Music as Autobiography: Connections between Composers' Lives and Their Works

FAIN: FA-58218-15

Mark Evan Bonds
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)

Whose emotions do we hear in music? Responses to this question have changed radically and more than once since the 18th century, when critics first addressed the relationship between a composer’s personal feelings and the emotions expressed in a work of music. Enlightenment commentators viewed expression as a construct calculated to evoke an emotional response. But through a convergence of philosophical, cultural, technological, and economic changes around 1830, composers and listeners alike became more inclined to consider music as wordless autobiography, a revelation of its creator’s innermost self. The "New Objectivity" of the 1920s and the high modernism of mid-century marked a return to the concept of expression as an objective construct. My book-length study reconfigures musical Classicism, Romanticism, and Modernism not in terms of stylistic developments (e.g., form or harmony) but in terms of changing ideas about the source and nature of music’s emotional qualities.

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The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography. (Book)
Title: The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography.
Author: Mark Evan Bonds
Abstract: The "Beethoven Syndrome" is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer's inner self. This was a radically new way of listening that emerged only after Beethoven's death. Beethoven's music was a catalyst for this change, but only in retrospect, for it was not until after his death that listeners began to hear composers in general--and not just Beethoven--in their works, particularly in their instrumental music. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography traces the rise, fall, and persistence of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to 1830, composers and audiences alike operated within a framework of rhetoric in which the burden of intelligibility lay squarely on the composer, whose task it was to move listeners in a calculated way. But through a confluence of musical, philosophical, social, and economic changes, the paradigm of expressive objectivity gave way to one of subjectivity in the years around 1830. The framework of rhetoric thus yielded to a framework of hermeneutics: concert-goers no longer perceived composers as orators but as oracles to be deciphered. In the wake of World War I, however, the aesthetics of "New Objectivity" marked a return not only to certain stylistic features of eighteenth-century music but to the earlier concept of expression itself. Objectivity would go on to become the cornerstone of the high modernist aesthetic that dominated the century's middle decades. Drawing on a broad array of source material from composers, critics, theorists, and philosophers, this study reveals how perceptions of subjective expression have endured, leading to the present era of mixed and often conflicting paradigms of listening.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/beethoven-syndrome-hearing-music-as-autobiography/oclc/1141662056&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780190068479
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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