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Charles Rosen, the pianist and man of letters, is perhaps the single most influential writer on music of the past half-century. While Rosen's vast range as a writer and performer is encyclopedic, it has focused particularly on the living \"canonical\" repertory extending from Bach to Boulez. Inspired in its liveliness and variety of critical approaches by Charles Rosen's challenging work, Variations on the Canon offers original essays by some of the world's most eminent musical scholars. Contributors address such issues as style and compositional technique, genre, influence and modeling, and reception history; develop insights afforded by close examination of compositional sketches; and consider what language and metaphors might most meaningfully convey insights into music. However diverse the modes of inquiry, each essay sheds new light on the works of those composers posterity has deemed central to the modern Western musical tradition. Contributors: Pierre Boulez, Scott Burnham, Elliott Carter, Robert Curry, Walter Frisch, David Gable, Philip Gossett, Jeffrey Kallberg, Joseph Kerman, Richard Kramer, William Kinderman, Lewis Lockwood, Sir Charles Mackerras, Robert L. Marshall, Robert P. Morgan, Charles Rosen, Julian Rushton, David Schulenberg, László Somfai, Leo Treitler, James Webster, and Robert Winter. Robert Curry is principal of the Conservatorium High School and honorary senior lecturer in the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Sydney; David Gable is Assistant Professor of Music at Clark-Atlanta University; Robert L. Marshall is Louis, Frances, and Jeffrey Sachar Professor Emeritus of Music at Brandeis University.

In the sonata practice of the mid-eighteenth century, composers frequently asserted the minor dominant prior to the major dominant in the second part of the exposition. Beethoven dramatized this technique in two senses: first, he used it after it had largely fallen out of fashion, thus affording it considerable dramatic impact (e.g., Piano Sonatas Ops. 2, no. 2, and no. 3); second, he graduated from using the “wrong” mode to the more radical technique of using the “wrong” key. For instance, for the secondary key of the Piano Sonatas Ops. 31, no. 1, and 53 (“Waldstein”), he substitutes the major mediant for the dominant. These and similar cases result in the deferred arrival of the tonic in the secondary theme of the recapitulation. Consequently, when the tonic belatedly arrives, the listener is more cognizant of it. In this way Beethoven brings the resolution of large-scale tonal dissonance to the fore. I suggest that such a tactic is metamusical—that Beethoven was in a sense writing music about music, about the relationship between a particular piece and the tonal and formal conventions it relies on and also problematizes. After presenting a number of such metamusical instances, this article traces the stages by which Beethoven “progressed” from the mid-eighteenth-century approach to sonata expositions to his more radical one; it then offers a typology of key-problematizing techniques. It concludes by briefly considering the extent to which these procedures can be squared with Schenkerian theory and its ideal of structural hearing.

In this essay, Martin refers to a lecture given by Charles Rosen in which he referred to the first song in Robert Schumann's \"Dichterliebe\" as \"a perfect Romantic fragment.\" Martin says that while the fragment is presumably a formal category, Rosen's analysis focuses instead on the song's notorious tonal ambiguity. Because Rosen says nothing about the form of the fragment, Martin explores that gap in this essay in order to understand the fragmentary effect of the song \"Im wunderschönen Monat Mai.\"

[CHARLES ROSENS] performance of the Variations is notable for its appreciation of [BEETHOVEN]'s wit, the humor, subtle and brusque, with which the composer explodes Diabelli's flatfooted little waltz into its component parts before reintegrating them into a different dance, one that carries in its measure the memory of everything before. In his annotations for his formidable recording of the piece (perhaps the most challenging and satisfying performance in the catalogue), [CHARLES ROSEN] says \"no other work of Beethoven is so informed with the comic spirit\"; but you don't have to turn to his words to get the point - the wonderfully self-important swagger of the opening alla marcia made the pianist's intentions clear from the beginning. Many of the subsequent variations brought forth prodigies of playing - the fleetness of No. 10 or No. 27, the cloudless poise of the little fugue and the clangor of the big one - and of pointedness; Rosen is unique among pianists in his ability to play a variation like No. 13 as a cheeky process of thought and not as a mere series of notes and rests.

It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? InMozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace. Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

There is a very good reason why the first movement of the socalled Moonlight Sonata has become one of the most famous pieces in the entire pianoforte canon. It was dedicated by Beethoven on a particularly bad herr day to his pupil, the Countess Julie Guicciardi, a young woman for whom the tousle-headed tunesmith was suffering an all-consuming, utterly debilitating but ultimately unrequited love. And it shows. This is not so much a piece of music as an annotation of an affair of the heart; the means by which Beethoven exorcised his soul of accumulated lust and despair. \"Even today, 200 years later, its ferocity is astonishing,\" said the music theorist Charles Rosen. This is precisely why you should learn to play it. Towards the end of any respectable house party, when the empty boasting of braggarts and charlatans has been exhausted and the mood becomes as still as the surface of Lake Lucerne (the lunar image reflected from which is said to have inspired the poet Rellstab to give Beethoven's Piano Sonata in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 27 No 2, its popular name), it is the quiet man who can rattle off this bit of Beethoven who gets the girl. There are several reasons why you should be able to master the first and most important bit of the Moonlight. You know how it goes, so there's no need to become bogged down in trying to make sense of the yellowing and faintly malodorous sheet music from inside the stool. It is rhythmically consistent, the regular ostinato triplet figure of the right hand continuing unabated throughout. Meanwhile, the left hand is confined to playing simple octaves and the occasional threenote chord, the middle note of which can probably be left out for convenience. Part of the Moonlight's continuing appeal with amateur pianists must rest with its relative technical simplicity: there are no changes of tempo, no flamboyant leaps around the keyboard, and it's quite slow. Indeed, most people play it too fast.

On his own, Mr. [Rolf Schulte] played Mr. [Elliott Carter]'s \"Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi,\" a virtuosic work that contrasts chordal themes with anxious, angular solo lines, and sweet-toned melodies with violent bursts. He also offered [Donald Martino]'s \"Fantasy-Variations,\" an expansion on a three-bar theme, in which the violin's timbral resources are vigorously exercised.

In a four-hour surgery, surgeons place bone morphogenic protein, or BMP, in a titanium cage between the vertebrae that need to be fused. BMP acts as a kind of bat signal, calling stem cells to swarm the site and grow new bone. The body contains its own morphogenic protein in small amounts, but not nearly enough to grow bone at the rate required for surgery, [Charles Rosen] said. Since BMP received FDA approval in 2002, 100,000 surgeries have been performed in the United States. That's a small percentage of the 115,000 spinal-fusion surgeries performed each year, and Medicare doesn't cover the procedure. But Blue Cross of California and other insurers are recognizing the benefit of the surgery and are starting to pick up the tab, and Rosen expects BMP to become the industry standard. About two-thirds of adults have lower-back pain at some time. While most do fine without fusion surgery, the rate of lumbar fusion surgeries leapt 77 percent between 1996 and 2001, prompting the New England Journal of Medicine last year to publish an article titled, \"Spinal-fusion surgery: The case for restraint.\"

The consummate writer, critic, musicologist and pianist Charles Rosen has been at the forefront of his many fields for most of his 80 years. To a packed hall, he gave a programme that would tax the greatest performers half his age, in Beethoven's Appassionata sonata Op 57 and the Diabelli Variations Op 120. From the opening of Op 57, Rosen cast a spell of mystery and tension, of a vision understood. This set the pattern for the evening.