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.

Lost Books of the Odyssey, David Copperfield, The Jewish Dog, The Children's Book, Music and Sentiment

The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason, is subtitled "A Novel."  I know it's become pretty common to subtitle novels with "a novel," it's rather strange in this case.  The book is a collection of out-takes, so to speak, from the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Although Mason is clearly intimately familiar with both, he fortunately did not choose to write a pastiche in the Homeric style -- I imagine that the result would have been risible.  Instead, he has written a series of episodes that are inspired by the events and characters of the two epics (as well as one that is really about Theseus), as well as some non-Greek stories (one episode owes something to The Tempest, for example).

The results vary from thoughtful to surprising to contrived.  In one story, Odysseus returns home to find Penelope married, in another he finds her in the Underworld, in yet another she's a werewolf.  As you'd expect with a book like this, it occasionally gets too meta-textual for its own good.  There are several stories in which the Iliad or Odyssey themselves show up, and they're usually more cutesy than thought-provoking, with one notable exception.  But that's my only issue with thought-provoking collection.

I"m also in the middle of a few books, and thought I'd mention my intermediary reactions.

David Copperfield is interesting in a few ways.  It's one of only two books that Dickens wrote in first person, the other being Great Expectations.  It's also his most autobiographical work.  These influences combine to create a work that is, in some places, stylistically very different from the others of his that I've read.  The first few chapters, for example, are surprisingly impressionistic.  We get a couple of paragraphs remembering, say, a local church, then a couple about what dinners were like, then a bit about the house, and so on.  David's wedding day is also depicted in this way -- a few sentences suffice to sketch a moment here, then a moment there.

I"m not so impressed with the more standard Dickensian sub-plot about Steerforth and Emily.  If you've read any Victorian-era melodrama it's really clear where this one is going from the beginning, and it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers exercise to stretch out the book.  On the other hand, the Uriah Heep plot is really good; Heep is one of the best Dickens villains I've run across.

In addition to listening to an actual Victorian novel in David Copperfield, I've been reading about the Victorian era in The Children's Book, by A. S. Byatt.  She follows a few families from the end of the Victorian era through to the beginning of WWI (I don't know how far into the war she goes, since I'm still in 1908).  I'm still not sure if I like this book or not, despite being several hundred pages in (it's a very long novel).  On the one hand, Byatt takes a lot of pains to give us a faithful representation of what one part of England might have been like, while also giving us really rounded characters who are not just types chosen to represent their era.  On the other hand, it's such a faithful representation that (at least for now) it feels like the novel has no narrative structure (just like real life).  There's no build-up of tension across the novel; individual characters have their ups and downs, but they don't happen to coincide with anyone else's.

Byatt writes beautifully, and it's always a pleasure to read her.  But I'm not sure how much I could recommend this novel to someone who isn't already interested in the late Victorian/early Edwardian eras.

I want to make a quick caveat to the above comments.  She divides the book up into "The Golden Age," "The Silver Age," and "The Lead Age" (the last of which I assume is WWI, though I haven't gotten there yet), so Byatt clearly has some sort of structure in mind, and it may become more apparent to me as I make my way through the book.

I'm reading The Jewish Dog in Hebrew, about a dog's view of the Holocaust.  It's funny and depressing by turns.  The dog is abnormally intelligent, and has learned human speech, but his view of things is off-kilter, leading to some odd ironic humor.  (For example, he's happy when the local coffee shop puts up a sign banning Jews and dogs, because now he doesn't have to wait outside while his master drinks coffee.  This sign makes him optimistic that his life will continue to improve under the new rules).

I'm a huge fan of Charles Rosen's music writing.  I think he is very clear about a topic which is both abstract and subjective.  In Music and Sentiment, he tackles the representation of sentiment in music, starting with the baroque era and going through the moderns.  I'm in what seems to be his favorite era, the classical, and I'm enjoying his lucid examination of the move from the baroque conception of one sentiment per piece to the classical idea of an opposition of sentiments which lead to a new synthesis.