Music as Thought : Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven

by Bonds, Mark Evan

• ISBN13: 9781400827398
• ISBN10: 1400827396
• Copyright: 2008-09-02
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Before the nineteenth century, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Kant described wordless music as "more pleasure than culture," and Rousseau dismissed it for its inability to convey concepts. But by the early 1800s, a dramatic shift was under way. Purely instrumental music was now being hailed as a means to knowledge and embraced precisely because of its independence from the limits of language. What had once been perceived as entertainment was heard increasingly as a vehicle of thought. Listening had become a way of knowing. Music as Thoughttraces the roots of this fundamental shift in attitudes toward listening in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on responses to the symphony in the age of Beethoven, Mark Evan Bonds draws on contemporary accounts and a range of sources--philosophical, literary, political, and musical--to reveal how this music was experienced by those who heard it first. Music as Thoughtis a fascinating reinterpretation of the causes and effects of a revolution in listening.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. xiii
List of Abbreviations	p. xxi
Prologue: An Unlikely Genre: The Rise of the Symphony	p. 1
Listening with Imagination: The Revolution in Aesthetics	p. 5
From Kant to Hoffmann	p. 6
Idealism and the Changing Perception of Perception	p. 10
Idealism and the New Aesthetics of Listening	p. 22
Listening as Thinking: From Rhetoric to Philosophy	p. 29
Listening in a Rhetorical Framework	p. 30
Listening in a Philosophical Framework	p. 33
Art as Philosophy	p. 37
Listening to Truth: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony	p. 44
The Infinite Sublime	p. 45
History as Knowing	p. 50
The Synthesis of Conscious and Unconscious	p. 53
Organic Coherence	p. 55
Beyond the Sublime	p. 57
Listening to the Aesthetic State: Cosmopolitanism	p. 63
The Communal Voice of the Symphony	p. 63
The Imperatives of Individual and Social Synthesis	p. 68
The State as Organism	p. 71
Schiller's Idea of the Aesthetic State	p. 73
Goethe's Pedagogical Province	p. 75
Listening to the German State: Nationalism	p. 79
German Nationalism	p. 79
The Symphony as a "German" Genre	p. 88
The Performance Politics of the Music Festival	p. 92
The Symphony as Democracy	p. 99
Epilogue: Listening to Form: The Refuge of Absolute Music	p. 104
Notes	p. 117
Bibliography	p. 153
Index	p. 167
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