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JENNIFER JUDKINS, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven by bonds, mark evan, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 65, Issue 4, October 2007, Pages 428–430, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-594X.2007.00277_6.x
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When Arturo Toscanini conducted concertos with the NBC Symphony in the 1940s, the radio audience heard something they would never hear today. What they heard was applause—the live audience clapped after the first movement. Applause between movements was reported in Vienna in 1938 when Bruno Walter conducted Mahler's Ninth Symphony—one of his last performances before the Anschluss (although the clapping was removed from the ultimate recording of this concert). By the 1950s, though, audiences no longer clapped between symphonic movements, setting aside a loud and lusty practice that was centuries old. Some ascribe the first suggestions of this change to Richard Wagner's “Bayreuth Hush”—a moment of golden silence before the downbeat, while others blame the band of silence placed on mass‐produced vinyl LPs. (And there are those who fault conductor Leopold Stokowski, who signaled the audience for silence between movements in the late 1920s.)
Concern about historically informed performance practice has become rather commonplace. We don't use pianos for Bach basso‐continuo if we can help it, and we worry which note should start the trill and whether the ornament is on or off the beat. (The issue of how to present an operatic castrato part authentically is still a sticky wicket.) However, recreating a historically informed listening practice—understanding the historical context in which music was heard—is relatively new territory.
Mark Evan Bonds's thesis is that “people began to listen to music differently in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, and this change in listening opened up new perceptions toward music itself, particularly instrumental music” (p. xiii). For his original project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, he translated an array of commentaries on the symphony between 1720 and 1900. He was a DaimlerChrysler Fellow in the fall of 2002 at the American Academy in Berlin, where he was able to observe “the immediacy of the continuing artistic, social, and political traditions that link an orchestra and its listeners” (p. xi).
Bonds is not the first to point to the year 1800 as a pivotal moment in music history, but few accounts bridge social, political, philosophical, and artistic events as successfully as his Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. The gradual shift in performance venues from aristocratic salons to public concert halls is at the crux of his argument, and this momentous change in music's reception is too often ignored. The symphony became an expression of a communal voice—a spiritual link between performers and listeners in these specially constructed places. It is not an accident, he argues, that Beethoven's early decades in Vienna coincide with this move from private to public venues (although some scholars have pointed to London for a clearer example of this change, fascinatingly witnessed in the newspaper articles of the time; see Simon McVeigh's and Alyson McLamore's work in this area).
The new symphonies for orchestra were expensive to publish and required a large number of musicians for performance. As Bonds writes, “[t]he emergence of the symphony as the most prestigious of all instrumental genres in the closing decades of the eighteenth century was in many respects an unlikely development” (p. 1). Possibly, the expanded musical range of the symphony was a natural result of improvements in the instruments themselves. In the early nineteenth century, timpani began to have chromatic pedals, valves became common on brass instruments, and woodwinds developed more efficient fingering systems. There was also a growing (and fortunate) realization that organized rehearsals were essential to good performances of large‐scale pieces.
At the vortex of Music as Thought is this question: What caused the transformation of attitude that occurred between Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790 and E. T. A. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in 1810—from Kant's view of instrumental music as “more pleasure than culture” to Hoffmann's assertion that music is the highest of all art forms (p. 8)? Bonds's belief is that Hoffmann stated a new paradigm, applied by virtually all subsequent commentators, in which Beethoven's music created a new aesthetic: Listeners were now compelled to rise to the level of the composer (p. 9). In Hoffman's review, Mozart and Haydn act as individuals, leading us, but Beethoven is invisible, opening up to us: “Thus Beethoven's instrumental music also opens up to us the realm of the monstrous and immeasurable. Burning rays of light shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we become aware of giant shadows that surge back and forth, closing in on us in ever narrower confines until they destroy us, but not the pain of endless longing” (p. 35).
On Bonds's view, Hoffmann's idealism prioritizes spirit over matter. Special importance has now been placed on the active nature of aesthetic perception, as Bonds puts it: “the true essence of the artwork could be grasped only through the power of imagination—Einbildungskraft—a faculty capable of mediating between the senses and reason” (p. 12). Hoffmann's Beethoven review “articulates the shift from the Enlightenment's perception of music as a language, operating under the principles of rhetoric, to Romanticism's perception of music as a source of truth, operating under the principles of philosophy” (p. 34). In Hoffmann's own words: “Yet how does the matter stand if it is your feeble observation alone that the deep inner continuity of Beethoven's every composition eludes? If it is your fault alone that you do not understand the master's language as the initiated understand, that the portals of the innermost sanctuary remain closed to you?…[A]nd at the center of the spirit realm thus disclosed the intoxicated soul gives ear to the unfamiliar language and understands the most mysterious premonitions that have stirred it” (p. 36).
For the first time, Bonds states, in this one critical review, we have an image of music as an organic whole, where a work encompasses “the unfolding of a central musical idea, the close integration of contrasting gestures, a trajectory leading from struggle to triumph, all within a general framework of the sublime” (p. 57). Hoffman's urgent tone asserts that Beethoven's Fifth and large symphonic works like it are perceived no longer as vehicles of entertainment but as vehicles of truth—a perception that has persisted today. We don't end the Olympic Games with a Mozart symphony. We end them with Beethoven's Ninth and the “Ode to Joy.”
Hoffmann's now infamous Romantic review is made to do some fairly heavy lifting here. A little E. T. A. Hoffmann goes a long way, but not nearly far enough to shore up a comprehensive argument for such a sea change in musical reception. To help make his case, Bonds points to a number of contemporary writers and clothes the beginnings of Idealism in meticulous social and political documentation. Ample support is presented from the works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Christian Friedrich Michaelis, as well as from Hegel, Novalis, and Goethe. (Twentieth‐century music philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Peter Kivy, and Jerrold Levinson are mentioned only in passing.) Bonds identifies the principal social ideals in early nineteenth‐century Germany as a paradoxical blend of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. The state, having previously been seen as a machine, is now viewed as an organic conception: the individual should self‐realize to the maximum so that he or she might in turn contribute in the fullest manner to society as a whole (p. 71). Beauty, and especially musical beauty, develops the spirit of the individual and the community.
Bonds parses these contemporary reviews and accounts to find a sense of exertion on the part of the audience, seeking the beginnings of an Idealism requiring active listening and the reconstruction of musical works in the mind for full aesthetic effect. He makes believers of us—the musical discourse in German‐speaking lands during Beethoven's lifetime certainly seems extensive enough that we can reconstruct these earlier modes of musical perception at least in broad outline (even though most of these writers speak only very generally to music's affect, and do not usually discuss specific works in detail).
Aestheticians are conversant with many of the philosophical writings featured here, particularly those of Kant and Hoffmann, and the argument for the year 1800 as a pivotal point in Western music is familiar. Bonds's contribution is in his wide embrace of sociopolitical as well as philosophical sources. A lagniappe is insight into the intrepid beginnings of musical criticism as such.