Music and Sentiment.

Proksch, Bryan

Music and Sentiment. By Charles Rosen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. [141 p. ISBN 978-0-300-12640-2 (hardback) $24; 978-0-30-017803-6 (paper) $17.50]

In the areas of formal and stylistic analysis, few writers can claim to be as significant as Charles Rosen was. His death on 9 December 2012 will leave a significant hole in the musicological world and his generally level-headed approach to analysis will be missed. His Classical Style and Sonata Forms are books which will undoubtedly continue to be influential for generations to come. Unfortunately, in my opinion, one of his final books, Music and Sentiment--really a series of lectures given at Indiana University in 2002--will not leave such a mark on our understanding of music.

The book's central problem is that Rosen's "sentiment" is too loosely used. He generally uses the term synonymously with emotional content, but he notes that it would be futile to attempt to decode the formulas used to create emotion in music. Rosen's objective is to discern broad trends in the presentation of emotional material in music from the Baroque to the early 20th century. In Rosen's view, changing tastes in music led composers to move away from the Baroque "doctrine of affects" through the Haydnesque "dramatic opposition" contained within a single phrase to the Romantic separated and continually-evolving affects presented over increasingly large spans of time. Each of these developments, Rosen argues, increased the emotive/affective power of music. To be sure the ideas are not new, but then Rosen's reputation was built on writing books that give a fresh take on old ideas.

Rosen eschews the affective analytic approach of Leonard Ratner as well as the rhetorical analysis employed by Tom Beghin, which is surprising considering that the basics of emotional codes in music are at least nominally described in both. Rosen's method of parsing 18th Century themes is virtually identical to either approach but excludes their useful analytic frameworks. Indeed Rosen tries to set his approach in opposition to Ratner by arguing consistently that simple motives do not have any meaning in and of themselves. For instance, he denies that the "lament bass" has any specific emotional connotations in purely instrumental works (p. 23ff); instead the bass was really only an "indispensible tonal procedure" used to move from tonic to dominant. Rosen argues that additional musical elements such as theme, tempo, dynamics, etc. are needed to create lament as an emotion in instrumental music. I doubt anyone would deny Rosen's point, but he has only stated the obvious, and here in a way that says less about the emotional content of music than either Beghin or Ratner's approaches would.

An overarching problem with this book is Rosen's virulent critiques of present-day music analysis--attacks made more unpalatable because he regularly falls victim to the very same pitfalls he criticizes. He complains about "statisticians" who argue for "meaningless" inter-textual relationships between pieces based purely on generic similarities (p. 20). Well put and only a fool would disagree, but Rosen soon thereafter points out exactly this type of empty similarity between Haydn's Op. 33/3 and Mozart's K. 593 (p. 60). Nor is this an isolated case: he notes Haydn and Mozart "unconsciously" connected works, on p. 68, and that Strauss "surely" invoked Mozart on p. 124.

Indeed his fourth chapter, "The C Minor Style," is essentially a series of spurious inter-textual connections writ large. This opens with a statement about how he does not want to "imply any profound or symbolic meaning to the key of C," but then goes on in the next paragraph to describe how a "tradition of dramatic C minor works evolved" (p. 72). He then claims that Haydn's Symphony No. 78 was "influential for the composers who followed him" in setting up C minor as a special key, without citing any extra-musical evidence whatsoever (except that Mozart "almost certainly knew" it; pp. 73-5). Even if C minor is really a special key for the presentation of dramatic opposition as he argues, his citation of Mozart's K. 310 in A minor (!) as another early example of the C-minor style is inexplicable (p. 76). I do not recall ever seeing an argument that C minor was so important to Mozart; I was under the impression that Mozart's G minor works were the place to look for dramatic opposition in the Classical era. Rosen would have done well to take his own advice by not arguing that C minor had special significance in the late 18th century.

Perhaps I am nitpicking at what is intended as congenial philosophical musing originally presented in a laid back seminar-style atmosphere, and in Rosen's defense it is clear that the book is not intended to be an exhaustive scholarly inquiry. Nevertheless I found it difficult to read Rosen sympathetically after he opened the monograph with a frontal assault on modern musical analysis. He dispatched Deryck Cooke's The Language of Music (Clarendon, 1959) with a single counter-example (pp. 15-16) and then criticized a broad generalization about descending fourths made by Daniel Heartz in a single lecture "many years ago" (p. 24). Rosen's topic is a difficult one to be sure--emotional content in music has been the subject of philosophical inquiry since antiquity--but attacking honest and detailed efforts in short order only made his own argument more difficult to accept. Rosen's effort simply has too many contradictions, is too selective in examples and counter-examples, is too off-the-cuff, and takes too aggressive a stance towards larger and more detailed past efforts for my taste.

Fortunately, there are a number of instances in this book where we see vintage Rosen making astute observations that others have overlooked. His notion that many thematic ideas in Viennese Classicism use two affectively opposing ideas internally that are then reconciled over the course of the movement is powerfully descriptive and worthy of further inquiry. Similarly, his argument that tone color evolved into an emotional device even more powerful than thematic material is thought provoking.

In the end, even though the book has its weaknesses, it was an interesting and enjoyable read, not dry in the slightest, and yet another example of Rosen's willingness to challenge accepted wisdom and to go out on a limb. The book should lead to many an interesting debate in graduate seminars and is worth putting on the library's reserve shelf. While in this reviewer's opinion Rosen's arguments fall somewhat short, there is much to be learned from it.

Bryan Proksch

McNeese State University