Absolute Music: The History of an Idea by Mark Evan Bonds (review)

In the wake of new musicology, several important studies have focused on some (un)critically-acclaimed concepts that became regulative during the nineteenth century. Scholars have deconstructed our assumptions about the musical canon, the work-concept, contemplative listening, and even musicology itself. The common target of all these concepts is aesthetic autonomy. “Absolute music,” unsurprisingly, has also found itself inside the crosshairs of similar critical inquiries, including the one by Mark Evan Bonds currently under review. Despite monographs by Carl Dahlhaus and Daniel Chua on the topic, Bonds states that “the history of the idea of absolute music has never been adequately documented” (p. 13). He sets out to remedy the situation by approaching absolute music as a regulative concept, which he quirkily defines as “a premise that can be neither proven nor disproven but that provides a framework for discussing other ideas” (p. 6). According to Bonds, failing to do so has led scholars to treat absolute music “as a monolithic concept” rather than as a construct that has a history (p. 15).

Bonds divides his argument into three parts (“Essence as Effect: To 1550,” “Essence and Effect: 1550–1850,” and “Essence or Effect: 1850–1945”) and an epilogue (“Since 1945”). The titles convey both the author’s focus on the relationship between music’s essence and effect, and his belief that this relationship changes over time. Each part is preceded by a helpful summary. The author supplies an appendix (which presents responses to Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen), a good bibliography, and an index. The footnotes, which include many quotations in their original language, are valuable.

Part I of Bonds’s book draws on the figures of “Orpheus and Pythagoras” to personify music’s effect (“what it does”) and music’s essence (“what it is”) (p. 17). The author reminds us that, for Pythagoras, “music was the audible manifestation of number” (p. 23) and, as such, “a perceptible manifestation of cosmic order” (p. 25). The “isomorphic resonance” between music and the cosmos reappears throughout the book. Unfortunately, the figure of Orpheus becomes progressively absent. But, as several quotations from Boethius to Guido of Arezzo make clear, the essence of music is the source of its effect; the former weighs heavier than the latter.

Part II opens with the advances of empirical science, as cosmically-ordered music gives way to “music as a sounding art” (p. 39). The five qualities that the author believes were used to explain “the connection between the nature and power of music” from the sixteenth century onward make up the five chapters of the second part, namely “Expression,” “Beauty,” “Form,” “Autonomy,” and “Disclosiveness” (p. 40). Bonds seemingly favors dualities. He broaches “expression” through the relationship between music and language, discussing several topics, ranging from textual intelligibility to mimesis. Immanuel Kant’s notion of “beauty” allows the author to distinguish between sensuous and intellectual pleasure, which allows for a further distinction between music as an art of sentiment (without concepts) and music as an art of Geist. Bonds then connects “form,” the “central quality” by which eighteenth-century writers related music’s essence to its effect, to Pythagoreanism, which he divides into “hard” and “soft” versions. The uneasy relationship between form and content highlights the ambivalence of nineteenth-century writers regarding the question whether music is representative of something other than itself. Bonds divides the notion of “music in itself” into “material” and “ethical” autonomies. The former rejoins the question of music’s capacity to imitate emotions, while the latter refers to the ideology of l’art pour l’art. Finally, “disclosiveness” is defined as music’s capacity to reveal “the ‘wonders’ of the universe in ways that words could not” (p. 112). While this perceived quality enhances the status of instrumental music, whose lack of concept is now a virtue, Bonds claims it signals a Pythagorean tendency. More specifically, it is the motion in music that is...