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The Online Guitar Store - Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music (Vintage)
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List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
Your Save: $ 2.79 ( 20% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 787.87092
EAN: 9780307278753
ISBN: 0307278751
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2008-08-05
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2008-08-05
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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In a remarkable memoir written with insight and humor, Glenn Kurtz takes us from his first lessons at the age of eight to his acceptance at the elite New England Conservatory of Music. After graduation, he attempts a solo career in Vienna but soon realizes that he has neither the ego nor the talent required to succeed and gives up the instrument, and his dream, entirely.
But not forever: Returning to the guitar, Kurtz weaves into the narrative the rich experience of a single practice session. Practicing takes us on a revelatory, inspiring journey: a love affair with music.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The curse of the "lovely" instrument
Comment: This is a truly excellent book. The writing is gorgeous and smart, and Kurtz ably depicts the strange relationship that musicians have toward practice (the idea of what constitutes practice becomes increasingly problematic as the book goes on), as well as the extremely odd position, historically and socially, that the guitar occupies in the classical music world. Along the way, there is the best and most interesting short account I've read of the history of the guitar (I now know why angels are depicted playing harps), and a number of amusing anecdotes--my own favorite, for demonstrating the odd position of the classical guitar, is the young woman who asks our guitarist author to play something interesting, something different, and at the conclusion of the Capricho Arabe, says: "Thank you--that was so lovely I almost fell asleep." Should be read by all guitarists, and most everyone else as well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Comment: Very good book, especially if your a guitarist. Any musician can relate to the author's search and journey a instrument can drive you. Inspired! Thanks Glenn for sharing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Hymn to Mediocrity
Comment: Part memoir, part classical guitar history, part motivational manual, part philosophical reflection, the book defies classification. But at the heart of it is a meditation on mediocrity. Glenn Kurtz makes a passing reference to Peter Shaffer's Amadeus and Salieri's championing of mediocrities everywhere. But unlike Salieri, Kurtz doesn't rage against God's injustice. Instead, he quietly accepts his lot in life and finds inspiration in the humble act of practicing the guitar for its own sake.
Kurtz' ear for music is put to good use in his writing. He uses words like delicately-nuanced musical notes. At times the extreme subjectivity of his descriptions--as if the whole musical world vibrates for him alone--can be annoying. But all is forgiven when he opens our eyes and ears to the myriad sensual colours of music.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A memoir with its own musical accompaniment
Comment: "Because when you play this instrument, it plays you too, and the dreams this relationship brings out may get to the bottom of who you are. ...Let me wrap my arms around the guitar and with the gentlest touch brush my fingers against its delicate strings. I feel its body vibrate with a full singing tone. I hear this music; I feel it in my own body." p. 105
I've quoted this passage from Glenn Kurtz in order to capture some of the immense feeling and extraordinary sensitivity about music, self and life that he expresses in this memoir. Kurtz began playing the guitar at the age of seven when his mother took some lessons at a folk music studio called the Guitar Workshop. At eight he became their youngest student and by ten he could play along with popular groups on the radio: Grateful Dead, Beatles and others. At twelve he began his love affair with classical guitar. He took lessons and practiced until the guitar became the main focus of his life through high school and at the Boston Conservatory of Music where he majored in classical guitar performance. He wanted to be the next Andre Segovia. By the time he reaches age twenty-five, he found himself to be a failure who would never make it as a musician no matter how much he practiced, and therefore he quit the guitar. He didn't play again for ten years.
Kurtz left music and studied comparative literature. He became a college professor and a writer. His academic background as well as his musical history are well evidenced in the book. It is not an easy book to breeze through, but a book to savor. Kurtz's style affected me in the same way that listening to good music can-bringing on a kind of reverie.
This book isn't for everyone. I think that some basic knowledge of music and composers is probably essential background for the book. But for those readers who are interested in music and especially the classical guitar, this book is a genuine treat.
Armchair Interviews says: Wonderful memoir with music as its focus.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: What next after a search for perfection?
Comment: Kurtz's book is an enjoyable one, largely spent describing his early journey through a music conservatory and his hope of becoming a professional musician. This partial musical biography is filled out with reflections upon history of genre of classical guitar and also the meaning of music. While the story contains interesting anecdotes and observations, in the end it hints at but does not clearly spell out the resolution that I would hope for, namely the recognition that the drive to perfection in artistry is inherently problematic, and the discovery of a way to live a life in music that is not perfection-driven. Kurtz tells the story of giving up on music altogether for many years, and then, without being clear about just what the difference is, speaks (all too briefly!!) of taking up music once again with a different attitude. I really want to know more about what attitude works better for him now. As I, an amateur musician, read the book, I could clearly see deadly perfectionism, the love-of-music-destroyer, for what it was. What keeps me playing music, is the uncritical attitude I bring to my endeavor: that I DO NOT have to improve: I can enjoy whatever I can do: even if I can only play three notes: wonderful! Those three notes sound so great! This book is an example of how the world of music is still too influenced by an orientation to performance and virtuosity, and suggests that a more tolerant, enjoyment-oriented, less perfectionistic and improvement-oriented attitude may be the key to a truly enduring life in music.
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