Word: rosens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FRONTIERS OF MEANING, A lively inquiry into music aesthetics published last year, Charles Rosen admiringly paraphrased painter Barnett Newman: "Musicology is for musicians what ornithology is for the birds...
...probably Newman's epigrammatic conciseness that Rosen savored, not any disdain for the discipline to which he has committed so much of his career. Still, the idea conveys a familiar question: Is anything to be gained from description, analysis and criticism of music that cannot be discerned by listening to the music? After all, medical philosophy, however well wrought, cannot save a life. In both disciplines, what matters is who is doing the dissecting...
...Romantic Generation (Harvard University Press; 723 pages; $39.95) is Rosen's demonstration of the value and pleasures of musicology. In the narrowest sense, the author explores a relatively brief period of music history--from the death of Beethoven (1827) to the death of Chopin (1849). Rosen applies not only his experience as an extraordinary pianist, but also his considerable grasp of such disciplines as art history, philosophy, literature and linguistics. The result is an elegant and altogether irresistible study that is destined to endure, along with an earlier, seminal work of Rosen's, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven...
Never rigid, Rosen's ideas grow from his intimacy with the music. The book comes with a CD (a wonderful idea) on which Rosen plays 16 selections that he analyzes in the book. Rosen has concurrently released a separate recording, also called The Romantic Generation (Music Masters Classics), that contains six pieces--by Chopin, Schumann and Liszt--whose historical importance he discusses as well. One highlight is Rosen's commanding performance of Liszt's terrifyingly difficult tour de force of homage and imagination, Reminiscences de Don Juan, inspired by Mozart's Don Giovanni. In the text, he isolates from that...
Mark Todd Rosen...