Absolute music, Bonds, Mark Evan (cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor, Department Of Music, University Of North Carolina)

The core of this book focuses on the period between 1850 and 1945. Although the idea of pure music is as old as antiquity, the term absolute music is itself relatively recent. It was Richard Wagner who coined the term, in 1846, and he used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the
limitations of purely instrumental music. For Wagner, music that was absolute was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. His contemporary, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, embraced this quality of isolation as a guarantor of purity. Only pure, absolute music, he argued, could realize the
highest potential of the art.

Bonds reveals how and why perceptions of absolute music changed so radically between the 1850s and 1920s. When it first appeared, absolute music was a new term applied to old music, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had become-paradoxically--an old term associated with the new
music of modernists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Bonds argues that the key developments in this shift lay not in discourse about music but rather the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century-line and color, as opposed to
object-helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism.