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Absolute Music: The History of an Idea by Mark Evan Bonds (Hardcover, 2014)

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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.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN-13
9780199343638
eBay Product ID (ePID)
208805236

Product Key Features

Book Title
Absolute Music: the History of an Idea
Author
Mark Evan Bonds
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Topic
Music, Popular Philosophy
Publication Year
2014
Number of Pages
400 Pages

Dimensions

Item Height
238mm
Item Width
163mm
Item Weight
652g

Additional Product Features

Title_Author
Mark Evan Bonds
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States

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Absolute Music: The History of an Idea by Mark Evan Bonds (Hardcover, 2014)

About this product

Product Information

Product Identifiers

Product Key Features

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Additional Product Features

Best Selling in Books

The Concise 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene (Paperback, 2002)

Behind Dark Eyes: The True Story of Jon English by Jeff Apter (Paperback, 2021)

First Day by Andrew Daddo (Paperback, 2014)

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Save on Books

Frank Herbert'S Dune Saga 3-Book Boxed Set: Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of

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