Overview

In Making Light 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. Knapp identifies in Haydn and in early popular American musical cultures such as minstrelsy and operetta a strain of high camp-a mode of engagement that relishes both the superficial and serious aspects of an aesthetic experience-that runs antithetical to German Idealism's musical paradigms. By considering the disservice done to Haydn by German Idealism alongside the emergence of musical camp in American popular music, Knapp outlines a common ground: a humanistically based aesthetic of shared pleasure that points to ways in which camp receptive modes might rejuvenate the original appeal of Haydn's music that has mostly eluded audiences. In so doing, Knapp remaps the historiographical modes and systems of critical evaluation that dominate musicology while troubling the divide between serious and popular music.

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9780822369509

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Reviews

Making Light is a truly provocative book that offers an astounding assessment of Joseph Haydn's legacy in American musical culture. In a sweeping tour de force, Raymond Knapp draws tantalizing parallels between the composer's enigmatic eccentricity and the critical aspirations of high camp. Rich in analytical and historical detail, this timely study argues that Haydn's humane humor prefigured the rebellious impulses that punctured the prevailing aesthetic pretensions of musical idealism by advocating an Aristotelian sense of human flourishing. --Berthold Hoeckner, author of Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment

In this extraordinary book Raymond Knapp touches on just about every repertory in play in musicology, bringing an increasingly disparate and splintered field into a single conversation firmly focused on what really counts in the study of musical life in American society. Knapp's breathtaking scholarship and cutting-edge arguments are sure to create conversation; he makes you want to talk about his book. Making Light is a stimulating and bracing read. -- Todd Decker, author of * Who Should Sing Ol' Man River ? The Lives of an American Song * Making Light is a truly provocative book that offers an astounding assessment of Joseph Haydn's legacy in American musical culture. In a sweeping tour de force, Raymond Knapp draws tantalizing parallels between the composer's enigmatic eccentricity and the critical aspirations of high camp. Rich in analytical and historical detail, this timely study argues that Haydn's humane humor prefigured the rebellious impulses that punctured the prevailing aesthetic pretensions of musical idealism by advocating an Aristotelian sense of human flourishing. -- Berthold Hoeckner, author of * Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment *

Making Light is a truly provocative book that offers an astounding assessment of Joseph Haydn's legacy in American musical culture. In a sweeping tour de force, Raymond Knapp draws tantalizing parallels between the composer's enigmatic eccentricity and the critical aspirations of high camp. Rich in analytical and historical detail, this timely study argues that Haydn's humane humor prefigured the rebellious impulses that punctured the prevailing aesthetic pretensions of musical idealism by advocating an Aristotelian sense of human flourishing. -- Berthold Hoeckner, author of Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment

Making Light is a truly provocative book that offers an astounding assessment of Joseph Haydn's legacy in American musical culture. In a sweeping tour de force, Raymond Knapp draws tantalizing parallels between the composer's enigmatic eccentricity and the critical aspirations of high camp. Rich in analytical and historical detail, this timely study argues that Haydn's humane humor prefigured the rebellious impulses that punctured the prevailing aesthetic pretensions of musical idealism by advocating an Aristotelian sense of human flourishing. -- Berthold Hoeckner, author of * Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment *

Author Information

Raymond Knapp is Professor of Musicology and Academic Associate Dean at the Herb Alpert School of Music at the University of California, Los Angeles, the author of The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, and the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical.

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