This monograph by esteemed pianist, scholar and critic Charles Rosen is a concentrated venture into two closely related issues: Western classical music's capacity to represent sentiment, and how that representation changed over the course of musical style history – from singular moods to subtly nuanced emotions, from oppositionally contrasting affects to continuously graded reconciliations or integrations, and from surging intensities to more obsessive, interior states. By choosing the term ‘sentiment’ (over ‘affect’, ‘emotion’ or ‘expressive meaning’), Rosen may have signaled his intent to skirt the thorny debates of recent music aesthetics surrounding the expression or representation of emotion. Indeed, philosophers of music such as Roger Scruton, Stephen Davies, Peter Kivy and Jenefer Robinson are notably absent from the discussion, and recent work on expressive signification by Márta Grabócz, Eero Tarasti and myself, although briefly mentioned, is not further referenced.Footnote 1 Instead, Deryck Cooke's outdated theories serve as the primary foil to Rosen's approach, and Cooke's reliance on scale-degree melodic formulae as lexical terms in an emotional vocabulary proves to be an easy target.Footnote 2 For the most part, however, Rosen chooses to offer his own striking observations, drawing for the most part on carefully chosen opening themes from Bach to Stravinsky, in a virtuoso exemplification of some of the most characteristic differences in the representation of sentiment from Bach to Stravinsky.

Rosen's end run around relevant scholarship is not new; indeed, one might conjecture that his sweeping generalizations across historical eras would not have been possible without some degree of scholarly license. Unlike Richard Taruskin, Rosen does not attempt a musicologically representative history (and even Taruskin's encyclopedic history of music cannot help but omit or slight the occasional significant composer, as Rosen himself has noted).Footnote 3 Instead, Rosen's vision is that of the critic (in Joseph Kerman's sense of music criticism, or along the lines of the best art criticism), whose close and sensitive interpretation of individual works serves to ground an original insight into the style exemplified by those works.

Like the greatest music critics, Rosen writes in an artistically compelling prose style.Footnote 4 Unlike most music critics (Donald Francis Tovey being a notable exception), he is also a performer whose authority as a pianist is based on an unbroken chain of apprenticeship from Moritz Rosenthal through Liszt and Czerny to Beethoven and Haydn. An exquisitely shaded excerpt played to illustrate a subtle interpretive argument can be indelibly persuasive, and the experienced reader will have Rosen's discography in mind when reading about each of the composers discussed in Music and Sentiment. Drawing on his capacious repertoire and voracious reading (not just in music, but in art and literature), Rosen has reconstructed a critical competency that few can match, exceeding even the critical achievements of E.T.A. Hoffmann in the nineteenth century and Tovey in the twentieth. Like Tovey, Rosen not only demonstrates how a musical work reflects intentional strategies, but proposes explanations as to how those strategies imply a stylistic competency, and further models how that competency might best be understood. Rosen's first book, The Classical Style (1971), resulted in a major reconceptualization of musical style that had a profound effect on music scholarship.Footnote 5 No longer conceived as a mere collection of features characterizing a composer's works, the concept of style was reconceptualized by Rosen (following Tovey's lead) as a set of generative principles – in effect, a competency as potent as a grammar. But there was one further, and more provocative component to Rosen's model: the Classical style was defined as the artistic achievement of just three composers (Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven), with all the other minor composers of the era relegated to the category of those ‘who understood only imperfectly the direction in which they were going, holding on to habits of the past which no longer made complete sense in the new context, experimenting with ideas they had not quite the power to render coherent’.Footnote 6 Thus, the Classical style was an exclusive club, with exclusive privileges to the most expressive achievements of the age. Indeed, Rosen's construal of style would give him the tool to demonstrate how expressive intent could motivate structural experiment, thereby anticipating many of his arguments in Music and Sentiment.

It was The Classical Style that, like Chomsky's Syntactic Structures for linguistic grammar, most spectacularly laid bare the poverty of segmentation as the basic tool of analysis, and as music semiologist Nicholas Ruwet quickly conceded, undermined the status of any discovery procedures stemming from paradigmatic and syntagmatic analyses.Footnote 7 More importantly, it set a new standard for traditional music theorists and musicologists, inspiring a generation to reconstruct processes as strategies based on living practices, rather than taxonomies of forms based on statistical frequency. Thus, one might understand an unusual work to be atypical, but not anomalous, in that it uniquely realized a particular set of principles or strategies that were germane to a style. The consequences for a theory of expression were profound – here was an approach that could address both the commonalities among works (and hence a level of shared expressive meanings – style understood as analogous to a grammar) and their unique expressive achievements (and hence the critical responsibility to find the distinctive, one-of-a-kind aspect of each work – style understood as also encompassing a poetics). In effect, it met Croce's challenge to aesthetics regarding the uniqueness of expression – its ‘intransitive’ status, according to Wittgenstein, by which a work of art does not express (or communicate) already established meanings, but rather creates what has never before existed in that form – while also respecting the common ground of a compositional school or historical period, in which one can recognize general types of structure and expression as well as their unique tokens.Footnote 8 To be sure, Rosen's descriptive terms for expressive effects might not appear to have challenged Croce's bias toward the ineffable – Rosen at best applies ‘more’ or ‘less’ to such generic expressive terms as ‘intensity’ or ‘poignancy’ – but his in-depth interpretation of compositional premises within the framework of a more generative set of stylistic conventions would lead to far more subtle understandings of expressive intentions than the more formalist approaches still favoured in the early seventies.

There were dangers as well as rewards attending Rosen's often-cavalier approach to scholarship. His dating of the Classical style from the time of Haydn's op. 33 string quartets and his dismissal of all the minor composers of the era in deference to the creation of an artistic style by the ‘big three’ Classical composers would receive correctives from those musicologists deeply invested in those significant cross-currents that make the historical record so much more convoluted.Footnote 9 Furthermore, Rosen's promotion of sonata form, or its forming principles, to the level of the primary organizing principle of the Classical style itself, while brilliant as an insight into compositional process, required further support. This he proceeded to provide with his third book, Sonata Forms (note the plural), in which he filled in some of the missing composers, demonstrating how sonata principles were generative for Classical approaches to a wider array of genres, including operatic arias, and demonstrating more of the historical stages leading to his hypostatized ‘Classical style’.Footnote 10

On the other hand, the issue of style change leading from Classical to Romantic constructs was provisionally addressed in the final chapter of The Classical Style, in which he interpreted Beethoven as being committed to Classical conventions while also anticipating Romantic strategies. Rosen thus insisted on a significant break in style (an ‘inescapable hypothesis’) marked by the innovative works of Schubert and Schumann.Footnote 11 Again, this briefly sketched story demanded further refinement, and Rosen met the challenge with an even lengthier study of works by composers born around 1810 – Schumann, Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn – in his aptly titled The Romantic Generation.Footnote 12 This volume also provided opportunity for a more extended treatment of Schubert (1797–1828) – whose overlap with middle and late Beethoven, his inspiration for the late instrumental works, combined with his reliance on Mozart for his operas and earlier symphonies, made his undeniably Romantic inclinations that much more problematic for a sharp chronology of musical styles (as Rosen recognized already in The Classical Style).Footnote 13 In The Romantic Generation, new kinds of expressive meaning arising from literary and musical topical references were introduced, and an extensive digression on Romantic conceptions of landscape would signal Rosen's keen interest in art history. His controversial critique of Mendelssohn's ‘religious kitsch’ would also mark a broader approach to expressive meaning along the lines of the new musicology, since only a more ideologically critical listener would have the ability to interpret as kitsch that which for Mendelssohn was presumably sincere.

Rosen's vast scope as a performer had already led him to address styles other than Classical and Romantic: his second book on Schoenberg (for the ‘Modern Masters’ series), an essay on Elliott Carter's Piano Sonata, and program notes on Bach had each addressed expression from the inside of works which he had, in many cases, first interpreted as a performer.Footnote 14 Furthermore, three speculative essays on musical meaning had appeared in 1994.Footnote 15 Thus, the ground was well prepared for Music and Sentiment, a capstone study that could draw together Rosen's many insightful observations on the expressive capacities of various historical styles.

Those who have read Rosen's earlier books will find familiar examples and arguments here, but the perspectives are as provocative and broadly ranging as ever. The highly literate Rosen reaches out to the intelligent music lover with careful explanations and insights into how one's most profound emotional experiences may be mapped onto intelligible processes discernible in the music. As Rosen notes in the Preface (ix), the monograph began to take shape as the distinguished Patten Lectures, given to general audiences at Indiana University.Footnote 16 In these lectures Rosen discussed many examples not used in the present book, but the main themes were similar: how the representation of sentiment had changed over the course of musical style history, and as a result, how what it was possible to represent had also changed.

This theme, very similar to Ernst Gombrich's for the history of artistic styles, is neatly set forth in the Prologue to Music and Sentiment with a single example, the opening theme from the finale of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto (‘Emperor’).Footnote 17 For Rosen, the combination in one theme of ‘different sentiments with strong contrast’ is found only in the Classical style, whereas other kinds of affective complexity will characterize early, and then later nineteenth-century Romantic works.

Before launching into a brief history of musical styles, however, Rosen sets forth a few principles of his own with respect to emotion in music. One is that sentiment can never be reduced to a melodic code, as was attempted by Deryck Cooke.Footnote 18 Rosen's favourite counterexample is the way a stepwise melodic descent in minor mode from the dominant down to the leading tone (one of Cooke's sound terms for grief) can be heard in two different expressive contexts. Play it slowly, with dissonant treatment of the melodic pitches, and you have the dolente sentiment of the Arioso from the finale of Beethoven's op. 110. Play it faster, with more consonant treatment of the melodic pitches, and you have the ‘jolly and folksy’ sentiment of the opening theme of the scherzo of that same piano sonata, which is also ‘perhaps a touch sinister or satirical owing to the diminished sevenths in bar 3’ (p. 16). In this example Rosen stresses the importance of contextual variables such as tempo and harmonic setting over a mere scale-degree skeleton for an interpretation of sentiment, and any example of thematic transformation from Liszt or Wagner would serve to make the same point, as Rosen also notes (p. 19). Although the contrast between the two Beethoven themes is sufficient for his argument, it also ironically illustrates another of his premises (which reflects the legacy of Croce's view of expression), that one cannot give a precise name to any sentiment represented in music (p. 5). But it also somewhat undermines a third of Rosen's premises, that there is usually ‘little difficulty in deciding what sentiment is being represented’ (p. 5). In the case of the scherzo, Rosen's own description appears to challenge that claim: how might the theme be both jolly and folksy, and at the same time sinister and satirical? Wouldn't the sinister trump the jolly – or would the two create a trope, a unique sentiment emerging from their fusion?Footnote 19 What if we learn that Beethoven in one of his sketches set the following words to a later theme in the scherzo: ‘Ich bin lüderlich, du bist lüderlich’ (‘I'm a slob, you're a slob’)?Footnote 20 Would knowing the theme's compositional inspiration contradict a more surface-level interpretation of its jolliness, leading us to a reading closer to the grotesque? And how might a diminished-seventh harmony cue the satirical? Isn't it simply part of the rhetoric of the more tragic minor mode of the theme? Might the diminished-seventh chord instead contribute to our experiencing the seriousness of the emotion that underlies the theme, even if that emotion is not being taken seriously?

Questions like these keep lurking behind our initial labels for expressed meaning (regardless of their generality). Furthermore, what we might consider to be an ‘aesthetically warranted emotion’ will depend in part on our agreement as to the level of stylistic competency (the systematic context for a work) that we demand of the listener. But just how much might be justifiably claimed as stylistic competency for these works? In the case of the Scherzo, perhaps the rhetorically marked subito fortissimos that disrupt the scherzo section, or the extreme registral syncopations of the trio section, are more important cues for parody, given their marked distortion of the surface. And perhaps the melodic connection between the Scherzo and Arioso themes indeed is meant to be heard as a transformation, such that the Arioso fulfills an emotion of grief that was merely latent (as a repressed emotion) in the prior Scherzo.

Rosen's dismissal of Cooke's theory also underlies his critique of Daniel Heartz's specification of the descending chromatic tetrachord in the minor mode as a symbol of death in the eighteenth century.Footnote 21 Here, Rosen notes that the descending tetrachord from tonic to dominant was used in practically every ostinato of the time, and thus it cannot be given such a specific meaning (p. 24; note the use of a statistical argument here). But one might counter that not every such ostinato involved both chromaticism and minor mode. And one might further argue that a basic style correlation, related to the topical designation of this chromatic pattern in minor as a species of lament bass typically used in a slow tempo, either represents or expresses a generic emotion of grieving.Footnote 22 Given such a correlation, conceived as a style type, one could then move toward a narrower and more distinctive interpretation of any contextualized token of the type – and of course ‘death’ may well be too specific an interpretation for every case.Footnote 23

But Rosen clearly recognizes as ‘far more fruitful’ those approaches ‘that do not rely upon a code centred on single and simple parameters’ (p. 27).Footnote 24 Although he relegates these approaches to ‘music analysis’ (p. 27), he nonetheless draws on comparably sensitive, multi-parametric analyses to buttress his interpretive arguments. The subsequent treatment of the opening theme of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major is a clear example of how elements besides melodic contour and harmonic progression come together create a musically expressive gesture.Footnote 25 Rosen takes special note of the unusual slur from I⁶ to ii in bar three:

What interests Rosen in bar 3 is Beethoven's play with conventions of slurring, and the effect of this marked reversal is expressive – in this case, it adds the ‘feeling of effort’ that in turn suggests willfulness, and hence, if I were to take the interpretation a step further, an agent whose willfulness this effort reflects. Of course, the very contrast of texture, as Rosen notes, between the opening solo and the entrance of the orchestra on the distant chord of B major, is ‘radical’, but nevertheless ‘an essential characteristic of the style’, and in this case, ‘we cannot speak of any real contrast of sentiment’ (p. 30). However, I would suggest that by introducing the concept of agency, we can tease out a subtle difference in expressive meaning: the orchestra may be understood as representing a similar sentiment from a different perspective, and thus the emotional effect (enhanced by the distant harmony) is decidedly different, even with the same larger phrase structure of antecedent and consequent.Footnote 26 Whether or not we can further specify that difference in words, I would argue that something is gained by the insight. In fact, in his later discussion of the Brahms Violin Concerto (p. 119), Rosen makes a similar observation about a change of perspective upon hearing a shift in orchestration.

Ex. 1

Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, opening

Rosen's subsequent journey through a panorama of historical styles begins with ‘Pre-Classical Sentiment’, a chapter devoted to the High Baroque's unity of sentiment. Here, he carefully distinguishes his examples from those toccatas and fantasies that provide improvisatory contrasts (one might almost say separate ‘movements’), emphasizing the rhythmic continuity found in most independent movements in the Baroque. This continuity contributes to the ‘single affect’ principle of the Baroque, but Rosen expands it to include ‘slight expressive oscillations of intensity’ and even strong articulations that have ‘the power to shock’ (p. 38). These latter are what I term rhetorical gestures, in that they break the unmarked surface with marked changes (this is the sense of Rosen's use of the term ‘articulation’ here) in one or more elements of the music.Footnote 27 In vocal music, or chorale preludes referencing text, these breaks may be motivated by the text, especially when it introduces rhetorical exclamations, but similar effects were quickly adopted by purely instrumental music, as in Rosen's example from the finale of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 4. Although Rosen takes note of subtle changes in expression resulting from changes in register, mode, and key, he nevertheless concludes that ‘the basic sentiment is presented in an ever-changing chiaroscuro’ (p. 47) without any dramatic articulation. Here it might be worth objecting that changes in register, mode, and key may indeed introduce contrasting affects. For example, in Bach's Sinfonia (three-part invention) in D minor, an ascending sequential passage in F major (bars 8–10) moves progressively from the lowest to the highest register in a manner easily suggestive of hope, whereas the drives to cadences in A minor (bars 11–13) and D minor at the end of the invention (bars 21–23) each feature chromatic descending lines and registral descents that mime despair. While rhythmic continuity is maintained throughout, its contribution in this case is not so much to preserve a singular affect as it is to maintain the continuity of a single discourse, in which various (even oppositional) affects may occur – and perhaps to maintain a consistent agency, enabling the listener to map changing emotional states onto a protagonist who can experience both hope and despair in an allegorical journey of the soul.

Rosen notes one other exception to the singularity of affect in the Baroque: the doubling (stratification and troping, in my terms) of affect when two contrasting motifs are used simultaneously. He specifically notes the opening chorus of the St Matthew Passion, where the chorale tune overlies the main chorus. Raymond Monelle observed a similar phenomenon in the contrasting affects of subject and countersubject in Bach's A♭ major fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier, book II. Here a galant, optimistic subject is paired with a more pessimistic lament (descending chromatic) countersubject.Footnote 28 The expressive effect of their merger creates a trope, which I have elsewhere defined as akin to a purely musical metaphor, in which two clear correlations combine to engender an emergent meaning that is more than the sum of their contributions.Footnote 29 Thus, the image of a unity of sentiment may be preserved whenever contrasts are integrated tropologically. But an equally plausible interpretation might preserve the contrast, treating it as dialogical – a dialogue, in this case, between two agents. A theory of musical sentiment must somehow address this conflict of potential interpretations, although it may in many cases be undecidable – or one may simply prefer to have both options available as part of a reconstructed stylistic competency.

The turn in the next chapter to contradictory sentiments begins with a much-cited example, the opening of Mozart's ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, where the first theme features built-in (and extreme dynamic) contrast – the essence of dramatic conflict. What is striking is the subsequent move toward integration Footnote 30 in the counterstatement, where, as Rosen notes, the opposition is resolved by the flute scale that links the two contrasting motifs. (I would simply add that playing the first motive in the same piano dynamic as the second also contributes to the unifying effect.) This strategy is then traced through the opening themes of Mozart's Piano Sonata in D major, K. 576, and String Quintet in C major, K. 515. Again, what is missing from Rosen's account is the element of agency, which could make the drama that much more compelling, although these dialogical themes may suggest, as a result of an early integrative gambit, that they are two sides of a single agent rather than two opposing characters. Although one may not be able to decide among such interpretive alternatives, their consideration will certainly enrich our sense of the music's capacity to convey sentiment.

A chapter devoted to the ‘C minor style’ continues the exploration of contrasting sentiments in a single theme, but this time with greater dramatic extremity. Peter Smith, in his book on Brahms's ‘Werther’ Piano Quartet in C Minor, op. 60, also devotes a chapter to the similar structural and expressive strategies found in C-minor works from Haydn to Brahms.Footnote 31 Such successions of related works may be further theorized as intertextual, with consequences for a larger theory of musical meaning.Footnote 32 Rosen's examples from Haydn and Mozart lead directly to Beethoven's more powerful adoption of this technique (here, Rosen compares Mozart's Piano Sonata in C Minor, K. 457, with Beethoven's piano sonatas in C minor, from op. 10, no. 1 to op. 111). What fascinates Rosen is not merely the dramatic conflict, but the immediate effort to reconcile the opposition. In my terms, the integrative move could be understood as the first stage of a progressive troping of the extreme states. But what I find fascinating is that the extremes in these three examples are more readily reconcilable because they are two sides of the same affective coin: loud Sturm und Drang intensity and soft empfindsamer intensity stand for two extremes of the same tragic discourse. They may also suggest two opposing agential forces (at times interpretable as an opposition between an external agency that is both fateful and implacable, and an internal agency that responds, often with all-too-human fragility, to that force).

The following chapter pursues Beethoven's treatment of contrasting affects in a single theme as a structural dissonance requiring resolution (p. 87). The main example is the first movement of Beethoven's ‘Tempest’ Piano Sonata in D Minor, op. 31, no. 2, where the opposition also involves tempo. Noting the return of the slow arpeggiation of the opening Largo in the Allegro tempo at bar 21, Rosen argues that it requires a new continuation to take the place of the Allegro motif in bars 3–6. I would note that the contrast here is also motivated – the piano turn figure that responds to the bass arpeggiation is derived from the end of the Allegro motif in bar 6. More importantly, however, it continues the play of agencies (external vs. internal) that these opposing motifs suggest by their registral and dynamic opposition.Footnote 33 But Rosen's argument goes further, recognizing that the later recitative offers still another continuation for the initial motive, one that has its justification in the need to find some kind of reconciliation for the extremity of tempo opposition established at the opening.

A ‘triumph of Beethoven's new style’ is the ‘polysemous character’ of the opening theme of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E♭, op. 31, no. 3 (p. 92), and here a comparison of Rosen's with my own interpretation may show how topics can further enhance an explanation of a theme that has a built-in dramatic trajectory (see Ex. 2). Rosen's overview is as follows:

I interpret the opening two bars as a pastoral fanfare, a calling forth of gentle sentiment, if you will, that in bars 3–5 becomes increasingly ombra-like (sinister, threatening) in its topical character, as low register and chromaticism turn the initial ii into a vii^o7/V.Footnote 34 Then, in bar 6, a more sudden transformation occurs, as the resolution to what I call an ‘arrival ’ (a cadential with rhetorical force of a Picardy third clearing to tonic consonance) suggests a noble/heroic triumph over tragedy. But bar 7 then undercuts that too-easy victory, appropriately deflating the breakthrough (not merely the chromaticism, but the entire discourse up through that arrival) with a buffa, comic cadence.

Ex. 2

Beethoven, Piano Sonata op. 31, no. 3, opening

Like Rosen, I emphasize the ironic effect of this cadential deflation. His account of this deflation is typically masterful:

Such annihilating humour was theorized by Jean Paul Richter as basic to Romantic irony, and it is employed to even more shocking effect in the addendum to the finale of Beethoven's String Quartet, op. 95, where a buffa overturning of the preceding ‘serious’ (tragic) movements is nothing short of bewildering without such an interpretive construal.Footnote 35 A theory of musical sentiment might interpret these moments as shifts in level of discourse (my term); these may in turn cue a narrative agency, by means of which the composer's persona can comment (perhaps critically) on the preceding musical discourse.

Rosen's transition to Romantic forms of sentiment is through the oppositional theme that opens Beethoven's Piano Sonata in B♭, op. 106 (‘Hammerklavier’). Here, the immediate contrast is progressively bridged as the soft response to the opening heroic fanfare increasingly expands in texture, register, and dynamics until it returns to the ‘affective world of the first’ idea (p. 99). This progressive intensity, minus the initial contrast, marks the ‘profound change in sensibility’ (p. 100) of the Romantic generation, which achieves ‘both an affective unity and a dramatic change’ (p. 103). With examples from three Chopin nocturnes Rosen demonstrates how this could be achieved through increasing density of texture. By contrast, the Chopin Ballade in F Major achieves ‘a continuous increase of tension’ both ‘negatively and paradoxically’ (p. 112) with a nearly static opening section. Here, Rosen notes Chopin's late (only at the stage of publication) change from individual phrasing slurs to a single long slur over the whole section, ‘as if to block any attempt to ruffle the surface and to discourage any obvious form of articulation’ (p. 112).

Two extremes of Romantic intensification are provided in the opening of Liszt's ‘Funérailles’, with its 55-measure progressive increase in dynamic tension, and the opening of Schumann's piano Phantasie in C Major, which begins from a peak of ecstatic intensity and thus can only fall away (a pattern Rosen notes as thematic to the movement and appropriately reflecting its early title, ‘Ruins’) (p. 113). Wagner's Prelude to Tristan receives obligatory mention, but the other examples in this chapter are perhaps more revelatory – especially the single Schubert excerpt (the slow movement of the last piano sonata, D. 960), which features a singular moment in the return of the slow movement's main theme. Here, we find ‘the radical transformation of emotion within a theme by contrast and opposition’ characteristic of the Classical style, achieved by means of a single harmonic shift, from an intense C minor to a subito pianissimo C major chord (p. 115).

The last 25 pages of Rosen's monograph accelerate through a series of examples from Brahms to Strauss, Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel, and Berg – not all captured under the theme of the chapter's title, “Obsessions.” Several other intriguing themes are tantalizingly introduced here, however, including the less extreme surges of intensity found in Brahms, resulting in changing perspectives on a single sentiment (p. 119), and Strauss's shift from representation of sentiment to direct provocation: the ‘sentiment of impatience’ created by an ‘irritating’ high pitch in the double basses during Salome's agonizing wait for the executioner (p. 122). Neoclassicism is first broached with Strauss's Rosenkavalier, with examples of Mozartean pastiche interpreted as the only means in an increasingly chromatically saturated, modernist style by which a composer might represent sentiments of innocence or unclouded happiness (p. 124). For the modernist Stravinsky, neoclassicism instead emphasizes distance from past models, unexpected explosions, and deliberate austerity (as in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments) (p. 128).

Obsession appears not as one might expect, in the rhythmic ostinato so characteristic of early modernism, but as obsessive sonority (the added-minor-sixth chord saturating Ravel's ‘Ondine’) (p. 135) or the planing of a 027 sonority (described as a fourth plus a second) in Debussy's ‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut’ (p. 130). In this example, the ‘sentiment is enforced more by the sonority than by the melodic contour’ (p. 131), although Rosen does not specify what that sentiment might be.

Rosen mentions several of the obsessive inventions in Berg's Wozzeck, Act III (invention on a pitch, on a six-note chord, and on a tonality), but inexplicably omits the invention on a rhythm that bursts out after the murderous obsession on a single B, and that so intensively evokes Wozzeck's unbalanced mental state in the tavern, where he has staggered after murdering Marie. Rosen's last example is also taken from Berg: the different symmetrical pitch collections (diminished seventh, augmented triad, and whole tone scale) that form unique backgrounds to individual variations in the first movement of his Chamber Concerto (pp. 139–40). But by this point, sentiment has become an assumption no longer clarified by the discussion, in that the symmetrical sets simply provide ‘an identifiably unique expressive sound’ (p. 140). The ‘competing ideologies’ of the latter half of the twentieth century are just as quickly dispatched: ‘a representation of sentiment is not equally efficient in all of these rival trends, but is present in all’ (p. 140).

Rosen's closural strategy for these lectures is a brief envoi in which he shifts from a focus on composition to the importance of the performer – the singer who can make even a wretched melody pleasurable to hear – and with this nod to his other area of expertise, he gracefully exits:

Music and Sentiment offers a similar kind of performance – both thought provoking and revelatory. It is a work that brings Rosen's unique brilliance to the fore, that of a lecturer whose vivid examples speak volumes, even when there may be more to say.