《Piano Notes》简介：

Among the world's instruments, the piano stands out as the most versatile, powerful, and misunderstood — even by those who have spent much of their lives learning to play. In Piano Notes, a finalist for a 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, Charles Rosen, one of the world's most talented pianists, distills a lifetime of wisdom and lore into an unforgettable tour of the hidden world of piano playing. You'll read about how a note is produced, why a chord can move us, why the piano — "hero and villain" of tonality — has shaped the course of Western music, and why it is growing obsolete. Rosen explains what it means that Beethoven composed in his head whereas Mozart would never dream of doing so, why there are no fortissimos in the works of Ravel, and why a piano player's acrobatics have an important dramatic effect but nothing more. Ending on a contemplative note, Piano Notes offers an elegant argument that piano music "is not just sound or even significant sound" but a mechanical, physical, and fetishistic experience that faces new challenges in an era of recorded music. Rosen ponders whether piano playing will ever again be the same, and his insights astonish.

《Piano Notes》摘录：

It is a very old one in aesthetics. The best known and most cogent exposition is Diderot's famous Paradoxe sur le comedien:it is not the actor who weeps at his own emotion that is the true master,but the one who is objectively aware of his art,stands back,and makes the spectators weep. This is a hard lesson for a pianist,for whom one of the greatest pleasures-one of the reasons for being a pianist,in fact-is forgetting the conscious self in the music.Nevertheless,things are more complex:one must have had the actual subjective experience of losing one-self in the work before one can attian the object state that enables one to recreate that experience effectively for others in performance. That objective state can generally be reached only when memory has become almost completely involunta...