Details

ISBN-10: 0674988469
ISBN-13: 9780674988460
Publisher: Belknap Press
Publish Date: 11/03/2020
Dimensions: 7.20" L, 4.60" W, 0.80" H

The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking: Conversations about Art and Performance

Translator: Catherine Zerner
Foreword by: Israel Rosenfield

Hardcover

Price: $21.95

Overview

Brilliant, practical, and humorous conversations with one of the twentieth-century’s greatest musicologists on art, culture, and the physical pain of playing a difficult passage until one attains its rewards.

Throughout his life, Charles Rosen combined formidable intelligence with immense skill as a concert pianist. He began studying at Juilliard at age seven and went on to inspire a generation of scholars to combine history, aesthetics, and score analysis in what became known as “new musicology.”

The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking presents a master class for music lovers. In interviews originally conducted and published in French, Rosen’s friend Catherine Temerson asks carefully crafted questions to elicit his insights on the evolution of music–not to mention painting, theater, science, and modernism. Rosen touches on the usefulness of aesthetic reflection, the pleasure of overcoming stage fright, and the drama of conquering a technically difficult passage. He tells vivid stories about composers from Chopin and Wagner to Stravinsky and Elliott Carter. In Temerson’s questions and Rosen’s responses arise conundrums both practical and metaphysical. Is it possible to understand a work without analyzing it? Does music exist if it isn’t played?

Throughout, Rosen returns to the theme of sensuality, arguing that if one does not possess a physical craving to play an instrument, then one should choose another pursuit. Rosen takes readers to the heart of the musical matter. “Music is a way of instructing the soul, making it more sensitive,” he says, “but it is useful only insofar as it is pleasurable. This pleasure is manifest to anyone who experiences music as an inexorable need of body and mind.”

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Reviews
Charles Rosen was a rarity among musicians; he excelled equally at the highest levels of performance and scholarship. This book presents the best kind of intellectual conversation: elevated, wide-ranging, impossible to predict, and sometimes very funny indeed. You'll wish you could have joined in.–Tim Page, Professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism and Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, and winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism
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Details

ISBN-10: 0674988469
ISBN-13: 9780674988460
Publisher: Belknap Press
Publish Date: 11/03/2020
Dimensions: 7.20" L, 4.60" W, 0.80" H
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