Erinn Knyt
Growing up in the Northern Bay Area of California, Erinn Knyt dreamed of a career performing piano. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, Knyt studied piano and began performing, both solo and with orchestras. But a professor changed the course of her life by introducing Knyt to music history—a field she hadn’t previously known existed. Knyt became fascinated with the biographical experiences and cultural contexts that informed compositional choices and stylistic trends.
Knyt ended up declaring a double concentration in piano performance and music history at UC Davis and went on to earn a master’s in music history and a PhD in music and humanities, both from Stanford University. She came to UMass Amherst as a lecturer in 2010 and, two years later, joined the faculty as an assistant professor. Today, she is “one of the most prolific and impactful music historians of her generation,” according to her colleague, Emiliano Ricciardi, associate professor in the Department of Music and Dance.
Knyt is a musicologist, specializing in 19th- and 20th-century music history as well as aesthetics and performance studies. She is one of the foremost experts on Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), an Italian-German composer, pianist, aesthetician, conductor, and mentor to many prominent artists of his time. Knyt’s research has been essential in reassessing Busoni’s immeasurable influence in important musical trends of the 20th century—including modernism—which has been largely overlooked in the century since his death.
Knyt is the author of two monographs on Busoni—Ferruccio Busoni as Architect of Sound (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2017)—which have shown how Busoni promoted ideas, ranging from electronic music to metatonality, that would become central to 20th-century music. She has also published more than a dozen articles on Busoni in prominent journals, such as The Journal of Musicology. In December 2024, The New York Times quoted Knyt extensively in an article, “What We Can Learn from the First Truly Modern Composer,” recognizing Busoni’s enduring impact on the 100th anniversary of his death. Knyt was also interviewed in a 2016 BBC radio story, titled “Busoni: Music’s Forgotten Visionary.”
According to Knyt, Busoni was a child prodigy on piano, who toured extensively to pay the bills, but he always wanted to be remembered foremost as a composer. His compositions didn’t fit into any of the traditional molds, and as a person of mixed heritage, he struggled to find support for his original compositions during the early 20th century, a period of intense nationalism. Thus, Busoni often sponsored his own concerts in order to promote his music, as well as the music of other young, up-and-coming composers he viewed as promising. Busoni was a nomad, living in several countries across Europe and in the United States. At his apartment in Berlin, he held regular open coffee hours for artists and scholars to gather and discuss music, art, politics, and culture.
“He mentored many people who went on to become notable figures in the arts, never charging them money, and played a crucial role in developing some of the most influential ideas in their work,” says Knyt.
Yet Busoni’s approach to music was out of step with other prominent musicians of his time, such as Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky.
“While many people around him were trying to reject the historical past and do something completely different, Busoni took a more additive approach, thereby developing a new polystylistic style of music based on historical techniques,” Knyt explains. “He foresaw a lot of ideas that became much more popular in the second part of the 20th century. He was way ahead of his time in that way.”
Busoni was also notable for his tendency to draw from others’ work while putting his own spin on it.
“His compositions often feature a mixture of quotations from other people’s work; they range from mostly arranged to the almost completely new, with some allusions to historical compositional techniques or to quotations of historical music or folk songs,” Knyt says. “He constantly changed and played with other composers’ music, which irritated a lot of people.” One of his most significant compositions was his last opera, Doktor Faust, which he left incomplete at the time of his death. It represents a culmination of his aesthetic contemplations about the possibilities of music as encompassing past, present, and future.
We talk a lot about the potential of STEM research to address societal challenges, but music has healing aspects to it as well. Listening to music can make the world a better place.
More recently, Knyt’s research has expanded to explore German composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach’s [1685–1750] reception. Her most recent book, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations Reimagined (Oxford University Press, 2024), explores the reception of Bach’s Goldberg Variations from different disciplinary perspectives. The book focuses primarily on adaptations of Bach’s harpsichord music for other instruments or for other mediums, such as dance, film, literature, architecture, or the visual arts.
“I’ve primarily studied the ways Bach is performed in the 20th and 21st centuries. Recently, I’ve also become interested in studying Bach’s reception in Ghana,” says Knyt. “There’s a long and rich history of Bach’s music being performed in Ghana that goes back centuries, initially due to missionary activity. Currently, compositional techniques based on Bach’s music are being blended with local techniques, and Bach’s music has also become an integral part of performance culture in Ghana today. I’m also interested in the role Bach’s music plays in Ghanaian music education.”
At UMass, Knyt organizes the biennial Bach Festival & Symposium, which she co-founded in 2015. This three-day event, held in the spring, features an academic symposium, drawing scholars and students from around Europe and the United States, as well as Bach concerts, which are widely attended by members of the UMass and surrounding communities. This year’s event, which will focus on Bach’s role in the 21st century, will be held April 25–27, 2025.
Through events like this and her other scholarly speaking and writing activities, Knyt finds it extremely rewarding to “discover new ideas and connections and share them with others,” she says. “I enjoy being able to unearth neglected music or to think about historic music in new ways that bring a lot of joy to people, whether students or community members.”
She adds, “I think the arts and humanities are sometimes underestimated. We talk a lot about the potential of STEM research to address societal challenges, but music has healing aspects to it as well. Listening to music can make the world a better place.”