Music as Thought

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.

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