Music and Sentiment (review)

A transcript of Charles Rosen’s William T. Patten Lectures delivered at Indiana University in 2002, this little ‘book’ arrives, fortuitously, in the wake of a stream of recent innovative writings on music and emotion by Patrik Juslin, John Sloboda, David Huron, Jenefer Robinson, and others, but it is a cuckoo in their nest. Ignoring, or perhaps simply ignorant of, the psychological and philosophical texts, Rosen expresses disdain for any kind of cultural context—a paradox for a musician and critic who has written so broadly on literature and painting. This gives the book a suffocatingly hermetic air, perfumed by Rosen’s customary mandarin tones. I yield to no one in my admiration for Rosen’s oeuvre. He is arguably one of the two or three finest, and most influential, Anglo-American writers on music since Tovey. The Classical Style (London, 1971) and The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass., 1995) have secured Rosen’s plinth in the musicological canon. But Music and Sentiment is just the latest of Rosen’s late-style ‘bagatelles’—an amuse bouche that adds very little to his established position.

Articles on emotion in psychology journals are sometimes shorter than their bibliographies, which can be dauntingly voluminous. Music and Sentiment turns that frequently ridiculous disparity on its head, to comic effect: it has no bibliography or footnotes at all, and what little theory there is Rosen gets out of the way in the five pages of his preface and ‘prologue’. Toveyishly anti-intellectual to a fault, Rosen declares that understanding music requires neither ‘esoteric code’ nor ‘specialized knowledge’ (p. ix). He seems to understand theory of emotion in a purely identificatory sense—discriminating and labelling affects: ‘I have been less concerned with identifying the sentiments represented by the music than with the radical changes in the methods of representation throughout two centuries, as these changes reveal important aspects of the history of style’. He has no interest in ‘putting a name tag on its meaning’ (p. x). The music, then, is held to speak for itself—with Rosen as intermediary—and that it is emotional goes without saying. Hence what follows is a chatty, entirely straightforward, all too brief history of style, which occasionally remembers the ‘sentiment’ in its title. Lucid, polished, and insightful it is; a book on music and sentiment it isn’t.

Readers will recognize the stylistic signposts from Rosen’s earlier writings, marking a model of history beguilingly congruent with Benjamin’s, Adorno’s, and Schoenberg’s thesis that modernity is inaugurated by the Baroque, interrupted by classicism, and picked up again by romanticism. By Rosen’s lights, both Bach and the Romantic generation composed music of continuity—and hence continuity of sentiment. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, presumably under the dramatic influence of opera buffa, wrote music of contrasting or ‘contradictory’ sentiments. With Beethoven predictably getting the lion’s share of Rosen’s book, the seventh and final chapter caps the story with an alarmingly compressed (22 pages) series of snapshots of Brahms, Strauss, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Berg. Deryck Cooke is the straw man of choice for Rosen’s scorn for the ‘frivolity of naming the sentiments’ (p. 5). Cooke’s theory that a descent in the minor expresses grief—as in the Arioso dolente from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A flat, Op. 110—is rejected on the grounds that the scherzo’s main theme is intervallically similar, but sounds rebarbative rather than sad. There follows a homily on the affective importance of tempo, rhythm, and articulation. Yet no serious psychologist of musical emotion—from Meyer sixty years ago to Juslin today—privileges pitch above the other parameters: quite the contrary. One of the tenets of music psychology’s recent affective turn, in fact, is that basic, or ‘discrete’, emotions do matter: sadness, happiness, fear, anger, for example, albeit considered as systems of behaviour rather than as labels. Rosen’s rash dismissal of ‘labelling’ leads him instead to dynamics, or patterns, of representation: unified or contrasting; steady and unchanging...