Charles Rosen

Twenty-First-Century Music in Society: The Lloyd Old and Constance Old Lectures

Photo by bawpcwpn.

A lady among the waitlisted hopefuls standing outside Elebash Recital Hall, where Charles Rosen’s lecture on the challenges of modernist music was about to begin, had come all the way from Pennsylvania for the occasion and had brought Rosen a jar of homemade jam. ‘He is a true Renaissance man,’ she told the person standing behind her. ‘Anything he says will be interesting.’ The event had sold out even before the organizers had the chance to advertise it beyond the university. Those who were not on the guest list were warned that, despite the rain, the odds were against them: there were only 189 seats available, and over 200 people were expected to attend. In the end, they were guided to a smaller room where they could watch the lecture on a teleprompter.

Rosen’s appearance was a rare one, and many in the audience feared that it might also be his last. He will be eighty-five this May and his health has begun to deteriorate. Despite a few accessories common among the ageing – cane, hearing aid – Rosen’s enthusiasm shone when he took the stage. He opened with a personal story that may have intimidated those who had come prepared with questions for him. Once, he said, while giving a similar lecture in Cincinnati, a woman asked him whether the composer had a responsibility to write music that the public could understand. Rosen, a naturally amiable man, told her that the question itself was not interesting but that the obvious resentment that had inspired it could not be ignored. It was this type of self-righteous indignation that he wanted to address tonight, the kind sometimes aroused by the challenges of contemporary art.

Modernism, for Rosen, was met with more hostility than any other movement, not only in music, but also in painting and literature. ‘Transforming something that is awkward into something beautiful is absolutely Though his frailty seemed apparent it also proved deceptive: when his fingers found the keyboard, he played briefly but with such power, that the performance left him breathless. fundamental to Modernism,’ he said. Modernist works, from Degas’s ballerinas to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and James Joyce’s Ulysses, were about being true to reality. But truth is almost always disagreeable. ‘Indeed, there is something repellent about all the masterpieces of Modernism,’ he remarked, admitting that he, too, was initially resistant to it. When he first listened to Debussy, at the age of seven, he exclaimed: ‘There should be a law against such music.’ His reaction captures the sentiment twentieth-century composers met when they began experimenting with dissonant and atonal pieces. Rosen brought up the example of Ned Rorem, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer and diarist, who once wrote that nobody really liked the music of Elliot Carter; Carter’s admirers only pretended to like it. The statement produced laughter in the audience, especially because Carter was in it. And it was part of Carter’s piece ‘90+’ that Rosen chose to perform to demonstrate his point. He slowly made his way to the piano, hooked his cane on the rim, and slid himself forward on the stool. Though his frailty seemed apparent it also proved deceptive: when his fingers found the keyboard, he played briefly but with such power, that the performance left him breathless.

Born in New York in 1927, Rosen started picking out notes on the piano at around the age of four, not because he was a prodigy, he was quick to clarify, but because all good piano players must start this early. ‘It is just like tightrope walking,’ he said. ‘If you don’t start early, you fall off.’ By six he was attending Juilliard, and by eleven he left to become a pupil of Moriz Rosenthal, who in turn had studied with a pupil of Chopin, and also with Franz Liszt. Rosen went on to receive a PhD. in French literature from Princeton in 1951, and made his debut in New York that same year. His second LP was the first complete recording of the Debussy études. ‘I guess I finally came around,’ he joked, though he explained that his initial reaction to Debussy’s music was understandable. ‘‘All great excellence in life or art, at its first recognition, brings with it a certain pain arising from the strongly felt inferiority of the spectator,’’ he said, quoting Goethe. ‘Only at a later period, when we take it into our own culture, and appropriate as much of it as our capacities allow, do we learn to love and esteem it.’ That feeling of inferiority results in a distaste for the work we cannot understand and appreciate. ‘If you feel inferior when you’re reading a book, you can put it down and move on to the next thing, but at a concert you have to sit there and feel like an idiot – and you are an idiot,’ Rosen said.

During their lifetimes, Mozart and Beethoven were also considered difficult to understand, and their music was met with antagonism both by the public and critics. Rosen has written extensively on the subject. The Classical Style, his book on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, won a National Book Award in 1972. Its success launched his long career as a critic, and he has been a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. His latest book, Freedom and the Arts, a collection of essays on music and literature, will be available by Harvard University Press in late April. Taste, Rosen has argued, is a matter of will, a product of moral and social decisions. Just as it takes a conscious effort on the reader’s part to appreciate Joyce’s Ulysses, it takes repeated listening to learn to love the music that at first puzzles and repels us. Ultimately, it comes down to making choices. ‘There is a lot of music I never wanted to love,’ said Rosen, who has unapologetically expressed his dislike for certain composers, such as Messiaen. And it was with equal directness that he declined the jam the lady from Pennsylvania offered him at the end of the lecture: it was apricot, and Charles Rosen has only developed a taste for blackcurrant. ■