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Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven
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Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven Hardback - 2006

by Mark Evan Bonds

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From the publisher

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.

Details

  • Title Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven
  • Author Mark Evan Bonds
  • Binding Hardback
  • Edition First Edition
  • Pages 200
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
  • Publication date 2006-08
  • ISBN 9780691126593 / 0691126593
  • Weight 0.88 lbs (0.40 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.25 x 6 x 0.8 in (23.50 x 15.24 x 2.03 cm)
  • Category Music/Songbooks
  • Library of Congress subjects Music - Philosophy and aesthetics, Music appreciation
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2005034091
  • Dewey Decimal Code 784.218

About the author

Mark Evan Bonds is Professor of Musicology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His previous books include Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration and After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony. He is a former editor in chief of Beethoven Forum.

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