Professor Mark Evan Bonds - Class of 1960 Music Lecture

Prof. Mark Evan Bonds offers a Class of 1960 Lecture titled Music’s Fourth Wall: Perspectives on the History of Listening.

Composing, performing, listening: in histories of Western music, the last of these is by far the most elusive. Indeed, writing a history of listening is in some respects a fool’s errand, for there are as many histories as there are listeners. We can, however, identify at least one fundamental change in the most basic assumptions about listening, one that took place toward the end of the eighteenth century when an increasing number of instrumental works began to violate music’s “fourth wall.” In the theater, this is the imagined barrier that separates actors on the stage from the audience, and we typically invoke it only when it is broken, when actors step outside their roles and acknowledge themselves as actors. A parallel phenomenon in music draws overt attention to a work’s form and makes us aware of the agency of the composer. Such works placed a new burden of understanding on the musical public and ultimately led to the proliferation of “how-to-listen” guides, program notes, and music appreciation books.

Mark Evan Bonds (Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) received a B.A. in music and German from Duke University in 1975; an M.A. in musicology from the Universität Kiel (West Germany) in 1977; and a Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard University in 1988. He taught at Boston University before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992. His research interests include music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly instrumental music, aesthetic theory, and the intersections of music and philosophy. He has received fellowships in support of his research from the NEH, the ACLS, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF). His most recent books are The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography and Beethoven: Variations on a Life, both published by Oxford University Press in 2020. As a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2021–22, he is working on a new book, Music’s Fourth Wall and the Rise of Modern Listening.

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