Guest Lecture: Raymond Knapp

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Falsettos in the Shadow of Fiddler on the Roof: Reconsidering Jewish Identity on Broadway in the New Millennium

Biography

Raymond Knapp is the Director of the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities. He holds degrees from Harvard (BA cum laude in music), Radford (MA in composition), and Duke (PhD in musicology). He has authored four books and co-edited two others: Brahms and the Challenge of the Symphony (1997), Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler's Re-Cycled Songs (2003), The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005; winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (2006), Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary (2008, with UCLA alumni Steven Baur and Jacqueline Warwick), and The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (2011, with Stacy Wolf and UCLA colleague Mitchell Morris). With the help from a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, he has this past year completed a new book, Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism, due out from Duke University Press in early 2018.

Knapp's published essays address a wide range of additional interests, including Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, nationalism, musical allusion, music and identity, disability studies, and film music. He has originated courses on Mozart and on the American Musical, and has given seminars on nationalism, Mahler, Haydn, Mozart, absolute music, allusion, the American musical, and the nineteenth-century symphony. 

Both in his courses and in his publications, Knapp has led the way in providing internet-based supporting resources. Several years ago, with the support of the UCLA Library, he devised online scrolling analyses for his Beethoven course, and combined internet resources with published books by developing websites to deliver streaming audio examples and video clips for his two books on the musical, Musicological Identities, and The Oxford Handbook.

Knapp has led many campus-wide committees at UCLA, including the Undergraduate Council's Curriculum Committee (co-chair, 1999-2001), Undergraduate Council (chair, 2001-03), General Education Governance (chair, 2004-07), the College's Faculty Executive Committee (vice chair, 2004-08, chair 2009-2011), the steering committee to prepare for UCLA's reaccreditation (2004-06), and a campus-wide committee to enhance UCLA's offerings of Capstone opportunities for undergraduates, as part of UCLA's Reaccreditation through WASC. He also plays violin for the Orchestra Santa Monica.

Knapp chaired the Department of Musicology from 2006-09 and 2013-16. He currently serves as Academic Associate Dean for the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and is the inaugural Director of the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities.

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