What is music, and why does it move us? From Pythagoras to the present,
writers have struggled to isolate the essence of "pure" or "absolute"
music in ways that also account for its profound effect. In Absolute
Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds traces the history of
these efforts across more than two millennia, paying special attention
to the relationship between music's essence and its qualities of form,
expression, beauty, autonomy, as well as its perceived capacity to
disclose philosophical truths.
The core of this book focuses on
the period between 1850 and 1945. Although the idea of pure music is as
old as antiquity, the term "absolute music" is itself relatively recent.
It was Richard Wagner who coined the term, in 1846, and he used it as a
pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely
instrumental music. For Wagner, music that was "absolute" was isolated,
detached from the world, sterile. His contemporary, the Viennese critic
Eduard Hanslick, embraced this quality of isolation as a guarantor of
purity. Only pure, absolute music, he argued, could realize the highest
potential of the art.
Bonds reveals how and why perceptions of
absolute music changed so radically between the 1850s and 1920s. When it
first appeared, "absolute music" was a new term applied to old music,
but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had
become-paradoxically―an old term associated with the new music of
modernists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Bonds argues that the key
developments in this shift lay not in discourse about music but rather
the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in
painting at the turn of the twentieth century-line and color, as opposed
to object-helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to
the cutting edge of musical modernism.
By carefully tracing the
evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages
to the twentieth-century, Bonds not only provides the first
comprehensive history of this pivotal concept but also provokes new
thoughts on the essence of music and how essence has been used to
explain music's effect. A long awaited book from one of the most
respected senior scholars in the field, Absolute Music will be essential
reading for anyone interested in the history, theory, and aesthetics of
music.
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