Raymond Knapp, professor of musicology in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, has written a new book titled, “Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism.”
Knapp, who has made a career exploring 19th-century symphonies and the American musical, contemplates the musical legacy of German idealism and its negative impact on how we value Haydn and theatrical music. He finds that German Idealism reshaped European and American paradigms for music across the 19th century, and continues to govern how we classify, study, and evaluate music and our musical experiences.