In this Book

buy this book Buy This Book in Print
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 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.

Table of Contents

restricted access Download Full Book
  1. Title Page, Copyright
  2. pp. i-viii
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Contents
  2. pp. ix-x
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. xi-xii
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Introduction
  2. pp. xiii-xx
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. List of Abbreviations
  2. pp. xxi-xxiii
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. PROLOGUE: An Unlikely Genre: The Rise of the Symphony
  2. pp. 1-4
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. CHAPTER ONE: Listening with Imagination: The Revolution in Aesthetics
  2. pp. 5-28
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. CHAPTER TWO: Listening as Thinking: From Rhetoric to Philosophy
  2. pp. 29-43
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. CHAPTER THREE: Listening to Truth: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
  2. pp. 44-62
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. CHAPTER FOUR: Listening to the Aesthetic State: Cosmopolitanism
  2. pp. 63-78
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. CHAPTER FIVE: Listening to the German State: Nationalism
  2. pp. 79-103
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. EPILOGUE: Listening to Form: The Refuge of Absolute Music
  2. pp. 104-116
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Notes
  2. pp. 117-152
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 153-166
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Index
  2. pp. 167-169
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
Back To Top

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.