Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking: Conversations about Art and Performance

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

Rosen, Charles
Temerson, Catherine
Zerner, Catherine

Hardcover

Classical MusicMusic Instruction: GeneralMusic Reference

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0674988469
ISBN13: 9780674988460
Publisher: Belknap Pr
Published: Nov 3 2020
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.80 Width: 4.60 Depth: 7.20
Language: English

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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