| FA-58218-15 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Mark Evan Bonds | Music as Autobiography: Connections between Composers' Lives and Their Works | 1/1/2016 - 12/31/2016 | $50,400.00 | Mark | Evan | Bonds | | | | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Chapel Hill | NC | 27599-1350 | USA | 2014 | Aesthetics | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 |
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. |