What does it mean to understand music? What, if anything, does music mean? Composers, performers, listeners, and scholars may answer these questions differently, but what sense of music do they share? When music seems unfamiliar or unlike anything we have heard before, we say we don't "like" it. How is taking pleasure from music related to understanding it?

In this lucid and entertaining book, the noted pianist Charles Rosen explores these and other issues as they arise in various musical contexts. Performers' interpretations may be filled with errors, after all, that then become part of a tradition; a composer's work may be variously assessed by his contemporaries (Mr.

Rosen gives us an eye-opening account of how Beethoven's towering reputation was established so early); and musical analysis can mislead as well as deepen our understanding of a composition's splendor. In The Frontiers of Meaning Charles Rosen brings to a bold, inspiring study of music - as text, as performance, as listening experience - the insight and bravura elegance for which his own work as a practicing musician is justly famous.