Teaser Tuesday - 25 January

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

I bring this up here because there is sometimes a misunderstanding about why we enjoy certain styles of music, a belief that we relish above all the character of the sentiment, the emotional aura of the music. Yet, around 1810, when Beethoven was still very controversial, many were horrified by their first contact with his music and Goethe's friend and Mendelssohn's teacher, Georg Zelter, even described the taste for it as something like sexual perversion.

Charles Rosen trying to get to the bottom of our response to music in his Music and Sentiment - the link is to Simon Callow's review in the Guardian which is worth reading on its own account!

Eighteenth-century composers, for example, played with the relationship between dissonance and consonance, dissonance creating a tension which is then released, to gratifying effect, by a consonance. Audiences knew and expected this pattern; they weren't taught it; they simply imbibed it with the rest of the culture.

Rosen is not an easy read but it is usually worthwhile, I was introduced to his book the Classical Style (thanks Paul!) while at college, and his works are always worth the effort.
I see that the preface to this volume says:

I am deeply indebted to Robert Marshall, emeritus professor of Brandeis University

so unfortunately, I guess that's not me! I was very tempted to pick a teaser from page 36 where he quotes Robert Marshall (a Handel scholar I think, unless there's another in the field!) 'Robert Marshall has suggested to me...' but unfortunately those two sentences make around 15 lines!
The book was a Christmas present and I'm, at last, getting around to it!