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64
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
54/100Critics
75/100Scholars
Author:
Jeremy Denk
Publisher:
Random House
Date:
March 22, 2022
A memoir that is also an immersive exploration of classical musicâits power, its meanings, and what it can teach us about ourselvesâfrom the MacArthur Genius Grant-winning pianist. Renowned pianist Jeremy Denk traces an implausible journey. His life is already a little tough as a precocious, temperamental six-year-old piano prodigy in New Jersey, and then a family meltdown forces a move to New Mexico. There, Denk must please a new taskmaster, an embittered but devoted professor, while navigating junior high school. At sixteen he escapes to college in Ohio, only to encounter a bewildering new cast of music teachers, both kind and cruel. After many humiliations and a few triumphs, he ultimately finds his way as a world-touring pianist, a MacArthur "Genius," and a frequent performer at Carnegie Hall.
What The Reviewers Say
Denk, at the age of fifty-one, has written a book that shows what it’s like to be a pianist, but also what it’s like to be Jeremy Denk. As if that were not enough, it is also about the elements of music, and beyond that an account of the ways in which music and life mirror each other. It is a book like none other.
Every Good Boy Does Fine, has its share of private sorrow and family conflict. But for the most part this lucid and bittersweet coming-of-age story takes place inside the humdrum world of the studio.
This charming book explores how Denk became a master poet of music. At its heart, the memoir is about not the growth of the pianist but growth of the person.
A unique memoir. It is partly about his own life—a coming-of-age story refracted through the power of music—but it is also about his many years of lessons, and his teachers. Most popular narratives about music center on the finished product—the triumphant concert, the celebrated album—but Denk focuses instead on the far-less-glamorous process of becoming.
