Jeremy Denk
The American pianist on his memoir Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons – plus three of his music writing recommendations
Credit: Josh Goleman
Jeremy Denk is a wonderful pianist and writer. The first CD of his I properly got to know was of JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations – which also led me to his work as a writer. His liner notes offered a masterclass in how to write about music. And then, stay with me, when it turned out that he’d given up watching the hit TV show Breaking Bad for the ‘strange reason’ that he felt it was ‘bad for his soul’, as he wrote in The Guardian, I wanted to find out even more about his music and writing. Finally, someone else who found Breaking Bad as irredeemably bleak as I did. (I’m sure it is brilliantly written but I gave up and googled the ending. No regrets.)
Back to the point. I carried on exploring Jeremy’s recordings (try his album of Beethoven and Ligeti or his Mozart piano concertos) and reading his words. Around about the same time as his Goldberg Variations disc, he published a fascinating piece in The New Yorker about his music teachers – an idea which he then expanded into his memoir Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons (Picador).
It’s a brilliant book. How to describe it? As the subtitle suggests, it is a book about Jeremy’s education and how he became a concert pianist, told through the lessons with his teachers over the years. Yet that’s not all this memoir offers. The narrative is divided into three parts titled harmony, melody and rhythm. Interspersed amongst the chapters of his life are explorations and observations about both specific pieces of music and the building blocks of music itself. I don’t think I’d read anything before that so skilfully interweaves the personal and philosophical, the everyday and the abstract, the analytical and the poetic. His prose is thought-provoking, profound, engaging and witty. Every Good Boy Does Fine has gone straight into my list of unmissable music books.
We spoke last year, at the end of a hot, dry summer. Jeremy was enjoying the peace of his barn in the countryside, where he retreats to from his home in New York. I was at home in Bristol in the UK. He was a joy to talk to – and gave so many useful, sharp writing tips. It’s a conversation I’ll be returning to when I need some of my own writing inspiration. I hope you enjoy reading it too.
Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons by Jeremy Denk
Rebecca Franks (RF): I got so much out of reading your debut book – I loved it. And I’ll be recommending it to so many people.
Jeremy Denk (JD): It’s a real labour of love, that book. But, boy, am I glad it’s off my to-do list.
RF: There’s an amusing footnote early on about your father, who was also writing his memoir. You say that ‘in a truly hilarious development, my father managed to finish his book in the time it took me to choose a file name for mine. He emailed it to me, smugly, with two words: Done. – Dad.’ What was the writing process like for you?
JD: I got started in a fit of inspiration. I wrote a bunch of things, most of which didn’t end up in the final book but which I got out of my system. Then there was a year of doldrums when I wasn’t do anything, but the guilt would hit me every so often, or the editor would write to check in how I was doing.
The most important moment was when I read this book by Brian Blanchfield called Proxies, which is a series of very personal essays that start with academic ideas then reveal these searing internal memories. These essays are ultimately irritating and amazing. I didn’t want to do exactly that, but it showed me a path somehow to doing what I wanted to do.
A lot of my anxiety was that writing about music lessons would be inherently tedious. And who would ever want to read about them…
RF: Because music lessons can be tough enough the first time around?
JD: And they’re also, by neccesity, full of boring things. But sometimes they become these incredibly radiant, emotional memories. I began to have more confidence I could organise the book around them.
I could lose myself in words as easily as I could lose myself in music
RF: From your earliest days at the piano, when your first teachers got you to document everything about your practice in a journal, it seems words and music have been tightly linked for you. How do you describe that relationship?
JD: It’s a very powerful connection for me. I grew up as an obsessive reader. I could lose myself in words as easily as I could lose myself in music. I had wonderful English teachers. They were also a kind of refuge when I was in high school from the bullies. They took me under their wing and they had me write journals about life. I became completely obsessed with Wallace Stevens or Kafka or Dante and so on at the same time I was maturing as a musician.
My teenage years were a lot about piano drudgery, whereas writing was always where I went to be inspired or to access emotions. They’re weirdly complementary or intersecting impulses. I stopped writing altogether in my twenties because I thought I had to focus on the piano and then in my thirties I came back to it. I realised that it was a part of myself that needed to be activated for my mental and emotional health.
RF: All musicians have to think about music, but would you say there’s a difference between thinking and writing about it?
JD: There are so many tricks to writing about music. First of all, you have the problem of jargon. It’s so hard to talk about musical notes without getting deep in the weeds and then you’ve lost most people already. Then there’s also the temptation to go full bore emotional and paint the musical picture in wild and fanciful prose. I always feel you have to earn the fanciful. When you’re writing about music, you have to tie it to the specific somehow. We have to grapple with the notes in a certain way then bring them to the wider world of metaphor or life.
RF: The constraints and specificities are what you need to make it fly?
JD: For me it does. I mean, there are great passages.… I’m thinking of the famous place in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus [when the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn discusses Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111] and there are actually several conspicuous errors in that passage about the music. On the other hand, you feel that because of the way it’s written, it has a greater truth than the individual errors. He captures something about that piece and he really tries to bridge the gap between the musical construction and the mysteries of the universe.
I guess I grew up with a Nabokov fetish, too, and he’s a stickler for the details. My English prof at Oberlin also loved him. Nabokov famously didn’t like music that much but his prose is so unbelievably musical.
RF: Your book is built around music lessons but we also get these glimpses of literature you loved and your English teachers. Could you share who and what shaped you as a writer?
JD: A lot of that started with my junior high school English teacher, Ms Dresp, who appears in the book briefly. She had been through a recent divorce and my dad really loved that she hated marriage. I guess that was the beginning. Then I really adored Thoreau and Emerson and the transcendentalists. Emerson became really important to me later on in terms of how you write ecstatic prose as an American. How do you take on the most fundamental issues?
Then two years later, Mrs Woodward, I think… It’s funny that I can’t remember her name as I can see her vividly. A caffeinated and petite lady. She made us write a one-page paper every week. She was very insistent that at the end of the first paragraph, you had to have a thesis statement. It had to make a concrete argument about whatever work of art the paper was about. This led to a lot of ridiculous assertion, I think. She made us pump these out once a week, so I guess those are amazing exercises in concision, in sentence choice and marshalling evidence.
My English teacher at Oberlin, David Walker, was incredibly important. He was insistent that the idea of writing about a work of art was to find some sort of ‘truth’ about it.
RF: It feels to me as if you reach these ‘truths’ in the sections about the building blocks of music – on harmony, melody and rhythm. Was that the hardest or the easiest material to write about?
JD: It was hard in some ways. Yet once they got going, that was the most satisfying writing for me. It’s agonising to write the memoir – to know what to put in and what was just navel-gazing and what was boring. That was much more difficult.
I was looking to have three sections for each of harmony, melody and rhythm. I only had one on harmony until quite late in the game. Then I was working on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and the B minor Prelude and Fugue, particularly the Fugue. I remember feeling ecstatic about the process. Once I found the right framing, incredible things about that piece seemed to appear.
Essays are tricky because they can often be tedious but when they are going well each new paragraph unlocks the next one. That’s something I always admired about the famous essay about TV that David Foster Wallace wrote called E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction. It starts with the idea of people watching TV, everyone sitting at home watching screens and how the act of watching has transformed our lives. Each section of that essay takes the consequences of the last. That’s just like in music. I feel that way when the paragraphs are rolling off each other. That’s really delicious.
I enjoy including the silly. At least part of that is due to my upbringing with The Muppet Show
RF: Another aspect of your book I really enjoyed was its wit. There was a lovely moment where you were talking about the opening prelude to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and what specific chords ‘want’ to do, harmonically speaking. And you translate that technical detail into an amusing description of the feeling of wanting ice-cream but not feeling quite motivated enough to get off the couch to fetch it. ‘No, I can’t quite believe I’m writing about Bach this way either,’ you add. How do you feel about writing about composers? Do you have to take them off their pedestals?
JD: It’s fair to say I enjoy including the silly. At least part of that is due to my upbringing with The Muppet Show. The libretto for my opera, The Classical Style, was also extremely Muppet Show oriented.
I do feel like, for example, in Mozart or even Beethoven, what I love about them is that the silliness of existence is folded in with the sublimity of it. They don’t exclude the possibility of being ridiculous from the great sense of humanism or whatever it emanates. I did make fun of myself for writing the Bach-ice-cream metaphor, but I also secretly enjoyed writing it because it’s vivid and everyone can associate with it. I like to think that when I do these things, I circle around so that the eventual point makes up for the silliness along the way. That’s my hope.
RF: Life would be pretty dully without silliness…
JD: I mean, Schumann’s writing is very silly. And full of the absurd. Maybe that’s a model for me. Everyone has a different way of doing it. When Bartók writes about music, it’s so serious and so academic, but his music is full of life.
RF: Do you listen to music while you’re writing?
JD: Mostly I don’t. Do you?
RF: I find it really difficult when I’m actually writing. I get distracted and listen to the music.
JD: I get excited or outraged! I can’t really do background music. Even though when I’m around the house doing chores and stuff I love to listen to Nina Simone and jazz, but I can’t do that when I’m writing. It doesn’t feel right.
RF: Let’s turn to the three pieces of writing about music that you’d like to talk about…
The Fermata by ETA Hoffmann
(1885) Read for free at Project Gutenberg
JD: It’s tough to choose just three. In my book, I talk about ETA Hoffmann. I would feel somewhat remiss if I didn’t. People don’t read him that much but his short story The Fermata is one of the funniest and most brilliant things about music that you can possibly imagine. He had this way of creating the perfect metaphorical scenarios for musical ideas. They are obviously super-Romantic and ridiculously over the top. [I could recommend] some of his other stories about music too, and there’s his famous description of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. But The Fermata is an unbelievable masterpiece. I laughed so hard. He’s so funny and that’s what makes he love him. And another obvious choice is Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr [which weaves together the autobiography of a cat with the story of the composer Johannes Kreisler]. It’s a postmodern masterpiece and also a great book for cat lovers.
The Fermata is one of the funniest and most brilliant things about music that you can imagine
RF: And how about your second choice?
Feminine Endings by Susan McClary
University of Minnesota Press (2002; original edition 1991)
I’m going to get trouble in for this. One of the most vivid and memorable pieces of writing about music from the world of American academia in the last 30-40 years is Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings, which infuriated me when I first read it. It still is infuriating. She takes a lot of risks, about reinserting sex into academic musical discussions. Maybe you don’t agree with all of it – I don’t think anyone does – but I think it’s incredibly challenging writing and, like certain important recordings, it also makes things seem new and different.
It’s a book about how gender roles and sexual power dynamics are embedded in the language of classical music. We’re talking about that a lot now, but it’s one of the first to grapple with some of the complicated problems about how Western tonality works, how the whole language is set up, and what it means for men and women. It’s about re-examining and probing what’s embedded in this music. A lot of these issues are incredibly important to music and how music feels. Sex is incredibly woven into music. No one is more complicated and interesting about sexual dynamics than, for example, Mozart.
The Classical Style by Charles Rosen
Faber & Faber (2002; original edition 1971)
That segues into my third choice, which is Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style. It’s a classic. He has an amazing passage about Mozart and sex in there, about how always at the moments of greatest tragedy and pathos in Mozart there’s also a weirdly sensual body. Mozart inhabits both of these places. For people who love classical music, The Classical Style is pretty great.
I’m just going to cheat and add one more choice. I always add the Louis Moreau Gottschalk memoir Notes of a Pianist. It is a fascinating account of what it’s like to be a touring musician in America in the 19th century, and also an incredible account of a narcissistic artist with a very funny and flowery prose style. He reveals his narcissim and sort of glories in it. He can’t escape from his own demons. It’s so funny and relevant for the miseries of what it actually is to be a musician.
RF: Where do you think classical music writing is at right now?
There’s some very interesting and intense academic music writing going on now. There’s a lot of people writing clever and thoughtful histories of classical music, zeroing in on composers. And there’s more of an appetite that I imagined for unpacking the basics of music. Vox did that thing with cellist Alisa Weilerstein about the G major Prelude from Bach’s First Cello Suite that has hundreds of thousands of views. People want to know how stuff works.
RF: That reminds me of the New York Metropolitan Opera podcast Aria Code, where they take an opera aria per episode and explore it. There’s always a singer who goes into the music and then there’s a contemporary storyline that runs alongside.
JD: I feel a little out of the loop. Now that I’ve finished the book, I can look around the world a little more.
RF: What’s next on the writing agenda?
JD: I’m not sure yet but I have several ideas. I loved writing my book once I got down to it. It was very happy-making.
RF: That really comes through. I’ll look forward to reading whatever comes next and thank you so much for talking to me.
What are your favourite music books? Have you read any of the books Jeremy mentions? Share your thoughts and tips in the comments below.
After starting this newsletter back in January, I took a long, unannounced break thanks to vastly underestimating how much time it would take to complete the MA I’m studying for. Sorry to have disappeared, hello again, and thanks for reading this far. The end of my degree is now in sight, so I’ll be back soon with another interviewee to talk about the worlds of words and music.