What does it mean to understand music? Does the musical fact have any meaning? Composers, interpreters, music lovers and academics could offer us different answers to these questions, but what idea of music do they share? When a piece of music is not familiar, or does not resemble anything we have heard before, we may say that we do not "like" it, but is there a relationship between delight and understanding? In these three lucid and entertaining essays, Charles Rosen explores these and other questions related to the composition, interpretation and listening of the work of different composers, and thus offers us an approach to music in which as important as the musical pieces they are the traditions in which they are inscribed and materialized as auditory experience.