“How Music(ology) Saves Lives” with Raymond Knapp

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

Music has long been understood to intertwine with the human spirit, and 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. This discussion will explore some of the ways musicology has extended its purview across the last three decades to embrace more facets of human experience, and will conclude, drawing on his recent work, by considering how online performances preserve a vivid record of musical life during the pandemic, and how musicology can deepen our understanding of that record.

Lecture to include time for Q&A and be followed by a reception on the Schoenberg Patio. Light refreshments will be served.

An RSVP is required to attend.

We hope that you can join us. For those unable to attend, this event will be recorded and posted on the UCLA Research and Creative Activities website after the event.

For inquiries, please email: ovcr@conet.ucla.edu.