Piano Notes: the hidden world of the pianist by Charles Rosen

A stylist in pursuit of the physical

Charles Rosen is most familiar as a writer of musicological tomes that leaven profound learning with jokes and provocations. But this brilliant literary stylist is also a considerable concert pianist, and he draws here on practical experience to present an accessible mix of anecdote and commentary.

Music-making, Rosen insists, is not just about the sounds. The pianist needs "a genuine love simply of the mechanics and difficulties of playing, a physical need for contact with the keyboard". In seven clear-cut chapters he reviews key aspects of the pianist's professional life: its physical challenges and rewards, the quest for a "singing" sound, the role of conservatoires and competitions (he's against them), of concert life and recordings. Some discussion assumes technical knowhow, and a certain US bias is undisguised.

Rosen specialises in sweeping generalisations that sum up one's own chaotic perceptions in a memorable way. In Piano Notes, he draws most blood with his provocative meditations on piano sonority. Pedalling plays its part, but "there is no way of pushing down a key more gracefully that will make the slightest difference to the resulting sound". Rather, "a beautiful quality of tone is achieved by shaping the melody and molding the harmony and the counterpoint".

This is controversial ground when you remember the way teachers teach and pianists play. Claudio Arrau always seemed to be simulating vibrato with his fingers. And Olli Mustonen springs to mind as someone who would like to be shaping sound even after his fingers are detached from the ivories. As Rosen eventually allows, we may need a few myths to save us from dull conformity.

His scepticism cuts deepest when he considers piano teachers and competitions. Among competition judges, he finds piano teachers the most intolerant and composers most tolerant. Concerts can bring great satisfaction, even if we "hear for the most part what we expect to hear", as "attention is accorded in advance to a great reputation".

Rosen has plenty of stories about the great and the good, of Glenn Gould and Vladimir Horowitz and their attitudes to microphone placement, tape splicing and other tricks of the recording trade. He regrets the way intimate recital balances have given way to hyped-up simulations of resonant halls, but appreciates the paradoxes. For the rock musician, it is the studio dabbling that rates as authentic, the concert no more than a doomed attempt to reproduce an electronic artefact.

When we arrive at the contribution to piano technique of 20th-century composers, Rosen's modernism is less prescriptive than, say, Alfred Brendel's. There is a surer sense of hands on keys, if not inside the piano. John Cage's extended playing techniques are dismissed as a fad, whereas Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter are strongly commended. He plays them, after all.

What of the future? With his instrument no longer an essential acquisition for every middle-class household and music-making ceasing to be part of the fabric of social life, music as "a basic human need" will nevertheless survive. It is the supremely physical experience of playing the piano, so successfully evoked here, that Rosen fears may be lost.