A couple of music books

I've been on a bit of a Charles Rosen kick in the last few months.

I made it through Sonata Forms, his book on the history of sonata forms.  It's always been too much for me before, because many of his musical examples are pretty obscure (including an opera by Leonardo daVinci (who knew there was one?)), and my piano skills aren't up to playing them.  But in an age of youtube, most of them are findable, and so I could get the context.

It's a good book, with lots of good information, but, in the end, I don't think it's at the level of The Classical Style.  For one thing, Sonata Forms deals with a lot of minor composers in trying to explain the background that sonata form grew out of, so it's not great at elucidating what differentiates Mozart and Haydn (or even composers like CPE Bach) from their contemporaries.  For another, the post-18th century discussion is pretty perfunctory.  His reasons are understandable (he claims sonata form sort of stops developing after Beethoven, which I don't buy), but, even so, it's almost a joke to have a post-18th century chapter that only covers Brahms and Bartok.

I've recently being going through Rosen's Beethoven Sonatas as well.  A lot of good solid info, although it's clearly aimed at an audience very familiar with music theory.  He tosses around phrases like "Beethoven here uses the V of the V of the V of the tonic to reinforce the dominant" with no further explanation, which would probably be trying on the patience of a total newbie.  (Cf The Classical Style, which at least makes the concession of explaining the circle of fifths).  On the other hand, his very extensive discussion of tempi, pedaling, and the like, is probably not of huge interest to a casual reader anyway.  On the other hand, a reader familiar with the terminology will find a lucid explanation of some of the fine points of the sonatas.  I'm finding it quite exhilarating to revisit these sonatas, and the book makes a good excuse to listen to them all again, which is never a bad thing.

I'm also reading Freedom and the Arts in small chunks, easy to do since it's a collection of essays.  It's hard to say who this one is aimed at, since it ranges from the incredibly technical (the role of continuo in Mozart) to the very simple (an overview of Chopin's work in about 10 pages).  The whole is very uneven in quality as well.  There are some really good articles on interpretation, and a few that are total ephemera -- it seems that Rosen had something of a feud with Richard Taruskin, and at least two of the essays are devoted to it.

One thing I've noticed about Rosen, and I think it's a really big deal, is that he has the ability to explain why such-and-such is a major composer, and to hone in on it clearly and concisely.  He can talk about a composer's weaknesses, but then say things like "it's Mendelssohn's sense of the structure of a work that shows so clearly in ..." and then throw in a few examples.  His book on Schoenberg is the only thing I've ever read that made me want to go back and re-sample the dodecaphonic works.