Mark Evan Bonds is the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 1992. He did his undergraduate work at Duke and received his PhD from Harvard University and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. His books include Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Harvard University Press, 1991), After Beethoven: Imperatives of Symphonic Originality (Harvard University Press, 1996), and Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton University Press, 2006). He has also published essays on the music of Haydn and Mozart and served as editor-in-chief of Beethoven Forum. He is the author of two college-level textbooks, both published by Pearson/Prentice-Hall: A History of Music in Western Culture, now in its third edition, and Listen to This, a music appreciation textbook aimed at general undergraduates, now in its second edition. He is currently at work on a new book entitled Absolute Music: The History of an Idea.

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