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The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography, by Mark Evan Bonds

The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography, by Mark Evan Bonds 614 Journal of the American Musicological Society acoustemologies of such “phonographic imperialism” from the perspec- tives of colonizers, missionaries, and Indigenous listeners. ARNE SPOHR The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography, by Mark Evan Bonds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xiii, 325 pp. Describing and distancing supposedly obsolete versions of Beethoven is an old musicological impulse. Arnold Schmitz’s 1927 Das romantische Beetho- venbild is its classic expression, but it goes back a good deal farther than this—to Wagner’s scattergun polemics, Hanslick’s formalist aesthetic theo- ries, and arguably even Czerny’s revisionist performance guides. The prac- tice continues to this day. Indeed, rejecting past Beethovens may look particularly urgent right now, when so many musicians and scholars seem to share a desire for Beethoven to be maximally superseded—whether as Philip Ewell’s downsized “above average composer,” the dark heart of a mori- bund “classical music” culture, or as a shrinking presence on revised univer- sity music curriculums across Europe and North America. Mark Evan Bonds’s The Beethoven Syndrome surely stands at the less po- lemical end of the Beethoven-distancing spectrum, but the book belongs on it nonetheless. Its Jason-Bourne-ish title—reminiscent also of Richard Daw- kins’s New Atheist screed The God Delusion http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of the American Musicological Society University of California Press

The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography, by Mark Evan Bonds

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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2022 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.
ISSN
0003-0139
eISSN
1547-3848
DOI
10.1525/jams.2022.75.3.614
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

614 Journal of the American Musicological Society acoustemologies of such “phonographic imperialism” from the perspec- tives of colonizers, missionaries, and Indigenous listeners. ARNE SPOHR The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography, by Mark Evan Bonds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xiii, 325 pp. Describing and distancing supposedly obsolete versions of Beethoven is an old musicological impulse. Arnold Schmitz’s 1927 Das romantische Beetho- venbild is its classic expression, but it goes back a good deal farther than this—to Wagner’s scattergun polemics, Hanslick’s formalist aesthetic theo- ries, and arguably even Czerny’s revisionist performance guides. The prac- tice continues to this day. Indeed, rejecting past Beethovens may look particularly urgent right now, when so many musicians and scholars seem to share a desire for Beethoven to be maximally superseded—whether as Philip Ewell’s downsized “above average composer,” the dark heart of a mori- bund “classical music” culture, or as a shrinking presence on revised univer- sity music curriculums across Europe and North America. Mark Evan Bonds’s The Beethoven Syndrome surely stands at the less po- lemical end of the Beethoven-distancing spectrum, but the book belongs on it nonetheless. Its Jason-Bourne-ish title—reminiscent also of Richard Daw- kins’s New Atheist screed The God Delusion

Journal

Journal of the American Musicological SocietyUniversity of California Press

Published: Dec 1, 2022

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