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Erinn Knyt, professor of music history in the UMass Amherst College of Humanities & Fine Arts, has been named a Spotlight Scholar for March 2025.

Knyt is a musicologist, specializing in 19^th- and 20^th-century music history as well as aesthetics and performance studies. Her colleague Emiliano Ricciardi, associate professor in the Department of Music and Dance, has called her “one of the most prolific and impactful music historians of her generation.”

Knyt is one of the foremost experts on Ferruccio Busoni, 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 20^th 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 20^th-century music. She has also published more than a dozen articles on Busoni in prominent journals, such as “The Journal of Musicology.”

More recently, Knyt’s research has expanded to explore German composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach’s 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.

To read more about Knyt and previous Spotlight Scholars, or to learn about the nomination process, visit the Spotlight Scholars website.