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"Bonds, Mark Evan, author"
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Ludwig van Beethoven : a very short introduction
\"Despite the ups and downs of his personal life and professional career - even in the face of deafness - Beethoven remained remarkably consistent in his most basic convictions about his art. This inner consistency provides the key to understanding the composer's life and works more than 250 years after his birth in 1770. Beethoven approached music as he approached life, weighing from a variety of perspectives whatever occupied him: a melodic idea, a musical genre, a word or phrase, a friend, a lover, a patron, money, politics, religion. His ability to recognize and unlock so many possibilities from each helps explain the emotional breadth and richness of his output as a whole, from the heaven-storming Ninth Symphony to the eccentric Eighth, and from the arcane Great Fugue to the crowd-pleasing Wellington's Victory. Beethoven's works are a series of variations on his life. The iconic scowl so familiar from later images of the composer is but one of many attitudes he could assume and project through his music. The supposedly characteristic frown and furrowed brow, moreover, came only after his time. Discarding tired myths about the composer, this study proposes a new way of listening to Beethoven by hearing his music as an expression of his entire self, not just his scowling self\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Music's fourth wall and the rise of reflective listening
\"We've all heard the line before: \"I enjoy classical music but don't know anything about it.\" The \"but\" is telling. Why and when did music-lovers begin to apologize for a lack of knowledge about what gave them pleasure? This book examines fundamental changes in concert-hall listening since the Enlightenment. By calling attention to the artifice of their art, composers like Haydn and Beethoven violated music's fourth wall, that imagined barrier which for so long had allowed listeners to \"lose\" themselves in what they were hearing, to resonate with the music and to forget, in effect, that they were listening at all. The new way of composing demanded a more reflective-distanced-perspective. By styling himself a Tondichter (\"tone-poet\"), Beethoven at once acknowledged a new way of both composing and listening, one in which instrumental music was no longer thought of as the \"language of the heart\"-wordless oratory, in effect-but rather as wordless poetry, a self-consciously artificial mode of expression\"-- Provided by publisher.
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