Music as thought : listening to the symphony in the age of Beethoven /
Mark Evan Bonds.
- Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2006.
- xx, 169 p. ; 25 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [153]-166) and index.
Prologue. An unlikely genre : the rise of the symphony -- Listening with imagination : the revolution in aesthetics. From Kant to Hoffmann ; Idealism and the changing perception of perception ; Idealism and the new aesthetics of listening -- Listening as thinking : from rhetoric to philosophy. Listening in a rhetorical framework ; Listening in a philosophical framework ; Art as philosophy -- Listening to truth : Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The infinite sublime ; History as knowing ; The synthesis of conscious and unconscious ; Organic coherence ; Beyond the sublime -- Listening to the aesthetic state : cosmopolitanism. The communal voice of the symphony ; The imperatives of individual and social synthesis ; The state as organism ; Schiller's idea of the aesthetic state ; Goethe's pedagogical province -- Listening to the German State : nationalism. German nationalism ; The symphony as a 'German' genre ; The performance politics of the music festival ; The symphony as democracy -- Epilogue. Listening to form : the refuge of absolute music.