Raymond Knapp
Distinguished Professor of Musicology, Disability Studies, and Humanities
Raymond Knapp is Distinguished Professor of Musicology, Disability Studies, and Humanities at UCLA, where he currently serves as Director of the Center for Musical Humanities and Vice Chair of the Department of Musicology. His books include Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler’s Re-Cycled Songs, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (winner, Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (co-edited with Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf), and Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism. He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the Television Musical with Jessica Sternfeld and Holley Replogle-Wong. While at UCLA, Knapp has served as Co-Director, and later Associate Dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music, chaired the Department of Musicology three times, and chaired (or co-chaired) the Undergraduate Council, College FEC, GE Governance, and WASC Reaccreditation Steering Committee. He has also won the Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award and been inducted into the Faculty Mentoring Honorary Society.
How Music(ology) Saves Lives
The phrase “saving lives” has potential application beyond its literal sense of keeping people alive, and this talk explores how music and musicology work in tandem as art and discipline to fulfill this potential. Music has long been understood to intertwine with the human spirit, whereas musicology has exploited this perceived relationship to reconstruct ways of being, movement, and feeling, to revitalize lost histories through performance and thereby reanimate the past. After exploring some of the ways musicology has extended its purview across the last three decades to embrace more facets of human experience, Dr. Knapp will share his work on online performances that preserve a vivid record of musical life during the pandemic, and suggest how musicology can deepen our understanding of that record.
