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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles > 20th century music
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Absolute Music - The History of an Idea (Paperback)
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Absolute Music - The History of an Idea (Paperback)
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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.
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