Posting Date: October 2, 2009
Distinguished professor completes residency at KSU School of Music
By Jarmea L. Boone
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Mark Evan Bonds |
Mark Evan Bonds, significant scholar and distinguished professor of musicology, taught music history and music appreciation courses during a recent residency on campus. KSU Assistant Professor of Music Edward Eanes adopted Bonds’ music appreciation text, “Listen to This,” published by Pearson, and his music history text, “A History of Music in Western Culture,” for fall classes. “During the process of negotiating the adoption of the new text for fall, I asked Pearson if Evan could do a residency to teach each of our six sections of Music 1107 and Music History,” says Eanes. “With the drastic budget cuts in Georgia, I wasn’t sure if funds from KSU would be available, so Pearson covered the entire cost of this latest residency.”
KSU’s Music 1107 classes had input into the selection of the book’s cover for ‘Listen to This’ and provided feedback for sample chapters. “Bonds’ scholarly publications has broadened the traditional view of 18th- and 19th-century music by illuminating the frequent use of rhetorical devices from oration and the theatre in purely instrumental works,” says Eanes. “His books get down to basics and focus solely on a repertory of compositions chosen not only for their pedagogical and representative purpose, but also because of the sheer joy, beauty and plain old fun they provide.”
According to Eanes, Bonds has challenged the field of musicology. “For many years, the field of musicology, or music history, was extremely conservative, staid, boring and never changing. Bonds and his contemporaries have injected vitality and broad-mindedness into the research and teaching of music history.”
Bonds received a bachelor’s degree in music and German from Duke University, a master’s degree in musicology from the Universität Kiel in West Germany, and a doctorate degree in musicology from Harvard University. He taught at Boston University before joining the at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992. His research interests include music of the Classic and Romantic eras, particularly instrumental music and aesthetic theory.