Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music Tapa dura - 2007

Resumen

Extracto

Sitting Down

I am sitting down to practice. I open the case and take out my instrument, a classical guitar made from the door of a Spanish church. I strike a tuning fork against my knee and hold it to my ear, then gently pluck an open string. During the night the guitar has drifted out of tune. It tries to pull the tuning fork with it, and I feel the friction of discordant vibrations against my eardrum. I turn the tuning peg slightly, bracing it between my thumb and index finger, until the two sounds converge. Another barely perceptible adjustment, and the vibrations melt together, becoming one. From string to string, I repeat the process, resolving discord with minute twists of my wrist. Then I check high notes against low, middle against outer. Finally I play a chord, sounding all six strings together. Each note rubs the others just right, and the instrument shivers with delight. The feeling is unmistakable, intoxicating. When a guitar is perfectly in tune, its strings, its whole body will resonate in sympathetic vibration, the true concord of well-tuned sounds. It is an ancient, hopeful metaphor, an instrument in tune, speaking of pleasure on earth and order in the cosmos, the fragility of beauty, and the quiver in our longing for love.

With a metal emery board, then with very fine sandpaper, I file the nails on my right hand. Even the tiniest ridges can catch on a string and make its tone raspy. In 1799 Portuguese guitarist Antonio Abreu suggested trimming the nails with scissors, then smoothing them on a sharpening stone to remove “rough edges that might impede the execution of flourishes and lively scales.” Some guitarists disagree heatedly with this advice, preferring to play with the fingertips alone. For support, they quote Miguel Fuenllana, who in 1554 stated that “to strike with the nails is imperfection. Only the finger, the living thing, can communicate the intention of the spirit.” But to my ear, the spirit of music speaks with many voices, and a combination of fingernail and flesh sounds best. I run my thumb over my fingertips. They are as smooth as crystal.

I shift the guitar into its proper position, settle its weight, and adjust my body to the familiar contours. And then I look around me. My chair is by a window in the living room; my footstool and music stand are in front of me. The window shade is partly drawn so that the San Francisco sunlight falls at my feet but not on my instrument, which would warp in the heat. Outside, people with briefcases and regular jobs are walking down the hill to work. Students are arriving at the school across the street. I listen to their voices and footsteps. Then I take a deep breath, letting them go. I draw myself in. I’m alone in the apartment, and my work is here. I begin.

At first I just play chords. The sounds feel bulky, as do my hands. I concentrate on the simplest task, to play all the notes at precisely the same moment, with one thought, one motion. It takes a few minutes; sometimes, on bad days, it takes all morning. I take my time. But I cannot proceed without this unity of thought, motion, and sound.

Slowly the effort wakes my fingers. Slowly they warm. As the muscles loosen, I break the chords into arpeggios: the same notes, but now spread out, each with its own place, its own demands. Arpeggios make the fingers of both hands work together in different combinations. I play deliberately, building a triangle of sound—fingertip, ear, fingertip—until my hands become aware of each other.

My attention warms and sharpens, and I shape the notes more carefully. I remember now that music is vibration, a disturbance in the air. I remember that music is a kind of breathing, an exchange of energy and excitement. I remember that music is physical, not just in the production of sounds, in the instrumentalist’s technique, but as an experience. Making music changes my body, eliciting shivers, sobs, or the desire to dance. I become aware of myself, of these sensations that lie dormant until music brings them out. And in an instant the pleasure, the effort, the ambition and intensity of playing grip me and shake me awake. I feel as if I’ve been wandering aimlessly until now, as if all the time I’m not practicing, I’m a sleepwalker.

I calm myself and concentrate. Give the sounds time, let the instrument vibrate. I have to hear the sounds I want before I make them, and I have to let the sounds be what they are. Then I have to hear the difference between what I have in mind and what comes from the strings.

It’s easy to get carried away. The grandeur, the depth and beauty of music are always present in the practice room. Holding the guitar, I feel music’s power at my fingertips, as if I might pluck a string and change the world. For centuries people believed that music was the force that moved the planets. Looking into the night sky, astronomers saw the harmony of heaven, and philosophers heard the music of the spheres. Musicians were prophets then, and according to Cicero the most talented might gain entry to heaven while still alive simply “by imitating this harmony on stringed instruments.” Every artist must sometimes believe that art is the doorway to the divine. Perhaps it is. But it’s dangerous for a musician to philosophize instead of practicing. The grandeur of music, to be heard, must be played. When I hold the guitar, I may aspire to play perfect harmonies. But first I have to play well.

I bring myself back to the work at hand. I listen to the strings, while testing fine gradations in the angle, speed, and strength of my touch. I vary the dynamics and articulation, vary the intensity and color of the notes. If I am to play well, I must gather the guitar’s many voices, let each one sing out. After a few more minutes of arpeggios, my fingers grow warm and capable. The notes are clear and distinct, and I play the simple chords again, very softly at first, then louder and more urgently. Again, softly, then filling, expanding, releasing. Once more, until gradually the sounds from the instrument near what I hear in my head.

Listening, drawing sound, motion, and thought together, I find my concentration. My imagination opens and reaches out. And in that reaching I begin to recognize myself. My hands feel like my hands and not the mitts I usually walk around with. I recognize my instrument’s tone; this is how I sound, for now. I recognize my body; I feel alert and able. I feel like a musician again, a classical guitarist. I feel ready to work, ready to play.



“For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner,” wrote the cellist Pablo Casals in his memoir, Joys and Sorrows. “I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.”

Try to describe your experience of music, and you’ll quickly reach the limits of words. Music carries us away, and we grope for the grandest terms in our vocabulary just to hint at the marvel of the flight, the incredible marvel, the wonder. “Each day,” Casals continues, “it is something new, fantastic, and unbelievable.” I imagine him leaning forward in excitement, a round-faced bald man in his eighties, gesturing with his hands, then meeting my eyes to see if I’ve understood. Fantastic and unbelievable. The words say little. But yes, I think I understand.

I’m sitting down to practice, and like Casals, I’m grasping for words to equal my experience. Alone in the practice room, I hold my instrument silently. Every day it is the same task, yet something new. I delve down, seeking what hides waiting in the notes, what lies dormant in myself that music brings to life. I close my eyes and listen for the unheard melody in what I’ve played a hundred times before, the unsuspected openings.

What are the tones, the terms, that unlock music’s power, the pleasure and profundity we experience in listening? I begin to play, leaning forward excitedly and grasping for the right notes, my whole body alive with aspiration. Sounds ring out, ripening for a moment in the air, then dying away. I play the same notes again, reaching for more of the sweetness, the bittersweetness they contain and express. And again the sounds ring out, float across the room, and fall still. Each day, with every note, practicing is the same task, this essential human gesture—reaching out for an ideal, for the grandeur of what you desire, and feeling it slip through your fingers.

Practicing music—practicing anything we really love—we are always at the limit of words, striving for something just beyond our ability to express. Sometimes, when we speak of this work, therefore, we make this the goal, emphasizing the pleasure of reaching out. Practicing, writes Yehudi Menuhin, is “the search for ever greater joy in movement and expression. This is what practice is really about.” But frequently we experience a darker, harsher mood, aware in each moment of what slips away unattained. Then pleasure seems like nourishment for the journey, but it is not what carries us forward. When musicians speak of this experience, they often stress the labor, warning how difficult a path it is, how lonesome and demanding. The great Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia cautioned that “it is impossible to feign mastery of an instrument, however skillful the impostor may be.” But to attain mastery, if it is possible at all, requires “the stern discipline of lifelong practice.” For the listener, Segovia says, music might seem effortless or divine. But for the musician it is the product of supreme effort and devotion, the feast at the end of the season.

Like every practicing musician, I know both the joy and the hard labor of practice. To hear these sounds emerging from my instrument! And to hear them more clearly, more beautifully in my head than my fingers can ever seem to grasp. Together this pleasure in music and the discipline of practice engage in an endless tussle, a kind of romance. The sense of joy justifies the labor; the labor, I hope, leads to joy. This, at least, is the bargain I quietly make with myself each morning as I sit down. If I just do my work, then pleasure, mastery will follow. Even the greatest artists must make the same bargain. “I was obliged to work hard,” Johann Sebastian Bach is supposed to have said. And I want so much to believe him when he promises that “whoever is equally industrious will succeed just as well.”

Yet as I wrap my arms around the guitar to play, I also hear another voice whispering in my ears. “Whatever efforts we may make,” warned Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1767 Dictionary of Music, “we must still be born to the art, otherwise our works can never mount above the insipid.” In every musician’s mind lurks the fear that practicing is merely busywork, that you are either born to your instrument or you are an impostor. Trusting Bach and Segovia, I cling to the belief that my effort will, over time, yield mastery. But this faith sometimes seems naïve, merely a wish. “The capacity for melody is a gift,” asserted Igor Stravinsky. “This means that it is not within our power to develop it by study.” Practice all you want, Rousseau and Stravinsky say, but you will never become a musician if you don’t start out one. Perhaps practice will carry me only so far. Perhaps, as Oscar Wilde put it, “only mediocrities develop.”

I shake out my hands. Outside on the street, the morning commute is over. The workday has begun; school is in session. Only tourists pass by my window now, lumbering up the hill in search of Lombard Street, “the crookedest street in the world.” I walk down this tourist attraction all the time, a pretty, twisting street festooned with flowers. Now, from my chair, I watch a family cluster around a map, Mom, Dad, and two red-haired teenage boys, each pointing in a different direction. They’re just a block from their destination, but they don’t know it, lost within sight of their goal. I feel that way every day.

Practicing is striving; practicing is a romance. But practicing is also a risk, a test of character, a threat of deeply personal failure. I warm up my hands and awaken my ears and imagination, developing skill to equal my experience. I listen and concentrate in an effort to make myself better. Yet every day I collide with my limits, the constraints of my hands, my instrument, and my imagination. Each morning when I sit down, I’m bewildered by a cacophony of voices, encouraging and dismissive, joyous and harsh, each one a little tyrant, each one insisting on its own direction. And I struggle to harmonize them, to find my way between them, uncertain whether this work is worth it or a waste of my time.

Everything I need to make music is here, my hands, my instrument, my imagination, and these notes. For most of their lives Segovia, Casals, Bach, and Stravinsky were also just men sitting alone in a room with these same raw materials, looking out the window at people on the street. Like me, they must at times have wondered how to grasp the immensity of music’s promise in a few simple notes, how to hold fast to their devotion against a cutting doubt that would kill it.

Reseñas en medios

“If there is any idea less appealing to a musician than sitting alone in a room with an instrument and a metronome, watching one’s maladroit fingers stumble through the same passage of Bach, Mozart or Billy Joel for an hour, it may be the thought of reading another musician describe the experience.  So it is to the immense credit of Kurtz . . . that he has written such a thoughtful and fluid meditation on the subject: his book is at heart a memoir of his formative experiences learning the classical guitar and of how he eventually gave up his musical ambitions, interwoven with bits of history about pioneering guitarists like Fernando Sor and Andrés Segovia and yes, contemplative passages about the value of practicing. . . . By the time Kurtz settles into the story of his artistic decline, at 22 in Vienna (where, he says, two Americans in “animated conversation” is the “definition of a riot”), he is in complete control of his narrative.  When he remorsefully writes of how easily he fell out of practice, he might just compel you to call your old grade school piano teacher to see if she’s taking on any new students.”
            –Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times Book Review (October 28, 2007)

“A classical guitar prodigy, Kurtz was utterly devoted to music, but he recognized, at age 23, that he did not have the talent or temperament to be the next Segovia.  Years later he returns to the guitar and to meticulous practicing, aiming not at a career, but at a sustaining spiritual experience.  This book’s lovely essays also contain lots of lyrical appreciation for guitar history and Eastern Europe.”
            –Stanford Magazine (July/August 2007)

“Absorbing . . . To the layman, the act of public performance is a profound mystery, a carefully finished product that conceals more than it reveals. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? And what does it feel like to step out of the wings and make art in front of a crowd? The best books about the performer’s art [address] things like that. . . The most instructive book I’ve read in recent months about the act of performance is by an author who, like me, is a ‘recovering musician.’ Glenn Kurtz studied classical guitar at the New England Conservatory of Music, then changed course and became a writer. . . . He writes with uncanny sensitivity, [and] is especially good about the hard labor that goes into professional music-making. He quotes a remark by the great harpsichordist Wanda Landowska: ‘If everyone knew how to work, everyone would be a genius!’ Probably not, but there’s no such thing as a genius who doesn’t know how. Mr. Kurtz nails it: ‘Every artist must sometimes believe that art is the doorway to the divine. Perhaps it is. But it’s dangerous for a musician to philosophize instead of practicing. . . . When I hold the guitar, I may aspire to play perfect harmonies. But first I have to play well.’”
–Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal (July 21, 2007)

“At 8, Glenn Kurtz was a prodigy. At 19, he was a promising classical guitarist. At 25, he was a professional musician. But something was wrong. Kurtz was beginning to suspect that the dream he had chased for most of his life was out of reach. One day he simply quit. He stopped playing and even stopped listening to the music he loved. He took a 9-to-5 job that felt, he says, like jail. Not many of us have achieved proficiency as musicians. But ‘anyone who has ever desperately yearned to achieve something and felt the sting of disappointment’ can appreciate the heartbreak Kurtz lived with during the 10 years that followed the expiration of his dream. This quiet, inspiring, unique book is about a love rediscovered. Kurtz eventually returned to his guitar–with different expectations. [Though] he has learned to accept that the saying ‘practice makes perfect’ simply isn’t accurate, he practices regularly anyway. In his memoir, a meditation on a single session of practicing is interwoven with the chronology of his bittersweet history as a musician. Kurtz’s book offers useful lessons for us all.”
–The Week Magazine (Week of July 25, 2007)

“A sensuous, evocative memoir about love lost and regained. In Practicing, Kurtz beautifully blends the concrete details of practicing classical guitar with the metaphysical lessons he’s learned from his musical career. . . . He describes his years of monklike devotion to musical perfection, his subsequent disillusionment and his ultimate epiphany: he realizes that the loss of what he loved most allowed him to discover his better self. Kurtz seamlessly transports readers from present to past, switching from a present-day practice session in San Francisco to his years studying classical guitar at the New England Conservatory of Music, and the beginnings of his solo career in Vienna. . . . Throughout his richly detailed narrative, Kurtz also describes the long history of the guitar and its role in a classical repertoire that favors the violin and piano. . . . Kurtz learns that whatever it is we love (music, art, science, a person), can disappoint us, but devotion also teaches us about ourselves, exposing our own desires and flaws. Kurtz's ‘second act’ as a classical guitarist may not end up at Carnegie Hall before an adoring crowd, but he seems to understand music and himself better this time around. There’s something holy about his longing for beauty, thwarted or not. Laborare est orare, said Catholic monks in the Middle Ages: To work is to worship. Glenn Kurtz has gone back to work on his guitar playing, and his devotion seems like a rebirth of self.”
– Chuck Leddy, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“Graceful . . . a lovely, unique book. . . . Kurtz picked up the guitar as a kid in a music-loving family, became something of a local prodigy at his Long Island music school and went on to play on Merv Griffin’s TV show, even backing jazz great Dizzy Gillespie once before graduating from the New England Conservatory-Tufts University double degree program. Motivating the young Kurtz is the dream of reinventing classical guitar, as if by his fervency alone he can push it from the margins of popular interest to center stage–a feat not even accomplished by the late Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia. Practicing reads like a love story of sorts: Boy meets guitar. Boy loves guitar. Guitar breaks boy’s heart or, more precisely, the ordinariness of a working musician’s life does. Boy leaves guitar. Were the story to end here, this book would be a tragedy, but after nearly a decade boy returns to guitar, he finds his love of the guitar again in a way he never could have appreciated before. Although Kurtz is writing about a unique musical path, his journey speaks eloquently to the heart of anyone who has ever desperately yearned to achieve something and felt the sting of disappointment. . . . [He] educates the reader about the history of the guitar and considers philosophic questions on the nature of art and what purpose the artist can serve in society. Kurtz’s desire to inform and inspire is evident on every page. . . . Practicing is a fantastic example of what memoir as a literary form can best deliver: a person delving honestly, profoundly and fearlessly into one aspect of life, not necessarily coming up with answers so much as struggling in the face of life’s big questions. The core of memoir is the writer moving into deeper levels of self-understanding and awareness. Magically, although it is a personal journey, it becomes universal, elevating all in the process.”
–Samantha Dunn, Los Angeles Times

“At an age when the rest of us were mastering shoelaces, Kurtz was setting out to become a classical concert guitarist. . . . While other kids grooved to the AM radio hits, he made a pilgrimage to see Andrés Segovia play. While other kids watched TV, he found himself on the ‘Merv Griffin Show,’ playing with Dizzy Gillespie. While other teens were at the football game, he was winning Long Island’s 1981 Teen Talent Competition. . . . [Kurtz] and his music and his pursuit of it were all one. When it came time to apply for college, there was no doubt. He enrolled at the New England Conservatory. Was Kurtz aware that truly making it, professionally, as a concert guitarist happened almost never–and that a failed concert guitarist does not have a readily apparent back-up career? In a sense, these questions are irrelevant. He was a classical guitarist, and there was nothing else but to charge ahead. Kurtz’s is a story many of us know, whether we’re musicians, ball players, painters, writers or tightrope walkers . . . [We’re] told to pursue our passions. Follow our hearts and we’ll eventually prevail. [At age 25,] Kurtz saw that his lifelong fantasy was just that, and the reality of his life could not intersect it. He quit the thing that he’d built nearly his entire life around. . . . For 10 years, he avoided anything having to do with what had been the center of his world. . . . One day, a decade after burying it in his closet, he reached again for his guitar. . . . [and discovered that the] struggle was not to try to repeat his earlier story or recover his earlier skill, but to let it become something new. . . . Hailed for its candor and insight, [Practicing is] a poignant, at times wrenching, account of  loss and hope, [showing how] succeeding can happen through, not in spite of, failure. ”
–Chris Colin, San Francisco Chronicle

“[Practicing is] the book of a lifetime . . . Glenn Kurtz started taking guitar lessons at age 8 and soon became a musical prodigy. At age 16, he discovered Beethoven, which changed his course from jazz to classical music. At 17, he heard the great Segovia perform in Carnegie Hall and caught a glimmer of what he hoped his own career might be. At 19, he won Newsday’s Teen Talent competition. By then, he was already studying at the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music, after which he performed in Vienna for several years. [Now] Kurtz has just written his first book, a lyrical memoir-meditation. Constructed in part around a richly detailed description of a practice session, the book moves from his childhood infatuation through his realization that his dream of an artist’s life was not the life he was leading.”
–Aileen Jacobson, Newsday

“Bravo! I enjoyed Practicing very much. It’s sensitively written, and one does not have to be a musician, practicing or otherwise, to respond to it–in many ways and on many levels. Glenn Kurtz has done a wonderful job.”
–Jeffrey Siegel, piano soloist, conductor, and author of Keyboard Conversations

“Waylaid from an early career as a classical guitarist, a teacher of the arts recounts his reimmersion in his music by undertaking an intensive regime of practicing. . . . Kurtz tapped into the Guitar Workshop and mastered folk songs by the time he was 10; inspired by seeing Andrés Segovia perform, Kurtz envisioned a life devoted to music. He studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory, where the key to success was constant practicing, and where he had to overcome a sense of the guitar’s inferiority to other instruments. Trekking through Europe with other players, he was confronted with the economic exigencies of a musical career and eventually ceased practicing, to his great sorrow. In his mid-30s he took up the guitar again and gleans the painful lesson that although musical artistry may seem divine, mastery of the instrument is humbling and mundane. Kurtz’s work contains a rich history of the classical guitar, including the work of Bach, Fernando Sor and Scott Joplin.”
–Publishers Weekly

“Practicing is elegant, methodical and deeply engaging. It is science and poetry in one book. One sentence in the book, ‘Repertoire is destiny’, gave me a tremendous amount of inspiration–and unease. I have to thank Glenn Kurtz for revealing the inner life of a musician in a such a unique and compelling way.”
–Rosanne Cash

“The author has an uncanny ability to bring to life in a vivid and visceral manner abstract concepts of music and performance, and the passions that drive them. I very much enjoyed reading Practicing. It brought me back a few decades, and is a valuable reminder of the challenges and hurdles students face.”
–Sharon Isbin, Grammy Award Winner and Director, Guitar Department, The Juilliard School

“Practicing is a superb account of a young musician whose ambition finds its natural complement in the travail of practice. What makes the book extraordinary is the tale of his return to music decades later, his taking up again the slow, joyous misery of “practicing”–the way a musician, a Zen monk, or, who knows, a doctor or lawyer might understand that word. Kurtz’s art had nearly destroyed him; now, note by note, it rebuilds him, until each moment with or without his guitar become both practice and performance, the very place to embody and surrender all of his desire. This is that rare thing, an honest memoir–each note struck at its very center; a truthful, moving, and beautiful book.”
–Jay Cantor, author of Krazy Kat

“Glenn Kurtz’s masterful account of his journey from aspiring concert soloist to, simply, musician, will speak to anyone who has cherished an ideal to the detriment–rather than the enrichment–of what is real. Is there hope for those of us who dream of an unattainable perfection? Perhaps, like Glenn Kurtz, we might fall short of perfection, abandon hope, and find an even better reason to make music (or write, or think, or work): love.”
–Mark Salzman, author of Iron and Silk and The Soloist

“Glenn Kurtz has taken a routine and often dreaded part of musical life, and elevated it to the level of a spiritual journey. Along the way, he shows what it means to be a musician: the fears, doubts, discoveries, and failures, the struggles with your instrument and with yourself–and the moments that sprout wings. He skillfully illuminates the occasions when music’s magic emerges from its hiding place, whether in the poignant crossing of two hushed tones in a piece by Bach, the exhilarating feeling of riding the crest of a sweeping phrase, or the recognition of what it means to be in tune. This is a book written with understanding and love.”
–Stuart Isacoff, author of Temperament: How Music Became A Battleground For The Great Minds Of Western Civilization

“Glenn Kurtz has captured the unique, richly detailed and often lonely struggle to master an instrument. I was riveted to read our classical guitar world depicted in such vivid detail. Music lives in all of us, and this book will speak to those who have tried to make music an active part of their lives.”
–David Tanenbaum, Classical Guitarist and Chair, San Francisco Conservatory Guitar Department