Charles Rosen Replies to Tia DeNora

[DavidO]

Some of you might enjoy reading this 1997 exchange in letters to the New York Review of Books between Tia DeNora (Beethoven & the Construction of Genius) & Charles Rosen:

www.nybooks.com/articles/1218

Earlier, Rosen had reviewed DeNora's work, & this exchange starts when DeNora replies to Rosen's review, & is followed by Rosen's response.

Rosen's full review costs $3 (U.S.) to view:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arti...rticle_id=1360

[Quijote]

Thank you DavidO for your posting. In many ways it highlights a perennial question : how are we to talk about music? Personally, I share Kerman's more comprehensive position, id est : it is necessary to engage with music 'critically' (critical and/or cultural theory), to approach music not only as a strictly sonic manifestation, but from its cultural, socio-political grounding.

[Chaszz]

Some of you might enjoy reading this 1997 exchange in letters to the New York Review of Books between Tia DeNora (Beethoven & the Construction of Genius) & Charles Rosen:

www.nybooks.com/articles/1218

Earlier, Rosen had reviewed DeNora's work, & this exchange starts when DeNora replies to Rosen's review, & is followed by Rosen's response.

Rosen's full review costs $3 (U.S.) to view:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arti...rticle_id=1360

DeNora's views are outgrowths of current "postmodern" literary criticism, where the "text" does not really exist as a work of intentional art, but is merely a passive result of the various social and political pressures that have served to form it, notably racism, sexism and imperialism. In the minds of these critics, no artist really attains genius except as a social construct in the minds of people who are passively manipulated by his essentially passive work and his actions in the world. Everything is relative, and no work of art is really any better than any other, only thought to be so by a certain set of individuals. Thus there is no true value, only one set of historical prejudices against another set of historical prejudices. So DeNora could nominate a forgotten composer as an equal to Beethoven, since the intrinsic value of their respective works takes a distant back seat to the social forces that created their reputations two hundred years ago as well as now.

Luckily this kind of thinking occurs mainly in the universities, where it persists by feeding back upon itself in a kind of closed loop, enforced by the need to conform to it in order to get fellowships and tenure.