New Releases by Charles Rosen

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.”

The 1980s were arguably the NBA's best decade, giving rise to Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan. They were among the game's greatest players who brought pro basketball out of its 1970s funk and made it faster, more fluid, and more exciting. Off the court the game was changing rapidly too, with the draft lottery, shoe commercials, and a style driven largely by excess. One player who personified the eighties excess is Micheal Ray Richardson. During his eight-year career in the NBA (1978-86), he was a four-time All-Star, twice named to the All-Defense team, and the first player to lead the league in both assists and steals. He was also a heavy cocaine user who went on days-long binges but continued to be signed by teams that hoped he'd get straight. Eventually he was the first and only player to be permanently disqualified from the NBA for repeat drug use. Tracking the rise, fall, and eventual redemption of Richardson throughout his playing days and subsequent coaching career, Charley Rosen describes the life‑defining pitfalls Richardson and other players faced and considers key themes such as off‑court and on‑court racism, anti-Semitism, womanizing, allegations of point‑shaving within the league, and drug and alcohol abuse by star players. By constructing his various lines of narration around the polarizing figure of Richardson--equal parts basketball savant, drug addict, and pariah--Rosen illuminates some of the more unseemly aspects of the NBA during this period, going behind the scenes to provide an account of what the league's darker side was like during its celebrated golden age.

A few years after its invention by James Naismith, basketball became the primary sport in the crowded streets of the Jewish neighborhood on New York's Lower East Side. Participating in the new game was a quick and enjoyable way to become Americanized. Jews not only dominated the sport for the next fifty‑plus years but were also instrumental in modernizing the game. Barney Sedran was considered the best player in the country at the City College of New York from 1909 to 1911. In 1927 Abe Saperstein took over management of the Harlem Globetrotters, playing a key role in popularizing and integrating the game. Later he helped found the American Basketball Association and introduced the three-point shot. More recently, Nancy Lieberman played in a men's pro summer league and became the first woman to coach a men's pro team, and Larry Brown became the only coach to win both NCAA and the NBA championships. While the influence of Jewish players, referees, coaches, and administrators has gradually diminished since the mid‑1950s, the current basketball scene features numerous Jews in important positions. Through interviews and lively anecdotes from franchise owners, coaches, players, and referees, The Chosen Game explores the contribution of Jews to the evolution of present-day pro basketball.

"During the 1972-73 season, the Philadelphia 76ers were not just a bad team; they were fantastically awful. Doomed from the start after losing their leading scorer and rebounder, Billy Cunningham, as well as head coach Jack Ramsay, they lost twenty-one of their first twenty-three games. A Philadelphia newspaper began calling them the Seventy Sickers, and they duly lost their last thirteen games on their way to a not-yet-broken record of nine wins and seventy-three losses. Charley Rosen recaptures the futility of that season through the firsthand accounts of players, participants, and observers. Although the team was uniformly bad, there were still many memorable moments, and the lore surrounding the team is legendary. Once, when head coach Lou Rubin tried to substitute John Q. Trapp out of a game, Trapp refused and told Rubin to look behind the team's bench, whereby one of Trapp's friends supposedly opened his jacket to show his handgun. With only four wins at the All-Star break, Rubin was fired and replaced by player-coach Kevin Loughery. In addition to chronicling the 76ers' woes, Perfectly Awful also captures the drama, culture, and attitude of the NBA in an era when many white fans believed that the league had too many black players, most of whom were overtly political and/or using recreational drugs. "--

"Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work. Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state.

A few years ago, I suddenly realized that the men in my life had each written his memoirs. My father, my brother, and my husband were each very different, with completely distinct backgrounds. Their memoirs were a unique gift to me, and now, dear reader, a gift to you. My father, Charles Rosen, was born and raised in Harlem in New York City and, after his father was killed leaving his mother with 6 sons, had to start work to survive. He finally became a printer but, then in World War I, he fought at the front in France. His memoirs are very vivid memories of that war. After being wounded in battle, he returned home where he became a master printer. His memoirs of his love for his wife and family are only surpassed by his love of his country. My brother, Hank Rowan, began to draw and paint at a very early age. After WWII he pursued his career as an artist and professor of art which took him all over this country as well as the world. His memoirs are filled with that pursuit of Art which defines his life. My husband, Jim Cooke, not an artist, but a man who pursued truth, and had the ability to recognize it throughout his life, but especially during WWII where he fought in Europe. His memories are filled with events that needed to be documented, never to be forgotten, from Normandy to Buchenwald to Berlin. I am blessed to have been an important part of the lives of my father, my brother, and my husband, and best of all to be able to document those lives!

Through a range of musical examples, Rosen details the array of stylistic devices and techniques used to represent or convey sentiment. This is not, however, a listener's guide to any c̀orrect' response to a particular piece. Instead, Rosen provides the tools and terms with which to appreciate this central aspect of musical aesthetics, and indeed explores the phenomenon of contradictory sentiments embodied in a single motif or melody.

How does a work of music stir the senses, creating feelings of joy, sadness, elation, or nostalgia? Though sentiment and emotion play a vital role in the composition, performance, and appreciation of music, rarely have these elements been fully observed. In this succinct and penetrating book, Charles Rosen draws upon more than a half century as a performer and critic to reveal how composers from Bach to Berg have used sound to represent and communicate emotion in mystifyingly beautiful ways.Through a range of musical examples, Rosen details the array of stylistic devices and techniques used to represent or convey sentiment. This is not, however, a listener’s guide to any “correct” response to a particular piece. Instead, Rosen provides the tools and terms with which to appreciate this central aspect of musical aesthetics, and indeed explores the phenomenon of contradictory sentiments embodied in a single motif or melody. Taking examples from Chopin, Schumann, Wagner, and Liszt, he traces the use of radically changing intensities in the Romantic works of the nineteenth century and devotes an entire chapter to the key of C minor. He identifies a “unity of sentiment” in Baroque music and goes on to contrast it with the “obsessive sentiments” of later composers including Puccini, Strauss, and Stravinsky. A profound and moving work, Music and Sentiment is an invitation to a greater appreciation of the crafts of composition and performance.

Language has frequently been at the center of discussions about Holocaust writing. Yet English, a primary language of neither the persecutors nor the victims, has generally been viewed as marginal to the events of the Holocaust. Alan Rosen argues that this marginal status profoundly affects writing on the Holocaust in English and fundamentally shapes our understanding of the events. Sounds of Defiance chronicles the evolving status of English in writing about the Holocaust, from the period of the Second World War to the 1990s. ø Each chapter highlights a representative work from a different genre?psychology, sociology, memoir, tales, fiction, and film?and examines the special position of English with regard to the Holocaust, supported by references to the role of other languages, including Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. This original approach provides a new perspective on such standard works as Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Shawl, and Maus, while drawing attention to others largely unknown. Rosen also links this analysis of English writing to developments in the postwar period: the escalating production of writing on the Holocaust in English; the increasing prestige of English as a global language; and paradoxically, within the contexts of neocolonial and multilingual studies, the increasingly uncertain position of English.

Las sonatas para piano de Beethoven constituyen una de las colecciones de obras más importantes de la historia de la música. Compuestas a lo largo de varias décadas de la vida del artista, no tardaron en ser consideradas el primer corpus de música importante para piano adecuada para ser interpretada en grandes salas de conciertos. En esta guía práctica tanto para el intérprete como para el oyente, Rosen comienza situando las sonatas en su contexto y explica los principios formales de su interpretación, incluidos aspectos como la forma sonata, el fraseo y el tempo, el uso del pedal y los trinos, para, a continuación, analizar las sonatas individualmente. El CD que acompaña al libro, con interpretaciones del propio Rosen, va ejemplificando lo expuesto en el libro.

Poucas pessoas se igualam ao refinamento e discernimento de Charles Rosen, seja como pianista, estudioso de música ou crítico. Neste livro ele faz uma habilidosa crítica do período romântico por meio de alguns de seus principais ensaios, passeando pelo romance, poesia, conto, pintura e música. Ao fazer uma comparação sagaz ou uma justaposição surpreendente, Rosen nos abre novas perspectivas, sem jamais banalizar as questões, mas também sem escorregar para o hermetismo. \r\n

Solista de piano de reputación internacional y estudioso de su repertorio, CHARLES ROSEN condensa en este libro los conocimientos y las experiencias de más de medio siglo de dedicación a este instrumento. Autor de «El estilo clásico» (AM 29), uno de los ensayos musicales más difundidos e influyentes de las últimas décadas, Rosen ahonda en los secretos de un instrumento que conoce como pocos valiéndose de un estilo ameno que huye de los tecnicismos y se apoya con frecuencia en anécdotas muy reveladoras protagonizadas tanto por él mismo, que ha conocido a muchos de los más grandes compositores e intérpretes del siglo xx, como por otros pianistas. La enseñanza en los conservatorios, los concursos, los conciertos, las grabaciones y, por supuesto, las peculiaridades que han hecho del piano el instrumento predilecto del público, son algunos de los temas abordados en EL PIANO: NOTAS Y VIVENCIAS, libro que desde su primera página prenderá la atención de profesionales, aficionados y amantes de la música por igual.

Darryl Dawkins revives his swashbuckling persona in this tell-all account of sex, drugs and racism in pro basketball during the 1970s and '80s, the NBA's outlaw league era.

In this comprehensive and authoritative guide, Rosen places Beethoven's sonatas in context and provides an understanding of the formal principles involved in interpreting and performing this unique repertoire. Includes a CD of the author performing extracts from several of the works.

This collection of essays by gifted musician and writer Rosen covers a broad range of musical forms, historical periods, and issues. They court controversy and offer enlightenment on subjects as diverse as music dictionaries and the aesthetics of stage fright.

Does an opera producer do anything besides tell the singers where to stand? Can a single note be played more or less beautifully on the piano? In these essays, five of our most accomplished artists and critics explore questions of technique and interpretation in the performing arts. Tom Stoppard considers ways of controlling how an audience gets information while watching a play, and Charles Rosen reflects on the very physical relationship between the musician and the instrument. Jonathan Miller describes ways of restoring dramatic motivation to some of our best-loved operas. Garry Wills argues that the collaborative and commercial pressures of filmmaking have produced some of our greatest cinematic achievements, and Geoffrey O'Brien looks at how hip audiences in the Nineties have rediscovered Sixties pop music icon Burt Bacharach. Witty, trenchant, often surprising, and always insightful, this collection is essential reading for all devotees of theatrical, musical, and film performance.

Dislocating the End examines how two concepts - catastrophe and typology - have reconceived the notion of ending. This innovation in ending has in turn gone hand in hand with innovation in genre. Focusing on Shakespeare's King Lear, Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, and Gershom Scholem's theory of catastrophe, this book shows the implications of displaced endings for tragedy, novel, and historiography.

Dans ce livre devenu un classique, Charles Rosen, pianiste américain de renommée internationale et de culture européenne, s'est proposé de repenser entièrement la notion controversée de style musical classique, qui naît avec Haydn et Mozart vers 1775 et s'achève pour lui avec Beethoven ; et il en analyse toutes les caractéristiques musicales et culturelles. A partir d'un examen détaillé des symphonies et quatuors à cordes de Haydn, des concertos, quintettes et opéras de Mozart, enfin des sonates pour piano de Beethoven, il montre qu'une même tension dramatique est au cour de toutes ces oeuvres et en vient à définir le style classique comme «la résolution symétrique de forces opposées». Une grande sensibilité aux hommes double l'analyse formelle. En Haydn se mêlent l'innocence pastorale, l'humour, la lucidité et une joyeuse énergie ; tandis que Mozart nous apparaît dans cette séduction qui relie subversivement la pensée révolutionnaire et l'érotisme.

Accompanied by a sound disc (digital; 4 3/4 in.) by the same name which is available in Multimedia : CD 6.

What does it mean to understand music? What, if anything, does music mean? Composers, performers, listeners, and academics may answer these questions differently, but what sense of music do they share? When music seems unfamiliar or unlike anything we have heard before, we may say that we don't like it. How is taking pleasure from music related to understanding it? This book explores these and other issues as they arise in various musical contexts.