William Weaver Austin

Austin was born in Lawton, Oklahoma on January 18, 1920, and attended schools in Kansas City, Missouri, Great Falls, Montana, and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Following the completion of his master's degree at Harvard in 1940, Austin went to the Berkshire Music Center to coach opera and study counterpoint under Paul Hindemith.

Austin became an associate professor in 1950, and received his doctorate from Harvard in 1951, for the dissertation "Harmonic Rhythm in Twentieth-Century Music."

His book, Music in the 20th Century from Debussy through Stravinsky, published in 1966, was the first recipient of the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society.

[3] His book Susanna, Jeanie and The Old Folks at Home: The Songs of Stephen Foster from his time to ours, originally published by MacMillan in 1975, was reissued by the University of Illinois Press in 1987.