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 Thought traces 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 Thought is a fascinating reinterpretation of the causes and effects of a revolution in listening.
Author(s): Mark Evan Bonds
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 200
Contents......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Introduction......Page 14
List of Abbreviations......Page 22
PROLOGUE: An Unlikely Genre: The Rise of the Symphony......Page 25
CHAPTER ONE: Listening with Imagination: The Revolution in Aesthetics......Page 29
From Kant to Hoffmann......Page 30
Idealism and the Changing Perception of Perception......Page 34
Idealism and the New Aesthetics of Listening......Page 46
CHAPTER TWO: Listening as Thinking: From Rhetoric to Philosophy......Page 53
Listening in a Rhetorical Framework......Page 54
Listening in a Philosophical Framework......Page 57
Art as Philosophy......Page 61
CHAPTER THREE: Listening to Truth: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony......Page 68
The Infinite Sublime......Page 69
History as Knowing......Page 74
The Synthesis of Conscious and Unconscious......Page 77
Organic Coherence......Page 79
Beyond the Sublime......Page 81
The Communal Voice of the Symphony......Page 87
The Imperatives of Individual and Social Synthesis......Page 92
The State as Organism......Page 95
Schiller’s Idea of the Aesthetic State......Page 97
Goethe’s Pedagogical Province......Page 99
German Nationalism......Page 103
The Symphony as a “German” Genre......Page 112
The Performance Politics of the Music Festival......Page 116
The Symphony as Democracy......Page 123
EPILOGUE: Listening to Form: The Refuge of Absolute Music......Page 128
Notes......Page 141
Bibliography......Page 177
G......Page 191
N......Page 192
Z......Page 193
