Colorado Boulder. He earned his PhD and MA in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991 and 1988, respectively, an MM in choral conducting from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1985, and a BM in vocal performance from Wheaton College in 1983. His research specializes in the music of Henry Purcell and seventeenth-century England, with a focus on historical musicology, source studies, and editorial work. Shay's scholarly contributions include the co-authored book Purcell Manuscripts: The Principal Musical Sources (Cambridge University Press, 2000, with Robert Thompson), which received the Music Library Association’s Vincent H. Duckles Award in 2002 for the best book-length bibliography or research tool in music. He has published chapters such as “Purcell’s Revisions to the Funeral Sentences Revisited” (2010), “Dryden and Purcell’s King Arthur: Legend and Politics on the Restoration Stage” (2002), and articles in journals including Early Music, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, Music & Letters, and Notes. In 2023, he released a new critical edition of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (Bärenreiter), with a second edition of King Arthur in progress.

Shay's career includes serving as Dean of the College of Music at the University of Colorado Boulder from 2014 to 2020, Professor and Director of the School of Music at the University of Missouri from 2008 to 2014, and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Conservatory at Longy School of Music from 2000 to 2008. Earlier, he was a faculty member at Lyon College from 1991 to 2000, directing the Concert Choir and teaching music history courses, and a visiting professor at Duke University in 1999-2000. A founding member of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, he has held roles such as treasurer, nominating committee chair, program committee chair, and conference host in Boulder in 2018. Shay has presented papers at meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music, and delivered invited lectures at Brandeis University, Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and others. He participated in Harvard University’s Institute for Educational Management in 2006.