Music''s Fourth Wall and the Rise of Reflective Listening

Music's Fourth Wall and the Rise of Reflective Listening examines fundamental changes in concert-hall listening since the Enlightenment, with an emphasis on changing assumptions about the very act of listening itself. Author Mark Evan Bonds shows how reflective--distanced--listening, previously limited to professional musicians and connoisseurs, ousted the earlier ideal of resonant--self-forgetful--listening. And for better or worse, it is the ideal of reflective listening that has prevailed ever since.

List of contents

• Introduction


• 1: The Pleasure of Resonance


• 2: Resonance Subverted


• 3: The Pleasure of Reflection


• 4: The Prestige of Reflection


• Epilogue: The Resilience of Resonance

About the author

Mark Evan Bonds is the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A former editor-in-chief of Beethoven Forum, he has written widely on the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with a special interest in the intersections of music and philosophy. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Institute for Advanced Study-Princeton, and the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF). His most recent books are The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography and Beethoven: Variations on a Life.

Product details

• Authors: Mark Evan Bonds, Mark Evan (Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished P Bonds
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 23.08.2025
• EAN: 9780197806371
• ISBN: 978-0-19-780637-1
• No. of pages: 232
• Series: AMS Studies in Music
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > Music history; MUSIC / History & Criticism, MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Classical, Romanticism, Music reviews & criticism, Music reviews and criticism, Romantic Music (C 1830 To C 1900), Art music, orchestral and formal music