You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The very title of the book, Between Couch and Piano, reveals much about its author's intention to bridge two different disciplines, as if being partly in both of them and trying not to reduce one into the other. From the “Preface,” we learn that this is also intended to be a personal book, that it contains Gilbert Rose's memories (even ones from his childhood of lying under the piano while his sister would play Beethoven's sonatas), impressions, artistic likes and dislikes. Not only is the title succinct and evocative of the book's contents, but it tells you immediately that the book is from a field rarely visited. I would dare argue that psychoanalysis has so far established better relations with any branch of arts and humanities than with music, which makes the latest in the series of Gilbert Rose's contributions to the field an important event and a possible daring breakthrough.
Though the book is very rich in data it presents, without simplification its material can be reviewed as organized around three clusters of questions. Despite the fact that these questions and various levels of Rose's answers to them are interwoven throughout the book, I shall present them here in a much more linear fashion.
The first group of questions is: Does a work of music mean anything? Does music communicate? Do composers send messages?
As to answering those questions, Rose's general framework is clear. He does not believe in the possibility that a piece of music contains a message that should be discovered, that it communicates composers' ideas and/or emotions. Quite the contrary, Rose argues that music generates activities in the mind of a listener that bring about meanings. He is with the constructivists, claiming that music is co-created by a composer, a performer, and a listener.