Charles Rosen

"In Piano Notes, he writes for an audience about an old friend - the piano itself. Drawing upon a lifetime of wisdom and the accumulated lore of many great performers of the past, Rosen shows why the instrument demands such a stark combination of mental and physical prowess. Readers will gather many little-known insights - from how pianists vary their posture, to how splicings and microphone placements can ruin recordings, to how the history of composition was dominated by the piano for two centuries. Stories of many great musicians abound. Rosen reveals Nadia Boulanger's favorite way to avoid commenting on the performances of her friends ("You know what I think, " spoken with utmost earnestness), why Glenn Gould's recordings suffer from "double-strike" touches, and how even Vladimir Horowitz became enamored of splicing multiple performances into a single recording. Rosen's explanation of the piano's physical pleasures, demands, and discontents will delight and instruct anyone who has ever sat at a keyboard, as well as everyone who loves to listen to the instrument."--BOOK JACKET.

"Beethoven's piano sonatas form one of the most important collections of works in the whole history of music. Spanning several decades of his life as a composer, the sonatas soon came to be seen as the first body of substantial serious works for piano suited to performance in large concert halls seating hundreds of people." "In this practical guide for both listener and performer, Charles Rosen places the sonatas in context and provides an understanding of the formal principles involved in interpreting and performing this unique repertoire, covering such aspects as sonata form, phrasing, and tempo, as well as the use of pedal and trills. In the second part of his book, he looks at the sonatas individually, from the earliest works of the 1790s through the sonatas of Beethoven's youthful popularity of the early 1800s, the subsequent years of mastery, the years of stress (1812-1817), and the last three sonatas of the 1820s."--BOOK JACKET

"These essays cover a broad range of musical forms, historical periods, and issues - from Bach through Brahms to Carter and Schoenberg, from contrapuntal keyboard music to opera, from performance practices to music history as a discipline. They revisit Rosen's favorite subjects and pursue some less familiar paths. They court controversy (with strong opinions about performance on historical instruments, the so-called New Musicology, and the alleged "death" of classical music) and offer enlightenment on subjects as diverse as music dictionaries and the aesthetics of stage fright. All are unified by Rosen's abiding concerns and incomparable style. Critical Entertainments will delight all music lovers."--BOOK JACKET.

"What is the real business of the critic?" Rosen asks of George Bernard Shaw in one of his essays. It is a question he answers throughout this collection as he demonstrates and analyzes various critical approaches. In writing about the Romantic poets Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, William Cowper, and Friedrich Holderlin, he examines the kind of criticism which attempts to uncover concealed code. He investigates the relationship between Romantic aesthetic theory and artworks, and explores the way Romantic art criticism has been practiced by critics from Friedrich Schlegel to Walter Benjamin. In essays on Honore de Balzac, Robert Schumann, Gustave Flaubert, and others, he highlights the intersections between Romantic art and music; the artist's separation of life and artistic representations of it; and the significance of the established text.

Rosen examines how 19th Century composers extended the boundaries of music, and their engagement with literature, landscape and the divine.

What does it mean to understand music? What, if anything, does music mean? Composers, performers, listeners, and scholars may answer these questions differently, but what sense of music do they share? When music seems unfamiliar or unlike anything we have heard before, we say we don't "like" it. How is taking pleasure from music related to understanding it? In this lucid and entertaining book, the noted pianist Charles Rosen explores these and other issues as they arise in various musical contexts. Performers' interpretations may be filled with errors, after all, that then become part of a tradition; a composer's work may be variously assessed by his contemporaries (Mr. Rosen gives us an eye-opening account of how Beethoven's towering reputation was established so early); and musical analysis can mislead as well as deepen our understanding of a composition's splendor. In The Frontiers of Meaning Charles Rosen brings to a bold, inspiring study of music - as text, as performance, as listening experience - the insight and bravura elegance for which his own work as a practicing musician is justly famous.