Charles Rosen: Quotes about the trip

Charles Rosen was American pianist and writer on music. Explore interesting quotes on way.
Charles Rosen: 138   quotes 2   likes

“The piano is the only keyboard instrument in which one can grandly vary the effects of the harmonics or overtones of a chord at will by balancing the sonority in different ways.”

Charles Rosen

Source: Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002), Ch. 1 Body and Mind

Way

“One of the pupils of Artur Schnabel told me that he never heard his teacher practice a difficult passage slowly, but he was struck by the way Schnabel would play one chord of a slow movement over and over, measuring and remeasuring the different components of the harmony.”

Charles Rosen

Source: Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002), Ch. 2 Listening to the Sound of the Piano

Way , Teachers

“Chopin's mazurkas stand apart from the rest of the considerable production inspired by folk music which reaches into all forms of Romantic music; they cannot conveniently be classified with any of the other manifestations. They are not arrangements of popular folk tunes, … He uses only fragments of melody, Polish formulas, typical national rhythms, and he combines them in his own way with great originality. From early on, Chopin's mazurkas are much more elaborate than the few modest pieces employing mazurka rhythms by Chopin's Polish predecessors, and they soon became the occasion for some of the most complex and pretentious of Chopin's forms.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

Music , Way

“It was this indifference to the quality of his material that earned Liszt the contempt of his most distinguished contemporaries and of many of the most respectable critics and historians of posterity. It was, nevertheless, his greatest strength. It made it possible for him to manipulate the material ruthlessly, to concentrate on effects of realization with unprecedented intensity, and to integrate styles and techniques of performance into composition in a new way. His invention of novel keyboard effects and his mastery of musical gesture have always been undervalued, especially by pianists of the German school who prefer the kind of music that can be executed while soulfully regarding the ceiling. On the whole, the most genuine understanding of his music has been displayed by musicians of eastern Europe, and he may almost be considered as the founder of Russian pianism.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 8 : Liszt: On Creation as Performance

School , Music , Way , Understanding

“We can, in fact, relive the history of taste in our own lives, the way embryos are supposed to go through the history of the evolution of a species.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense

Way , History

“Normally, misprints are either easily corrected or else so trivial that it makes no difference whether we play the correct or the faulty version. … Nevertheless, on rare occasions, a misprint or slip of the pen may challenge our view of the musical language. These extreme cases may help us understand a little more about the way music acquires meaning, or what it means to say that the music makes sense.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense

Music , Way , Understanding , Sense

“The world of Debussy is a seductive oasis, and it is hard to leave it after spending many days immersed in its atmosphere. Playing Debussy-or any other composer with a strong and idiosyncratic personality-affects not only one's cast of mind but the physical disposition as well, the way the muscles work and the fingers come into contact with the ivories.”

Charles Rosen

Source: Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002), Ch. 2 Listening to the Sound of the Piano

World , Way , Strong , Personality

“The opposition between structure and sonority in music is almost as misleading as that between line and color in the visual arts. Baudelaire insisted, correctly, that Delacroix was one of the three greatest draftsmen of the century, and emphasized his mastery of line. In the same way, a study of Chopin demonstrates the intimate relation between line and color in music.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

Art , Music , Color , Way

“Schumann is the most representative musical figure of central European Romanticism as much because of his limitations as because of his genius: in his finest works, indeed, he exploited these limitations in such a way that they gave a force to his genius that no other contemporary could attain.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 12 : Schumann: Triumph and Failure of the Romantic Ideal

Music , Way

“We can see that canonic status is accorded to the works of a composer not by posterity, or at least not by a posterity as distant in time as is sometimes thought; nor does it depend very much on whether the works are frequently performed for the public in every important musical center. To a certain extent, canonic status is actually built into some new works, partly by the way they impose themselves on an already substantial musical tradition. This may explain why it is so difficult to alter a firmly installed canon in any radical way, or to dislodge works that have been an integral part of it for some time.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 2 : How to Become Immortal

Music , Way , Distant , Time

“There is a paradox at the heart of Chopin's style, in its unlikely combination of a rich chromatic web of polyphony, based on a profound experience of J. S. Bach, with a sense of melody and a way of sustaining the melodic line derived directly from Italian opera. The paradox is only apparent, and it is never felt as such when one hears the music. The two influences are perfectly synthesized, and they give each other a new kind of power.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 5 : Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms

Music , Way , Sense , Heart