Raymond Knapp is a distinguished scholar whose work delves into the complex intersections of music, identity, and cultural representation. His writings explore how musical compositions, from classical works to the American musical, reflect and shape notions of subjectivity, alienation, and national or personal identity. Knapp masterfully connects deep musical analysis with broader cultural and philosophical contexts, offering readers insightful perspectives on the power of music to articulate human experience. His rigorous scholarship illuminates the intricate ways music engages with the world around it, making his contributions essential for understanding music's role in society.
Raymond Knapp traces the musical legacy of German Idealism as it led to the declining prestige of composers such as Haydn while influencing the development of American popular music in the nineteenth century, showing how the existence of camp in Haydn and American music offer ways of reassessing Haydn's oeuvre.
The American musical has achieved and maintained relevance to more people in America than any other performance-based art. This history of the genre, intended for readers of all stripes, offers discussions of how American musicals, especially through their musical numbers, advance themes related to American national identity.
Brahms's symphonies represent one of the most important bodies of work to come from the second half of the nineteenth century, when many of the difficult issues that have confronted composers and scholars in our own century were formulated. As the other arts at that time were turning away from romanticism, musicwaswitnessing an extended confrontation between two attitudes that had been fundamental to musical romanticism in the preceding that music was on the one hand profoundly expressive and, on the other, essentially self-sufficient. Wagner set the terms for the conflict at mid-century, proclaiming the ina quacy of "absolute" music and arguing that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ended thesymphonic tradition with its demonstration that musical expressivity ultimately stems from an innate dependency on "the word." Wagner's arguments were followed, in short order, by Liszt's appropriation of thesymphonic genre to programmatic ends (with Wagner's eventual, if guarded, approval); Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch Schonen, with its influential argument for the self-sufficiency of music; and the appearance of Schumann's article "Neue Bahnen," which vested the future of music solely in the person of the young, virtually unknown Johannes Brahms, who was heralded as the awaited savior of a valued but languishing tradition.