Music as thought : listening to the symphony in the age of Beethoven / Mark Evan Bonds.

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.

"I am also grateful to the American Academy in Berlin, where as the DaimlerChrysler Fellow during the fall of 2002 I worked on something more nearly resembling the present book. Gary Smith, Paul Stoop, Marie Unger, and the entire staff there created a setting that provided the ideal mix of sociability and solitude needed for turning an idea into a book." -- page XI