Music as Thought

Music as Thought PDF Author: Mark Evan Bonds
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691168059
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
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.

Music as Thought

Music as Thought PDF Author: Mark Evan Bonds
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691168059
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Beethoven Hero

Beethoven Hero PDF Author: Scott Burnham
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691050584
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Bringing together reception history, music analysis and criticism, the history of music theory, and the philosophy of music, Beethoven Hero explores the nature and persistence of Beethoven's heroic style. What have we come to value in this music, asks Scott Burnham, and why do generations of critics and analysts hear it in much the same way? Specifically, what is it that fosters the intensity of listener engagement with the heroic style, the often overwhelming sense of identification with its musical process? Starting with the story of heroic quest heard time and again in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, Burnham suggests that Beethoven's music matters profoundly to its listeners because it projects an empowering sense of self, destiny, and freedom, while modeling ironic self-consciousness. In addition to thus identifying Beethoven's music as an overarching expression of values central to the age of Goethe and Hegel, the author describes and then critiques the process by which the musical values of the heroic style quickly became the controlling model of compositional logic in Western music criticism and analysis. Apart from its importance for students of Beethoven, this book will appeal to those interested in canon formation in the arts and in music as a cultural, ethical, and emotional force--and to anyone concerned with what we want from music and what music does for us.

Beethoven's Symphonies

Beethoven's Symphonies PDF Author: John Bell Young
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781574671698
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Ludwig Van Beethoven's nine symphonies stand as towering masterworks at the core of the classical canon. In Beethoven's hands, the symphony expanded dramatically in scope and power in a way that would revolutionise both the form itself and music in general. The impact of Beethoven's nine was such that composers long after him would write their own symphonies in his shadow. In this book, acclaimed Pianist and critic John Bell Young explores each of the nine symphonies, always looking beneath the surface for what makes the music so compelling. He places them in their historical and cultural context, and he describes how the Russian concept of intonatsiia, a way of perceiving relationships "between the notes," can help deepen our appreciation of these pieces. The accompanying CD contains selections from all of the symphonies, each performance conducted by the legendary Wilhelm Furtwangler.

The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise PDF Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies

Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies PDF Author: Sir George Grove
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description


The Beethoven Syndrome

The Beethoven Syndrome PDF Author: Mark Evan Bonds
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190068477
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The "Beethoven Syndrome" is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer's inner self. This was a radically new way of listening that emerged only after Beethoven's death. Beethoven's music was a catalyst for this change, but only in retrospect, for it was not until after his death that listeners began to hear composers in general--and not just Beethoven--in their works, particularly in their instrumental music. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography traces the rise, fall, and persistence of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to 1830, composers and audiences alike operated within a framework of rhetoric in which the burden of intelligibility lay squarely on the composer, whose task it was to move listeners in a calculated way. But through a confluence of musical, philosophical, social, and economic changes, the paradigm of expressive objectivity gave way to one of subjectivity in the years around 1830. The framework of rhetoric thus yielded to a framework of hermeneutics: concert-goers no longer perceived composers as orators but as oracles to be deciphered. In the wake of World War I, however, the aesthetics of "New Objectivity" marked a return not only to certain stylistic features of eighteenth-century music but to the earlier concept of expression itself. Objectivity would go on to become the cornerstone of the high modernist aesthetic that dominated the century's middle decades. Masterfully citing a broad array of source material from composers, critics, theorists, and philosophers, Mark Evan Bonds's engaging study reveals how perceptions of subjective expression have endured, leading to the present era of mixed and often conflicting paradigms of listening.

Beethoven's Chamber Music

Beethoven's Chamber Music PDF Author: Victor Lederer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781574672039
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Victor Lederer examines Beethoven's sonatas for violin and piano, his sonatas for cello and piano, his piano trios, and most notably his sixteen string quartets. With the accompanying CD, Lederer helps the listener grasp the strangeness and grandeur of the astonishing creations.

Beethoven in America

Beethoven in America PDF Author: Michael Broyles
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253357047
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Examines America's early reception to Beethoven, the use of his work and image in American music, movies, stage works, and other forms of popular culture, and related topics.

The First Four Notes

The First Four Notes PDF Author: Matthew Guerrieri
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804170193
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
A TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2012 A New Yorker Best Book of the Year Los Angeles Magazine's #1 Music Book of the Year This revelatory book of music history examines what is perhaps the best known and most-popular symphony ever written—and its famous four-note opening. Reaching back before Beethoven’s time, Matthew Guerrieri uncovers premonitions of the opening notes in the rhythms of ancient Greek poetry and the music of the French Revolution. He discusses the Fifth’s impact when it premiered, tracing the artistic, philosophical, and political reverberations across Europe to China, Russia, and the United States, from Romanticism to ring tones, from propaganda to pop. This fascinating piece of musical detective work is a treat for music lovers of every stripe.

Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration

Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration PDF Author: Naomi Waltham-Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019066200X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
How is music implicated in the politics of belonging? Provocatively fusing recent European philosophy with music theory, Music and Belonging explores the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, reveals connections between listening and constructions of community, and testifies to Classical music's enduring political significance in an age of neoliberal exclusion.