Last modified: Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Leading scholar and concert pianist Charles Rosen to give Patten Lectures at IU
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jan. 11, 2006
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Charles Rosen, who has enjoyed worldwide acclaim as a music theorist and virtuoso pianist, will visit the Indiana University Bloomington campus next week (Jan. 15-20) as a Patten Lecturer.
Rosen will deliver a two-part Patten Lecture series on the representation of sentiment in music. He will supplement the lectures with a special performance of the last three Beethoven piano sonatas, Op. 109-111. All the events are free and open to the public.
The lectures are scheduled for Tuesday (Jan. 17) and Thursday (Jan. 19). The piano recital will be on Wednesday (Jan. 18). All events will take place in the IU Jacobs School of Music's Auer Hall at 8 p.m.
In an age of specialization, Rosen is a rarity. A concert pianist who studied with one of Liszt's pupils, he has delivered acclaimed performances throughout the world and has recorded the major works of the piano repertoire from Bach to Schoenberg. He is equally renowned for his scholarly work on classical and early Romantic musical styles, as well as on the 20th-century styles of Schoenberg and Elliott Carter. Additionally, he has written convincingly as a critic and scholar on literature and art.
Rosen's books have become standards in the field of musical study. The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (1971) received the National Book Award for Arts and Letters in 1972 and is considered one of the most famous and popular books of musicology. In the book, Rosen explains what was at stake in Haydn's development and Mozart's and Beethoven's expansion of the classical style as a set of artistic principles. The book advanced a new paradigm of criticism in which questions of style change and musical meaning could more effectively be addressed.
Rosen's other works include Arnold Schoenberg (1975) and Sonata Forms (1980, revised edition 1988), both of which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award; The Romantic Generation (1995), which received the highest award for a book from the American Musicological Society; and Romantic Poets, Critics and Other Madmen (1998), which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Rosen is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books (from which the essays in Romantic Poets, Critics and Other Madmen were drawn).
His knowledge of literature is exhaustive; his doctorate at Princeton was in French medieval literature.
William T. Patten, an 1893 IU graduate, envisioned the Patten Lectures as a way to enrich the intellectual life of the IU campus. The Patten Foundation invites to IU men and women who have made outstanding contributions to the sciences, humanities and arts or to the understanding of human affairs. To learn more about the Patten Lectures, go to https://www.indiana.edu/~deanfac/patten/home.html.
Information on Patten Lectures featuring Charles Rosen:
Tuesday, Jan. 17, Auer Hall, 8 p.m., lecture: "The Representation of Sentiment in the Arts from 1700-1930" (Part I)
Wednesday, Jan. 18, Auer Hall, 8 p.m., recital: Piano Sonatas, Op. 109, 110 and 111, by Ludwig van Beethoven
Thursday, Jan. 19, Auer Hall, 8 p.m., lecture: "The Representation of Sentiment in the Arts from 1700-1930" (Part II)
