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.