Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity - Paperback

by Karol Berger (Author)

In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two groundbreaking claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian worldview. Until this historical moment, as Berger illustrates in his analysis of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, music was simply "in time." Its successive events unfolded one after another, but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, was not central to the way the music was experienced and understood. But after the shift, as he finds in looking at Mozart's Don Giovanni, the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; the cycle of time unbends and becomes an arrow. Berger complements these musical case studies with a rich survey of the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period.

Front Jacket

Karol Berger may have gone further than any other scholar before him--and very successfully so--in teasing out the historicity of music in a way that makes his discoveries convergent with the historicity of other media and art forms. In its argumentative brilliance, Berger's approach enhances our aesthetic pleasure in listening to music.--Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Stanford University

"This is a major work by a major scholar. Berger is unique; there is something uncanny about his powers of synthesis and his quality of insight. No one else can relate, as he does, the closest technical analysis of music to the broadest questions of philosophy."--Richard Taruskin, author of The Oxford History of Western Music

"This book is an event. The musical styles of Bach and Mozart are admirably contrasted to illustrate an epochal shift in the cultural construction of time occurring around 1750. Berger combines careful musical analysis with grand perspectives on the plane of cultural theory and the history of ideas. The intellectual world has long been waiting for musicology to open up to the "cultural turn" that other disciplines of the humanities took long ago: here is a book which can serve as a model."--Jan Assmann author of Die Zauberflöte: Oper und Mysterium

Author Biography

Karol Berger is the Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts at Stanford University. His books include A Theory of Art (2000) .