School of Medicine

Biography

William A. Everett is Professor of Musicology and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies. He holds degrees from Texas Tech University (B.M., music theory), Southern Methodist University (M.M., music history, instrumental conducting), and the University of Kansas (Ph.D., musicology). At UMKC, he teaches graduate courses in medieval music, American musical theater, music and national identity, research and bibliography in music, and pedagogy of music history. He also team-teaches a course on medicine and music through the UMKC School of Medicine’s Sirridge Office of Medical Humanities and Bioethics.

Dr. Everett is the author of four books, including British Piano Trios, Quartets, and Quintets: 1850-1950: A Checklist (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2000), The Musical: A Guide to Research (New York: Routledge, 2004), Sigmund Romberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), and Rudolf Friml (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). He is contributing co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; second edition, 2008) and co-author of The Historical Dictionary of the Broadway Musical (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008). His book on operetta composer Sigmund Romberg received the 2008 Certificate of Merit for Outstanding Research on Recorded Classical Music from the Association of Recorded Sound Collectors (ARSC). His work has appeared in American Music, Opera Quarterly, Journal of the American Viola Society, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Studies in Musical Theatre, Journal of Croatian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and elsewhere. He has presented papers at conferences and symposia throughout North America and Europe. Dr. Everett’s current projects focus on the musicals that played at Daly’s Theatre in London during the 1890s and the rise of orchestral music in Kansas City at the end of the nineteenth century. He is a commissioning editor for musical theater for the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd Edition.

He received the 2003 Muriel Ewing Kauffman Award for Excellence in Teaching, a 2008 UMKC Trustees Faculty Fellowship, the N.T. Veatch Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity, and the 2009 Muriel Ewing Kauffman Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity. From 2008 to 2010, he served as a Faculty Fellow in UMKC’s Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching (FaCET).

Dr. Everett served as chair of the Conservatory’s Division of Composition, Music Theory, and Musicology 2006–2009. He was Treasurer of the Society for American Music 1996–2001 and President of the Great Plains Chapter of the College Music Society 2002–2004. He served as Reviews Editor for College Music Symposium, 2000–2006, and chaired the program committee for the 2009 CMS International Conference, which took place in Croatia. He is National Vice President of the College Music Society for 2011 and 2012.