Music as Thought:
Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven
Mark Evan Bonds

Book Description | Reviews
Chapter 1 [HTML] or [PDF format]

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
List of Abbreviations xxi

PROLOGUE: An Unlikely Genre: The Rise of the Symphony 1

CHAPTER ONE: Listening with Imagination: The Revolution in Aesthetics 5

From Kant to Hoffmann 6
Idealism and the Changing Perception of Perception 10
Idealism and the New Aesthetics of Listening 22

CHAPTER TWO: Listening as Thinking: From Rhetoric to Philosophy 29

Listening in a Rhetorical Framework 30
Listening in a Philosophical Framework 33
Art as Philosophy 37

CHAPTER THREE: Listening to Truth: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony 44
The Infinite Sublime 45

History as Knowing 50
The Synthesis of Conscious and Unconscious 53
Organic Coherence 55
Beyond the Sublime 57

CHAPTER FOUR: Listening to the Aesthetic State: Cosmopolitanism 63

The Communal Voice of the Symphony 63
The Imperatives of Individual and Social Synthesis 68
The State as Organism 71
Schiller's Idea of the Aesthetic State 73
Goethe's Pedagogical Province 75

CHAPTER FIVE: Listening to the German State: Nationalism 79

German Nationalism 79
The Symphony as a "German" Genre 88
The Performance Politics of the Music Festival 92
The Symphony as Democracy 99

EPILOGUE: Listening to Form: The Refuge of Absolute Music 104

Notes 117
Bibliography 153
Index 167

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