Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New - Hardcover

Rosen, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674177304 ISBN 13: 9780674177307

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2000

Synopsis

An extraordinarily gifted musician and writer, Charles Rosen is a peerless commentator on the history and performance of music. Critical Entertainments brings together many of the essays that have established him as one of the most influential and eloquent voices in the field of music in our time.

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. In sum, Critical Entertainments is a treasury of the vast learning, wit, and insight that we have come to expect from this remarkable writer. It will delight all music lovers.

About this title

Review:

Charles Rosen is that exciting college professor from whom you felt honored to earn a B-plus, and his new anthology is bracing. Most of the material, which covers 25 years of Rosen's book reviews, was originally published in general-interest periodicals. Readers who didn't feel up to the score-reading demands of The Classical Style and The Romantic Generation will have no trouble here.

Especially welcome is "The Irrelevance of Serious Music," in which Rosen notes that "the death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition," before reassuring us that "the music that survives is the music that musicians want to play" and that the problems are of "resentment, of hatred for an art that one does not understand--or rather, for an art that one is unwilling to understand." Earlier, Rosen had offered his own experiences with Elliott Carter's Double Concerto as a paradigm for the gradual acceptance of a new work, and addressed the difficult elements in Beethoven's compositions that make Rosen's own performances of the sonatas so striking.

Rosen can be funny, both in the dry humor of his thoughts on the New Grove and Harvard dictionaries of music and in his outright jokes as a hapless analyst of Mozart takes it on the chin. And he is touching in a remembrance of Oliver Strunk, whose distrust of dogmatic theory is reflected in all of these essays. A chapter on the keyboard music of Bach and Handel could stand on its own, with Rosen placing Bach's keyboard output squarely in the center of his achievement; his discussion of "the new musicology" (with particular attention to Lawrence Dreyfuss and Susan McClary) is remarkably evenhanded. Anyone who writes that Richard Taruskin "beats his dead horses with infectious enthusiasm" gets an A himself. --William R. Braun

About the Author:

Charles Rosen is a pianist and Professor Emeritus of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In addition to The Classical Style, which won the National Book Award, his previous books include Sonata Forms and Romanticism and Realism (with Henri Zerner).

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0674177304
• ISBN 13: 9780674177307
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336