BONDS, MARK EVAN. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. Oxford University Press, 2014, xiii + 375 pp., $35.00 cloth.

This book is intended as a history of the view that music is empty form. According to this view, music does not represent, it does not arouse ordinary emotions (perhaps it arouses aesthetic or musical emotion), and it does not express emotion. It is appreciated as pure (beautiful) form. In short, this book is a history of formalism in music. Bonds disclaims all philosophical pretentions. He writes that, “the purpose of this book … is not to advocate any particular philosophical point of view” (p. 5). He explicitly declines to engage with contemporary advocates of formalism, such as Peter Kivy and Nick Zangwill. Still, this is a book that will be of considerable interest to philosophers of music. A book of immense erudition, it can provide grist for any number of philosophical mills. Absolute Music begins with a brief survey of music theory from antiquity until 1550. Not much in the way of formalism is to be found in this period. Many ancients considered music a representational art and for much of the Middle Ages music was thought somehow to reflect the cosmos. The story becomes more complex after 1550, and the huge number of data points makes it difficult to form a coherent narrative that tells the history of music theory from 1550 up until 1850. Bonds opts to order music theory according to five general themes: expression, beauty, form, autonomy, and disclosiveness (that is, music's capacity to disclose “higher truths”). At times, this arrangement is a little awkward. Philosophers of music and music theorists are introduced in one section whose work could just as easily fit under another rubric. Moreover, so many figures are discussed in the course of about 80 pages that little attention can be devoted to any of them. Philosophers will quibble with the presentation of certain philosophical views. Still, these chapters of Absolute Music are interesting in that they introduce a wider range of music theorists than those with whom philosophers are normally conversant. The history of music theory is a much more many‐splendored thing than most philosophers know. Despite the complexity of the story, a fairly clear picture begins to emerge. Few writers seriously entertained formalism during the period from 1550 to 1850 until fairly late in the eighteenth century. At that point, several philosophers, among them James Beattie, Adam Smith, and Kant appear to embrace formalism. (Strangely, the musicologist Charles Burney, who can also be seen as an early exponent of formalism, does not figure in Bonds’ narrative.) This first, brief flourishing of formalism was, however, short‐lived. Formalism was quickly abandoned by philosophers such as Hegel and Schopenhauer as well as by composers such as Beethoven and Liszt. (Bonds devotes a short chapter to a discussion of Liszt's program music.) We then come to Wagner. Wagner was a staunch opponent of “absolute music.” (He coined the term and intended it pejoratively.) Ironically, however, Wagner, by denying that purely instrumental music could have expressive content, can be seen as paving the way for formalism. If purely instrumental music cannot be appreciated for its expressive content, we need another account of why such music is an object of aesthetic appreciation. Formalism has just such an account. And it was not long before a great champion of formalism emerged. In 1854 Hanslick published Vom Musikalisch‐Schönen. The core of Bonds' book is an examination of Hanlick's work, its context, and its fallout. Bonds does much more than provide an exposition of Hanslick's views about music. He does a masterful job of revealing the origins of Hanslick's ideas and showing that many of them are much less original than is often thought. Hanslick simply gave a classic expression to ideas that were floating around in several quarters. Bonds also demonstrates the tensions and inconsistencies in Hanslick's thought. The record shows how Hanslick's thought became more consistent. (Bonds provides a detailed history of how the concluding paragraph of On the Musically Beautiful evolved as Hanslick shed some of his metaphysical baggage and became more consistently a formalist.) Bonds shows how Hanslick frequently misrepresents the beliefs of his opponents. A picture emerges of a man characterized by mendaciousness and “mean‐spiritedness” (p. 169). Bonds shows how Hanslick's theoretical commitments drove his aesthetic judgments. He was willing to see the works of Schütz, Palestrina, and even the sonatas and concerti of Bach “go up in flames.” He found the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony “unbeautiful.” (When someone finds himself writing such things, it is time for him to go back and find the flaw in his reasoning.) Finally, Bonds investigates the connection between Hanslick's formalism and conservative politics. (The connection between formalism and right wing politics continued, Bonds notes, during the cold war when the CIA supported formalism in the arts.) In the short term, Hanslick was unsuccessful in converting many composers to formalism. (Earlier generations of composers, as Bonds points out, were usually resolutely anti‐formalist, a point that Hanslick conveniently avoids.) Mahler, Richard Strauss, and the other major composers of the second half of the nineteenth century usually believed that music is expressive and has content. (Contrary to what Bonds suggests, Mahler was pretty resolutely anti‐formalist. He wrote that a composition originates in “something the composer has experienced” and his symphonies sometimes have detailed, though not public, programs.) All of that changed come the twentieth century. Under the influence of Walter Pater and Clive Bell, in addition to Hanslick, formalism began to flourish in all of the arts. Schoenberg, writing in 1909, spoke of the “flowering of so‐called absolute music.” Other major composers, including Stravinsky, embraced formalism. (For some reason, today's defenders of formalism seldom refer to the composers whose work should most successfully illustrate the contentlessness of music.) Bonds discusses in some detail the growing appeal of formalism, in all of the arts, from the beginning of the twentieth century on. According to Bonds, the heyday of formalism stretched from 1945 to 1970. He believes that formalism began to lose its cachet in musical circles after 1970, and he attributes its demise to the rise of post‐modernism. (If this is true, it is the only good thing I have ever heard about post‐modernism.) Prior to the dominance of composers who embraced formalism, Bonds believes, there was a period when composers and theorists alike sought a compromise between formalism and anti‐formalism. I think that it is more accurate to say that there was a period when a variety of views about music were current. Some writers embraced formalism, others anti‐formalism. It is pretty hard to reconcile views that are, after all, contradictory. It must be said, however, that some formalists, not ones discussed by Bonds, have tempered their views somewhat. In particular, the enhanced formalism of Kivy allows that music can be expressive of certain emotions. One consequence of formalism is that musical beauty is ineffable. Hanslick certainly believed that we cannot capture in words what makes a work of music beautiful. Contemporary formalists also typically take musical beauty to be ineffable. Bonds pays comparatively little attention to this consequence of formalism. Absolute Music is a good book that would have been even better had it paid more attention to ineffability. In my view, formalism is unsatisfactory precisely because it makes the beauty of music inexplicable. In the end, Bonds is a little disingenuous when he disclaims any philosophical agenda. By the end of his book, it is clear that he does not have a great deal of sympathy for formalism. He takes it to be “self‐evident” that “music is an art of expression” (p. 41). He concludes by saying that “the idea of wholly a autonomous art … finds relatively few adherents today” (p. 298). In my experience, it is still pretty widespread in philosophy of music circles, as the examples of Kivy and Zangwill suggest. I agree, however, that the worm seems to have turned again, and the fortunes of formalism are in decline. I am not so sure, however, that post‐modernism is undermining formalism in philosophy of music. Rather it is threatened by a return to empiricism: a focus on the experience of music and on psychological research into the experience of music. Bonds has written a meticulously researched and informative book on the history of formalist thinking about music. It is mercifully free of jargon and the sort of “theory” that philosophers often find off‐putting. While it is not a contribution to philosophy of music, it will nevertheless be of interest to many philosophers interested in music. It brings to the attention of philosophers a wider range of examples from the history of music theory than commonly comes to their knowledge. Moreover, it deepens our understanding of Hanslick by placing his work in its historical context.

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