Jeremy Denk’s Memoir Features Music, Love and More Music

Denk’s defining relationships have been together with his piano lecturers, not friends. At first there was Lillian Livingston, who gently policed his early efforts on sonatinas, “music so transcendentally mediocre that it’s thought a toddler can not spoil it.” In Las Cruces he studied with William Leland, a professor at New Mexico State, who introduced self-discipline into Denk’s tempos and assigned limitless études to shore up the independence of his fingers. Typically these led to small epiphanies at dwelling, when a knotty passage out of the blue appeared to play itself.

However mastering a selected technical problem in an étude was one factor, taking part in it expressively within the context of a Beethoven sonata one other solely — “like should you requested somebody how you can kiss a woman, and so they gave you a diagram of the anatomy of the lip.” Execution and expression more and more fused collectively after Denk entered Oberlin, the place his piano classes with the dry and diagnostic Joe Schwartz got here to be supplemented with revelatory chamber music coachings by a good friend’s cello trainer, Norman Fischer.

Enjoying the piano is a uncommon human exercise that requires equal dexterity from each palms. In consequence, pianists turn into intimately acquainted with every hand’s quirks and foibles:

“My proper hand is extra agile, extra Fred Astaire, keen to throw itself right into a flurry of quick notes at a second’s discover. It tends to attempt too laborious and tire itself out. My left hand is healthier at stable notes, issues that require cushioning, weight, gradation. It could possibly play louder than my proper, and extra easily, however prefers to not transfer quick; it believes in endurance and preparation. You possibly can say that my left hand is older than my proper, and wiser, and a lot lazier.”

Denk additionally finds memorable methods to light up music principle. Dotted all through the ebook are discursions on melody, concord and rhythm, illustrated by musical examples, which turn into like a playlist accompanying every chapter. A lot of the time, Denk elegantly sidesteps the necessity for music notation, as an alternative providing diagrammatic representations of musical constructions. Most necessary, he explains summary ideas with empathy and precision.

“On the coronary heart of the artwork of concord is want,” he states in a passage about chords. His evaluation of Bach’s Fugue in B minor from the primary ebook of “The Effectively-Tempered Clavier” renders the harmonic development as “a journey from identified to identified, by way of unfathomable thriller.” Bach’s fugue, he provides, turns into “a musical shorthand for a standard query we ask ourselves, particularly as we get older: How the hell did I get right here?”