Raymond Knapp has been selected for a 2015 Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship. The fellowship entails a residency in Bogliasco, a fishing village near Genoa, Italy, where the foundation sponsors those who demonstrate notable achievements in the arts and humanities to live and work for one month. This fellowship is awarded to approximately 50 people from around the world every year, and focuses on fostering work in archaeology, classics, history, music and more.
Knapp is a professor and chair of musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He earned his B.A. in music from Harvard and his Ph.D. in musicology from Duke. He joined the faculty at UCLA in 1989, and has taught on a variety of subjects from Mozart to 19th century music to the American musical. He has authored four books and co-edited two others.
Knapp's next book, which he intends to complete during his residency in Bogliasco during Fall, 2015, will be titled “Surviving Absolute Music: Haydn, German Idealism, and the Persistent Dualities of Music in the New World.” This book will consider the steady decline of Haydn’s standing as a major composer alongside the rise of popular music in the United States across the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in theatrical contexts. Knapp situates both of these developments in relation to the ways Beethoven and German idealism affected the emergence of "serious" music.
