Making Light

"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 will surely spark many fruitful and interesting discussions, and lead to ever clearer and more meaningful ways of looking at performance.” - Michael E. Ruhling, Haydn

“As a writer and thinker, Raymond Knapp is a congenial musicologist—eschewing the obscurities of hard theoretical labor and preferring colorful insights. Highly recommended.” - M. Dineen, Choice

"I recommend Making Light strongly; it is provocative, stimulating and overflowing in original and insightful argument. [Knapp] moves the study of Haydn in a new direction, while developing new ways of understanding how idealistic perspectives on music have shaped the values attached to different forms of music-making." - Derek B. Scott, Popular Music

"A rich and timely study. . . . Readers interested in fresh approaches to Haydn’s catalogue or camp in American musical culture will find Making Light an intriguing study of marginalized musical features across canonic boundaries."
  - Jon Churchill, Current Musicology