Buch, Englisch, 232 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 235 mm
Reihe: AMS Studies in Music
Buch, Englisch, 232 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 235 mm
Reihe: AMS Studies in Music
ISBN: 978-0-19-780637-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press
Like the theater, the concert hall has its own fourth wall, an imagined barrier that allows audiences to forget that what they are experiencing is a carefully crafted artifice, which in turn allows them to lose themselves in the music and resonate with it in a way that is immediate and direct. But when composers like Joseph Haydn began to violate music's fourth wall--most spectacularly in the finale of the "Joke" String Quartet (1782), with its repeated false endings--lay listeners were compelled to listen reflectively. They could not lose themselves in what they were hearing when it kept reminding them that they were listening to a work of music.
Author Mark Evan Bonds uses the concepts of resonant and reflective listening as coordinates for tracing this important change in the history of concert-hall listening. By 1850, reflective listening--once limited largely to professional musicians and connoisseurs--had become the aspirational norm for lay listeners. Contemporary developments in the philosophy of art accelerated the growing status of instrumental music by promoting a mode of perception that went beyond the merely sensory to incorporate the intellectual as well: Beethoven famously thought of himself as a "tone poet," someone who not only moved listeners but also challenged them to think and reflect.
Lay audiences thus gradually accepted the idea of listening as a skill that could be learned and cultivated. Bonds shows how music appreciation texts, composer biographies, program notes, and pre-concert lectures, all new during this period, helped reinforce a growing distinction between classical and popular repertories. For better or worse, the ideal of reflective listening has prevailed ever since.