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[Music and Letters 102 (2021), in press]

The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking: Conversations about Art and Performance. By

Charles Rosen and Catherine Temerson; trans. by Catherine Zerner. Pp. 160.

(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2020. ISBN 978-0-6749-

8846-0, £17.95.)

These interviews took place in the early 1990s. Much of what Rosen and Temerson

discuss is of its time, both with respect to the development of Rosen’s views on the

function of analysis, the nature of performing at the piano, and the history of musical

style, and with respect to the mainstream musicological world, which in 1993 (the first

French edition) was undergoing a paradigm shift in how it should act and what it should

produce. To read the book in 2016 (the second edition used for this translation), and
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even more so to read this in English in 2020 is to return to transatlantic debates that

moved on some time ago, and in relation to which Rosen himself, notwithstanding his

influential voice and plethora of opinions, occupied a somewhat marginal position. After

all, in his mind he was first and foremost a concert pianist, as the discography at the end

of this book details (the only typo is the entry for Bartók: two violin sonatas, not piano

sonatas, p. 137).

The Joy of Playing is a family affair: the introduction is by Temerson’s husband

Israel Rosenfield, and the translation is by the wife of Rosen’s co-author on Romanticism

and Realism. The narrative reads like a long single interview navigating a series of

familiar topics. In this sense, the division into six chapters—a Baroque publishing

gesture—is arbitrary, since the conversation weaves in and out of many more areas

than the headings suggest, and there are numerous lengthy digressions (e.g. about

Rosen’s own education (pp. 6–12) during the chapter on musical analysis). Indeed,

alongside the authorial chapter pairings (two on analysis, two on performance, and two

on miscellaneous matters: style and pleasure), another way of grouping the ideas

thematically could have been in terms of analysis and the performer, criticism and the

listening public, piano performance as determined by the instrumental set-up, and

musical style and culture. Another way to carve up the material might have been in

terms of musical pleasures, and the role of music in private and public lives; or, perhaps

more theoretically, in terms of the phenomenology of pianism, the technology behind

musical cultures, and the history and historiography of modernism. Whichever way one

reads this book (the lack of an index pushes the reader towards a start-to-finish

approach), it is a pleasurable text. The transcription has dramatized the conversational

ebb and flow, which gradually builds up a portrait of the pianist in the conventional

fusion of voice and authorial meaning. For example, numerous ellipses finish utterances
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(e.g. pp. 2, 6), tracing out moments where the conversation starts drifting, where Rosen

says something that a professional musicologist might wish to pause and explain, or

where something deliberately provocative needs to be left hanging for its full effect.

In the Foreword Rosenfield writes that ‘Charles habitually wrote in his head and

often spoke whole paragraphs of his current project over tea or at the dinner table’ (p.

xi). This is partially why Rosen’s prose is often quotable straight from the page. Its

ingredients have already been prepared, mixed, seasoned, digested, and delivered

vocally, hammered out with the interlocution of real and imagined friends. Rosenfield

also says that ‘It was these multiple points of view that created the pleasure of

discussions, writing and playing’ (p. ix). Such ‘multiplicity’ (cf. pp. 19 and 40–1) may

have been pertinent for Rosen’s circle of acquaintances in New York and Paris, and even

for some of the musicians about which he wrote repeatedly and whose music he played

(see the comments about Carter and Schumann in particular, pp. ix and 32), but it does

not quite apply to the written trace of these convivial conversations. Rosen does not

write in multiple voices and generally does not employ multiple literary registers to

make his points: he simply writes it all down non-reflexively in a virtuoso literary

display.

At various points the conversation turns to Rosen’s education (p. viii), privately

with Moriz Rosenthal and his wife Hedwig Kanner-Rosenthal (‘I studied technique with

her; with him, we mostly talked about phrasing’; p. 7), and institutionally at Juilliard and

Princeton. Rosen acknowledges the Rosenthals’ impact upon his musical and

intellectual priorities from an early age, emphasizing Moriz’ insistence that Rosen study

counterpoint, harmony, and composition (p. 10) in order to develop complete literacy

above and beyond the threshold ability to read music (p. 36). Rosen’s view of what is

involved in learning ‘the basic elements of music’ (p. 37) remains uncomplicated: ‘you
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can learn to read music in a quarter of an hour and understand the basics of tonality in

half an hour. Music theory is less complex than the basis of grammar, than concepts of

subject, verb, or adjective’ (p. 37). Whether this is also the view of rank-and-file

instrumental pedagogues or musicologists requires discussion. Perhaps more

interesting is not merely Moriz’s approach to pedagogical interaction—‘He never told

me I was wrong or that what I had done was incorrect’ (p. 8)—but also what he taught

Rosen about the function of analysis in relation to performance: ‘he wanted me to

analyse it before playing it. I owe him a debt for encouraging me to see the relationship

between the execution—the realization of a work in audible sounds—and the idea or

structure of a score’ (pp. 16–17). Without drifting into psychobabble, one can

understand where aspects of Rosen’s aesthetic ideology came from and how they might

have formed around the piano stool and in relation to musical traditions that stretched

back into the era of Brahms and Liszt and into debates implicating these very

composers. More conventionally intellectual education came at Princeton, where Rosen

stayed in the French department all the way through to the PhD. He recalls friendly

relations with the music department, among them Milton Babbitt, Bohuslav Martinů,

and Oliver Strunk (p. 11), and attending lectures there. Here, too, one could speculate

how the general origins of Rosen’s views on analysis—a certain kind of analysis and

theory, insofar as ‘theory’ was distinct from ‘analysis’—may have emerged in university

debates, as Rosen learned from an early age how to live the hybrid life of a writing

pianist.

As with several of Rosen’s other books, the topic of pleasure is central to The Joy

of Playing. Pleasure might not immediately come to mind when thinking of Rosen, given

his public reputation, which was largely based around unforgiving intellectualized

readings of warhorses like the late Beethoven sonatas, of which he himself was aware
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and apparently content to endorse (p. 110). However, that is beside the point, for

Rosen’s position on pleasure is informed by his position on what it means to be a

performer, not vice versa. He argues fairly rigorously what pleasure is and how it

functions for the performer, which he configures in terms of ‘the pianist’—though some

ideas also apply to other instruments. Consider the book’s title. The repeated titular

word ‘plaisir’ is translated as joy rather than pleasure, thus pitching the book as self-

help. Everywhere in conversation, though, both interlocutors use the latter term, with

its different nuances—more worldly than joy, more secular, more the result of effortful

work and thus slightly more guarded. Even when Temerson asks ‘What is it that

distinguishes the pleasure of analysing from the pleasure of playing?’ (p. 86, italics

original), it is pleasure rather than joy that is in question. Jouissance as a further

resonance or alternative is not used in the book, even when talk turns to ‘muscular

sensation’ (p. 88) and ‘physical sensation’ (p. 89), even when the imperative to ‘relax’ (p.

92) the muscles—not just the finger muscles—is heightened in pieces that ‘are painful

to play’ (pp. 91–2). Apropos of Rosenthal’s ability to execute the octaves in Chopin’s

Étude Op. 10 No. 5 as a glissando, though, Rosen does confess that ‘My fingers ache just

thinking about it…’ (p. 10).

Whether or not it ends in a physical ache, muscular pleasure is more than mere

‘athletic pleasure’ (p. 90) for Rosen, more than merely the position that ‘Virtuosity is

always a matter of expression, . . . is expressive in itself’ (p. 93), more than merely the

desire for mastery (pp. 90–1, 118) that provides one (competitive) trajectory towards

pleasure. Indeed, Rosen says less about the mastery associated with virtuosity and more

about the pleasure that underlies it. This position on pleasure follows from the fact that

playing is ‘a physical need’ (p. 87), a desire for physical intimacy with the instrument:

‘No one becomes a pianist unless they feel an intense pleasure in moving their fingers,
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above all in bringing them into contact with the keys’ (p. 86). Given ‘the very intimate

relationship that exists between musical meaning and physical effort’ (p. 114), the

performer’s relationship with the instrument functions as a vital component of musical

culture. Thus does the instrument’s material affordances and physical constraints play a

central role in the phenomenological constitution of sound. This is what Rosen calls the

‘kinaesthetic side’ of music, the ‘eloquence’ of arm and hand placement (p. 88) and the

fact that ‘The tension of the hands and the muscular sensation evoke the expressive

content of the music as much as the notes do’ (p. 88).

Rosen explores the relationship between the pianist and the sound they produce,

drifting from conventional accounts of performing as instrumental mediation between

touch and listening (with artistic intention in the background and appropriate

preparation pregnant within the fingers) in order to argue that the connection between

physical sensation at the instrument and musical sound is non-linear: ‘One knows the

music but one translates it into gestures, without listening to the sound’ (p. 87). He

brings one conversational moment to a climax with the following claim: ‘I think it is

time to enlarge our conception of music and recognize that it brings at least two

pleasures, one muscular and the other intellectual; neither is directly linked to hearing!’

(pp. 97–8). By this he means that there is a wholly musical pleasure that comes from

sound but does not require it to be produced. Desire is silent: ‘You can even enjoy

finding musical relationships without imagining the sound; it’s a secondary musical

pleasure, spiritual and intellectual, of pure reflection’ (p. 96). Music can ‘bring pleasure

beyond any execution’ (p. 97). This notion is hardly new, though Rosen digs deeper: ‘For

the pianist, being able to listen to oneself can be a constraint because the muscular

pleasure of playing is satisfying in itself!’ (p. 87). Of Chopin he writes that ‘The pleasure

of listening to Chopin cannot compare with the pleasure of playing him, of feeling
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through the tension in your hand’ (pp. 88–9). There is a sense in which muscular

activity is energetic expenditure in one direction while the music proceeds in another,

the trick being to bind the two together while acknowledging that the binding cannot be

a necessity. During such moments, ‘pleasure and understanding are almost identical. In

fact, what music analysis does serves only to account for the pleasure’ (p. 98). The

flipside of this position is that ‘The pleasure of music can be independent of sound, but it

is rarely independent of musical meaning’ (p. 89).

One might ask why Rosen develops this position on pleasure, according to which

pleasure and sound do not have to be synonymous, and muscular and intellectual

pleasures are not justified by the mere production or consumption of sound. The

answer is related to his belief about the meaning and purpose of music within society:

‘Music is a way of instructing the soul, making it more sensitive’ (p. 3) and ‘it produces

good citizens’ (p. 4). Distracted as he is by other issues in the conversation, Rosen says

nothing more about this huge perennial topic, other than observing that music’s

pedagogy of the soul is related to the pleasure gained from the proper use of music, and

that this pleasure coming from the proper use of music is in turn ‘manifest to anyone

who experiences music as an inexorable need of body as well as the mind’ (p. 4).

The notion that there is something ‘inexorable’—there are frequent moral

imperatives in Rosen’s discourse—in the performer’s need for music and for musical

pleasure, whether muscular and/or intellectual, sounding or silent, partially explains

why so much energy has to be invested in practice and rehearsal, not just in live events.

Rosen distinguishes between the different kinds of pleasures obtained in practice and

live performance, admitting that ‘The pleasure of a recital is that it offers an opportunity

and you should seize it’ (p. 121): this is kairos, the sophistical binding of muscular and

intellectual pleasures.
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One further point about the Rosen’s aesthetic concerns the flipside of the public

arena within which our contemporary understanding of ‘performance’ operates:

privacy, secrecy, and concealment. Rosen takes the opportunity to emphasize the

different kind of concert set-up that applies to the performance of Bach’s keyboard

works as opposed to Chopin’s or Carter’s: Bach’s were composed less for ‘performance’

and more for private execution (pp. 17, 22, 24, 25, 26, 73, 97, 115) and rendition (pp.

22, 23, 24, 111, 116) in front of small groups ‘at home’ (p. vii), not for the quasi-

therapeutic enthusiastic public events that constitute performances today. This

distinction between types of performance cuts across Rosen’s own avowedly ‘very

secular conception of music’ (p. 99). It is built into music and influences Rosen’s

approach to music-making. Rosenfield’s Foreword, for example, notes that ‘Catherine

and Charles played for themselves and their duo. They gave a series of private concerts,

of private discussions and private dinners on literature, architecture, science, and, of

course, music’ (p. vii). These were events among friends and family (p. viii), open

perhaps also to small groups of ‘interested non-professionals’ (p. xi) and ‘specialists’ (p.

36). The suggestion that performance—or at least, a desirable mode of performance

applying beyond Bach—is configured as a matter of privacy and intimacy, even of

secrecy (performance within the charmed circle appears concealed from outside) is

congruent with Rosen’s allusions to the pleasure of ‘deciphering pieces’ (pp. 14, 13, 21,

27, 39). An analogous situation confronts the pianist at the instrument: in the repertory

central to Rosen’s aesthetic they are sometimes afforded the opportunity to bring out

inner voices selectively, to reveal or conceal aspects of the music, e.g. ‘slightly changing

their interpretation of a work by making a subordinate voice the principal’ (p. 15). This

practice may involve ‘highlight[ing] the passages that give the performer the greatest

pleasure’ (p. 2), but it can equally arise from analytical concerns. It can be heard
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variously in different historical national pianistic traditions (p. 16), and the choice

arises, according to the style of the piece, either despite or because ‘the theme is very

often hidden’ (p. 78) within the texture, and in fact some aspects of structure may need

to be concealed ‘to avoid monotony’ (20). This specifically pianistic situation brings the

performer into an essential complicity with the music and with the instrument: they are

party to secrets, a private worker whose listeners just happen to hear sounds dispersing

from the instrument. In this sense, one might wonder whether, rather than simply being

read (that is, its meanings and gestures amplified and made linguistic, made public), The

Joy of Playing should also be ‘overheard’, in the sense excavated by Peter Szendy. This is

not entirely far-fetched. Reading interviews and personal letters (e.g. between John

Cage and Merce Cunningham in Dear Ice Box) is a matter not just of careful reading but

of listening in to matters whose desirability qua legibility is not a function of their

dissemination or even their public clarity. One might speculate, extrapolating only

slightly beyond Rosen’s pleasurable position: what might it mean to overhear somebody

else gaining physical pleasure in private?

More could be said about Rosen’s views on analysis, criticism, and interpretation

more broadly, which he discusses with Temerson in chapters 1 and 2. Pleasurable

reading though they are, these discussions cover the same ground as Rosen’s The

Frontiers of Meaning, published around the same time. The same might be said of

Rosen’s views on other topics, most obviously historically informed performance (pp.

72–3, 78–9, 82, 85) and the relationship between musical and literary Romanticisms.

Regarding the latter topic, there are reminders of The Romantic Generation in his use of

Schlegel (pp. 5, 32, 38–9, 98), of what Rosen said there about fragments, and about the

rise of the marginal (p. 66) in relation to genre theory, as well as echoes of his remarks

about Schumann (pp. 32–5, 52–3) and Schubert (pp. 106–7). On a quite different
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stylistic tack, The Joy of Playing also has tantalizing insights into what Rosen thinks

about Handel (pp. 44–5, 83–5)—which can be followed up in videos comparing Bach

and Handel on YouTube.

Before this penetrating and perceptive book is laid to rest alongside Alfred

Brendel, Stephen Hough, and other great hybrid writing pianists, I close with Rosen’s

final topic: electronic music and the future of music-making (pp. 128–9). Rosen’s all-too-

brief remarks are, understandably, outdated and an outsider’s view. Despite agreeing

with Temerson’s suggestion that music will evolve ever further into ‘the electronic’ (a

unhelpfully nebulous term left dangling), he asserts that electronic music ‘produces

fixed works . . . making the performer disappear for the benefit of the listener’ (p. 128).

This view cannot have been a particularly useful claim in 1993, let alone in 2020, even

though it is followed immediately with a compliment about Babbitt’s Philomel. However,

Rosen turns this simplistic point into something more nuanced about live performance:

‘Music has always been written, above all, to give pleasure to those who play it rather

than to a public’ (p. 129). Music is for the players. This is to say, after all, that the way to

understand Rosen’s pleasure duo—muscular and intellectual—is that the former

pleasure should be prioritized. Put schematically: physical material engagement with

the instrument as a way of being in the world generates pleasure (intellectual,

analytical, critical pleasures derive from this), pleasure generates meaning, and

meaning instructs and sensitizes the soul. Recalling the ‘golden’ (p. 12) and ‘glorious

age’ (p. 95) of live performance that his career was spent lamenting, on stage and in

print, Rosen’s final sentence is a message in a bottle: ‘Our music will survive as long as

there are musicians who experience physical pleasure in performing it’ (p. 129).