The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music - Hardcover

Rosen, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809072548 ISBN 13: 9780809072545

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 1994

Synopsis

In three lucid and entertaining essays, Charles Rosen explores the true meaning of music and how this meaning changes from performer to performer, as well as audience to audience.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Rosen is a professor of music and social thought at the University of Chicago.

Reviews

Rosen, a noteworthy scholar/pianist and National Book Award-winning author (The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, 1972), presents a series of lectures that he delivered in Rome in 1993. He begins by recalling a principle of biology in explaining the evolution of one's personal musical taste and then presents some examples of mistakes that have crept into certain music scores. Another lecture covers Beethoven as viewed by his literary contemporaries. The final lecture explains why Mozart occasionally sounds like Puccini, the success behind Schubert's An die Musik, and why he writes about music. Recommended for music libraries.
James E. Ross, Seattle P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In lectures given in Rome in 1993--which were cosponsored by the publisher and the New York Review of Books , and are collected here--Rosen ( The Classical Style ) tackles the difficult question of how we understand music. He contends that because music has no fixed meaning, the only conclusion we can reach is that music makes sense when we are comfortable with it. He demonstrates this with passages from works by Beethoven and Chopin in which long-standing errors in scores have become so familiar that the correct readings now sound wrong. He further argues that because each new style of music creates its own meaning, methods of musical analysis must constantly change, and by way of example he shows how Beethoven's music, which often perplexed his contemporaries, gave rise to a type of analysis not suited to the works of later composers. Rosen's cogent examination of motivic development in Beethoven and Schubert and his observations on the musical structure in several of Schubert's vocal works prove that lucid analysis can deepen our understanding of music. For the most part, however, his elusive arguments will be of primary interest to the cognoscente.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Short, extremely perceptive discussions about ``meaning'' and ``understanding'' in serious music that will captivate new listeners as well as the musically tuned-in. Readers who can set aside their envy of Rosen's talents--he is a renowned pianist on stage and recordings, a persuasive advocate of new music, and a world-class prose stylist (The Classical Style won a National Book Award in 1972)--will devour these three lectures that Rosen gave in Rome last year under the aegis of the New York Review of Books. For wit, intelligence, and original thought about the problems of how to speak (or write) cogently about classical masterpieces as well as the challenging musical art of today, Rosen has few rivals. He starts with a large enough question: ``What does it mean to understand music?'' Expanding his first ``modest'' definition that ``understanding music simply means not being irritated or puzzled by it,'' he goes on to suggest that the historical evolution of musical criticism began with judgment (i.e., deciding how a musical piece measures up to accepted classical models or, more generally, to listeners' unconscious expectations) and in the last 200 years was transformed into an imaginative exercise in comprehension. Given the radical leaps in musical language taken by 20th-century composers, Rosen's investigation of changing critical criteria is especially pertinent for the contemporary listener who, sorely tried, is still trying to understand modern music. Rosen does rely on some musical examples printed in the text, but an inability to read musical notation will not measurably diminish the reader's pleasure in following his train of thought. Not every reader will agree with all of Rosen's notions, particularly his Mahler-esque maxim that ``the name generally given to widely accepted error is tradition.'' Still, few music lovers will come away unsatisfied. A work of genuine intellectual nourishment, brief but brilliant. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Rosen is a greatly talented man. As a pianist, he has provided compelling insights in performances of a wide range of works. As a writer, he has won the National Book Award and appears frequently in the New York Review of Books. In these three lectures, he examines, relatively informally, how music communicates meaning. In the first, he considers the process of how a listener seeks out the familiar in new works of music and the impact that the need to do so has upon reception of the music. He describes how this need for the familiar contributes to the persistence of errors in the scores, and he remarks upon how such errors generally are discovered and fixed. The second lecture is an extended meditation, first, on how Beethoven assumed his status as an immortal at a very early stage in his career, and then, on the process of canon formation in music. The third piece, "Explaining the Obvious," examines how scholarship can mislead or deepen one's understanding of a musical work. In this elegant book, Rosen is always the urbane and fantastically erudite musical mandarin. John Shreffler

Edition details

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809072548
• ISBN 13: 9780809072545
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 145