“Mathematicians tells us that it is easy to invent mathematical theorems which are true, but that it is hard to find interesting ones. In analyzing music or writing its history, we meet the same difficulty, and it is compounded by another. For whom is it interesting? To paraphrase a famous remark of Barnett Newman, musicology is for musicians what ornithology is for the birds.”

—  Charles Rosen

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 3 : Explaining the Obvious

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Charles Rosen 69
American pianist and writer on music 1927–2012

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