The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music

by Charles Rosen

In three lucid and entertaining essays, Charles Rosen explores the true meaning of music and how this meaning changes from performer to performer, as well as audience to audience.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Art

Hardcover

First published July 1, 1994

About the author

Charles Rosen was a concert pianist, Professor of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and the author of numerous books, including The Classical Style, The Romantic Generation, and Freedom and the Arts.

Reviews

[Ferran Benito · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conocía a Charles Rosen como pianista –más que notable–, pero el encuentro con su faceta ensayística ha sido un interesante descubrimiento.

La erudición de Rosen es extraordinaria, y no queda para nada restringida, según parece, al ámbito de la música –aunque este sea, lógicamente, su principal campo–. El despliegue de conocimientos y de capacidad analítica que realiza en las apenas 115 páginas que conforman este librito es simplemente abrumadora, y ofrece un punto de partida a tener en cuenta para replantear algunas nociones importantes en el campo de la musicología.

Las fronteras del significado recoge tres conferencias que Charles Rosen dictó en 1993 y en las que propone una reflexión sobre aspectos como la dialéctica tradición-novedad, la creación del canon estético o la relevancia (o tal vez falta de relevancia) del análisis musical de cara a la interpretación de una pieza; todo ello sin descuidar, claro, el análisis concreto de algunas obras, que le sirve para reforzar sus puntos de vista (esta última, sin duda, es la parte más difícil para aquellos lectores que carezcan de conocimientos un poco profundos de teoría musical).

La idea de fondo, según entiendo, es que, siendo la historia de la estética la historia de una superposición de códigos y significados nuevos que van complementándose (o sustituyéndose) los unos a los otros, si nos ceñimos al ámbito de la música, resulta especialmente difícil establecer una tradición válida en la medida en que se trata de un arte que se encuentra en la frontera entre el significado y el sinsentido (o el "no significado"). Dicho en otras palabras, la música tiene de algún modo un significado (porque todos estamos capacitados para entenderla, disfrutarla o aburrirla en la medida en que nos hemos criado en la tradición occidental), pero este significado dista mucho de ser universal y compartido.

De aquí surgen la mayoría de problemas que analiza Rosen en el libro. Entre ellos, por ejemplo, la galvanización de ciertas erratas textuales que la repetición ha convertido en tradición interpretativa (Rosen da muchos ejemplos en este sentido). O bien, más interesante, la innovación entendida como la necesidad de vencer continuamente las resistencias de los oyentes, que es el destino incluso de compositores que, como Beethoven, fueron ya célebres en su tiempo (esta resistencia se da ciertamente en todas las artes, pero nunca es tan palmaria como ante una disonancia que la oreja no se ha acostumbrado a escuchar).

El libro de Rose ofrece, en definitiva, un tejido riquísimo de ideas fecundas, y lo descubre al mismo tiempo como un músico con una capacidad crítica deslumbrante y con una preocupación poco corriente por dar una justificación sólida a sus decisiones musicales (con las horas de trabajo, de búsqueda y de reflexión que eso conlleva). Por lo demás, incluye algunos apuntes sobre el uso del motivo musical en Beethoven y en Schubert que harán las delicias de unos cuantos melómanos.

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Recomendado para: Partiendo de que una persona que se acerque a un libro llamado Las fronteras del significado no se sorprenderá probablemente al encontrarse con un texto denso y de talante filosófico, recomendaría leerlo especialmente a aquellos que tengan cierta formación musical, puesto que la teoría y el análisis musical abundan en sus páginas. Dicho esto, la erudición extraordinaria de Rosen –que incluye también el conocimiento de unas cuantas anécdotas y frivolidades–, junto con un fino sentido de la ironía, brindarán probablemente al lector alguna que otra sonrisa; algo que, en honor a la verdad, siempre se agradece en un ensayo.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rosen was an amazing musicologist, with a fine ear for penetrating details. These essays move a little bit away from that strength; Rosen wants to talk about how we can understand music on its own terms (rather than by saying a Beethoven sonata is like a poem, or Mozart is like Goethe, or whatever). The difficulty lies in the way that good music continually updates those terms -- you can't understand Debussy if you analyze him like Beethoven, obviously. So how do we as listeners understand newer music as it comes along?

It's a bit of a philosophical question, and I think Rosen is not at his best looking at these big philosophical questions. But the saving grace of the book is his close readings of various pieces, showing how Schubert manipulates a theme in a song, making it cover a wider and wider interval over time; and also showing that he's not exactly manipulating the theme ala Beethoven -- it's more about giving the listener the sense that it's the same basic idea, even though the actual expression is pretty different. (I'm not explaining it well, but that's why I read books like this -- Rosen does it better than I ever could!)

He also has a nice discussion of musical errors. That is, there are misprints that have been around a long time, and are pretty obviously wrong (parallel octaves in a Mozart piano concerto, for example), but have become calcified into "the way to perform it." In most cases, equivalent misprints will be fixed in books pretty quickly (leaving out quirkinesses in, say, "Ulysses"), because we can all see that they're mis-spellings or whatever. But music is in a weird space between making sense (we can feel a structure to it, we can hear when some notes are wrong, etc) and nonsense (in the end, it's just abstract, and you can't always easily say if an A natural is a misprint for A# or not -- maybe the composer meant to shock you with the dissonance).

[Nancy Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rosen is well established both as a pianist and as a critic, one who wears his astonishing knowledge lightly and writes with grace and clarity. In these three short lectures, he addresses the issue of how music comes to have a meaning, despite having no message. It begins with an absorbing description of music criticism in the Romantic era, a time when the idea of a fixed standard for judging art, music or literature began to disintegrate. "Standards could no longer be imposed from outside or in advance, and critics finally recognised that a new work was capable of establishing its own system of values" (7). Along the way, he gently dismisses a widespread idea that there is some kind of obscure code, or key, that "unlocks" the meaning of music. Rather he describes the generation of meaning in terms of listeners' familiarity with the musical culture of their own time and place, the shock and disgust they are likely to feel when hearing music that challenges, or "offends" that culture, and -- here he draws on his own experience -- often the gradual expansion of their sense of what is "their own" culture until it embraces the new.

[Elizabeth Kefaloukos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Within this piece, Rosen expounds upon the conclusions he draws in lectures- delving into foundational elements of musicianship and what it means to experience music. To derive meaning from aural experience is complicated and involves comprehension of one’s role in interacting with music. These roles of ‘artist’, ‘audience’ and ‘critic’ have changed over time and Rosen’s treatise holds this under a lens, focusing on the evolving traditions of Western Classical music.

[B & A & F · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Rosen's statement that music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense, or Lamb's quote "listening to music is like reading a book that is all punctuation." Instrument music has patterns, or modulations, but beyond that it's mostly free association or interpretation imposed by the audience or the person writing the music.

[Philippe · Rating 3 out of 5]

The lectures in this book focus on the transition from classicism to romanticism in western musical history. This passage manifested itself in a shift of the stature of the artist. Instead of a promulgator of a venerable tradition, he became a self-conscious breaker of rules. The mandate of the critic changed accordingly: the critic wasn't called to judge but to explain, to make intelligible the rule-breaking work of art. And, finally, the performer had to assume a much more analytical posture to be able to detect unexpected musical patterns and relationships as a basis for a performance strategy. The same applies to the general listener who faced the task to make sense of novelty against the background of the all-enveloping tradition he or she was part of.

In sum, what was at stake in this transition to a romantic aesthetic was the development of an acute capacity for musical sense-making. Composer, critic, performer and listener bumped into the 'frontiers of meaning' and had to find ways to make this intelligible for themselves. Biographic, motivic and harmonic analysis may have helped them to do so, up to a point. Eventually we have to acknowledge that music continues to hover at the border of meaning and nonsense and refuses to be arrested by any system of analysis or interpretation.

I believe this is the main thrust of Rosen's meandering narrative that stretches over these three informal lectures. (Maybe it's the meandering that makes them informal.) While it is rather hard to keep track of the key arguments, it is an unalloyed pleasure to partake of Mr Rosen's inexhaustible erudition. Also for the general reader, who is not able to follow the sometimes intricate analytical excursions, these essays reveal a fascinating vista on the teeming landscape of German literary and musical romanticism (3,5 stars).

[Stephen Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read several of Rosen's books. While I don't always share his conclusions, I find the insights that he brings often combine the practical performer with the astute scholar. He is more often right than wrong. This little book is three talks he gave in 1993. In them he goes to the heart of what he contends music can mean and does not mean. That it is often on the edge of nonsense with its search for beauty is some.thing worth thinking about

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Rosen is one of my favorite brainiacs and I really liked this book. I want to read The Classical Style because I think it is going to make me smarter, and more importantly have a greater appreciation for the music that I love.

[haryii]

Ok

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

anyone interested in alternate ways of looking at listening