The Gifts of Great Teaching
Roye Wates was a founding member of the Mozart Society of America. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky
The Gifts of Great Teaching
Roye Wates, a CAS professor of music, was a Mozart specialist
Roye E. Wates, a retired College of Arts & Sciences professor of music, died on March 10, 2023. She was 89.
Wates, a Mozart specialist and a founding member of the Mozart Society of America, earned a BA in English from Birmingham-Southern College in 1954 and a PhD in the history of music from Yale University in 1965, according to her obituary. She began teaching at BU in 1962 in the Division of General Education before becoming a University Professor and later a CAS professor of music.
In 1999, Wates was honored with the Boston University Teacher/Scholar of the Year Award. In a B.U. Bridge article about the award, John Silber (Hon.’95), then BU chancellor, described her as “an outstanding scholar and teacher, someone who brings to the classroom exemplary erudition and the gifts of great teaching.”
In 2010, she published Mozart: An Introduction to the Music, the Man, and the Myths (Amadeus Press). BU’s arts&sciences magazine covered the book: “Writes British reviewer Philip Borg-Wheeler in Classical Music magazine: ‘As in a good novel, the author draws the reader into the lives and interrelationships of her characters—Mozart, his family and colleagues—and engagingly describes the cultural milieu. I cannot recommend this outstanding book too highly.’”
In a 2011 interview with Ohio’s CantonRep.com, Wates described her fascination with the 18th-century Austrian composer. “He was so complicated, so colossally talented, and he had a father who gave him superb instruction,” she said.
When asked if she could have only one piece of Mozart music, she told the publication, “The Marriage of Figaro. And the Mass in C Minor. Both of those have a good deal of Mozart’s pastoral music, which I believe was his most distinctive personal idiom. The way Mozart wrote pastoral music was unlike any other, except Bach. It’s so powerful and so moving that I’m not sure I could live without it.”
Wates retired from BU in 2015.
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