Music as Thought
Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven
Chapter One
Listening with Imagination: The Revolution in Aesthetics
HISTORICALLY INFORMED PERFORMANCE PRACTICE has become a commonplace in the
concert world in recent decades. Orchestras routinely perform Beethoven's
symphonies on period instruments, and even nonperiod orchestras play in a
manner that reflects a heightened sensitivity to performance traditions of
the composer's time. Historically informed listening, on the other hand,
has been much slower to develop. It rests, after all, on the consumer
rather than the producer and is in any case far more difficult to
reconstruct, for the evidence of how people actually listened to specific
works of music in any given time and place is scant and by its very nature
notoriously subjective. In a celebrated passage in Howards End (1910), the novelist E. M. Forster neatly
captures an entire spectrum of modes of
listening among six characters in a concert hall, all listening to the
same work of music with six decidedly different reactions:
It will be generally ... read full excerpt from Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven ebook
