By Charles Rosen
Is there a second in background whilst a piece gets its excellent interpretation? Or is negotiation continually required to maintain the prior and accommodate the current? the liberty of interpretation, Charles Rosen indicates in those gleaming explorations of tune and literature, exists in a fragile stability with constancy to the identification of the unique work.
Rosen cautions us to prevent doctrinaire extremes whilst impending artwork of the earlier. to appreciate Shakespeare purely as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer may comprehend him, or to modernize his performs with out feel of what they convey from his age, deforms the paintings, making it much less ambiguous and inherently much less attention-grabbing. For a piece to stay alive, it needs to switch personality over the years whereas conserving a sound witness to its earliest kingdom. while twentieth-century students remodeled Mozart's bland, idealized nineteenth-century snapshot into that of a contemporary progressive expressionist, they satirically restored the popularity he had between his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart turned once more a posh innovator, difficult to accomplish and to understand.
Drawing on numerous serious tools, Rosen continues that listening or analyzing with intensity-for pleasure-is the single task quintessential for complete appreciation. It permits us to event a number of percentages in literature and track, and to prevent spotting purely the progressive components of creative construction. via reviving the feel that artistic endeavors have intrinsic advantages that convey excitement, we justify their carrying on with existence.
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Freedom and the Arts : essays on music and literature
Is there a second in background while a piece gets its perfect interpretation? Or is negotiation constantly required to maintain the earlier and accommodate the current? the liberty of interpretation, Charles Rosen indicates in those gleaming explorations of track and literature, exists in a fragile stability with constancy to the identification of the unique paintings.
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Sample text
I have spoken of the relation of score to realization as an opposition. The work does not hand itself over easily to interpretation; it does not surrender without a fight; it puts obstacles in the way of the executant. If you have played a Beethoven sonata, then you know what the problems are of looking at a score and how it is to be turned into sound. But with a recording, what you hear is the sound without being aware of the score behind it. Both experiences are fine, but most people today no longer have the experience of knowing what it is to transform a score into sound and the kind of resistance that the work exhibits.
Both experiences are fine, but most people today no longer have the experience of knowing what it is to transform a score into sound and the kind of resistance that the work exhibits. With five or ten recordings of the Matthew Passion, we can see that they’re all different but we’re not exactly sure of the process that transforms the score into the sound. The Future of Music 37 This process is a physical experience absolutely essential to the Western music tradition. Listening to a record, we neither feel the physical difficulty of realizing a musical text, nor can we witness, as in a concert hall, the exciting spectacle of the torments of the performer.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the most advanced forms of popular music Freedom and the Arts 36 were essentially improvised events, each of which was one-off, ephemeral: it was preserved not by a score, but on occasion by a recording, and was basically unrepeatable. In improvisation, the distinction between composition and realization disappears almost completely. So it does as well in another typical phenomenon of our time, electronic music: the playing of an electronically realized composition on tape is identical with the composer’s intention, except where the reproducing equipment or the acoustical setup is defective.