Practicing
A Musician's Return to Music
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. A serious artist is constantly plagued by the fear that he either has the gift or he doesn't, notes Kurtz, and that no amount of "busy work" can redeem him. Growing up in Great Neck, N.Y., in the 1970s, Kurtz tapped into the Guitar Workshop and mastered folk songs by the time he was 10; inspired by seeing Andr s 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.
