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 ...
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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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Add this copy of Absolute Music: the History of an Idea to cart. $33.95, very good condition, Sold by Daedalus Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Portland, OR, UNITED STATES, published 2014 by Oxford University Press.
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Very Good+ in Very Good+ dust jacket. 9780199343638. Top corners bumped. Light edgewear and surfacewear. A nice, bright copy.; B&W Photographs; 9.3 X 1.4 X 6.5 inches; 375 pages.
Add this copy of Absolute Music: The History of an Idea to cart. $59.20, new condition, Sold by booksXpress, ships from Bayonne, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 2014 by Oxford University Press, USA.
Add this copy of Absolute Music: the History of an Idea to cart. $62.00, very good condition, Sold by BookHouse On-Line rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Minneapolis, MN, UNITED STATES, published 2014 by Oxford University Press.
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Very Good. Very Good Dust Jacket. Size: 9x1x6; Signed 1st edition. Signed by author on title page, with brief inscription to a colleague. Text otherwise very good. Binding is tight, sturdy, and square. Dust jacket looks very nice. Shelfwear is very minor. NOT ex-library. 1st printing of 1st edition, with complete number line. Ships same or next business day from Dinkytown in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Add this copy of Absolute Music: The History of an Idea to cart. $70.54, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2014 by Oxford University Press.
