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Along with creating or performing music, some composers and musicians from past and present have gained considerable attention for writing about it.
In the 19th century, Robert Schumann famously wrote criticism for a journal that he founded, Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), and Hector Berlioz contributed more than 100 articles alone to the Gazette musicale de Paris. Closer to our time, Virgil Thomson served as music critic of the New York Herald-Tribune from 1940 through 1954.
That literary tradition has continued to the present day. Minimalist composer Philip Glass, for example, published Words Without Music, a well-received memoir in 2015, and British pianist Stephen Hough has written three books, including Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More. But few if any present-day classical performers have devoted more time to writing than New York-based pianist Jeremy Denk, who returns to the Ravinia Festival to serve as soloist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under Mei-Ann Chen, on July 28.
Pieces by Denk, the 2013 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” have appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, Guardian and New York Times Book Review. In 2022, his memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine, was published by Random House and became a best-seller, drawing coverage on CBS “Sunday Morning” and National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air.” “I tried to write this book for anyone, but it’s a book about classical-music training, so inevitably it has a little bit of a niche quality about it. So I was, of course, thrilled and surprised by the level of attention that it got.”
After completing the memoir, he spent six days in a studio recording the audio version, because he couldn’t bear the idea of having others take it on and potentially mispronounce names or classical-music terms. During the sessions, he recalls getting a hard-bitten sound engineer to laugh a few times. “So I thought, ‘Maybe sometimes there are some jokes in this book that work for just about anybody,’” he said. “I hope that is true.”
“Writing was like opening a valve for me to express a lot of the solitary thoughts that happen when you’re practicing, some of the miseries and some of the pleasures of deep-diving into music.” — Jeremy Denk
Now 53, the pianist never set out to write a memoir, but it grew out of an article he wrote for the New Yorker that compared the teaching methods of boyhood teacher, William Leland, in New Mexico and his professor a decade or so later at Indiana University, noted Hungarian pianist György Sebők. “Ideally, that was a story about piano lessons and the different philosophies and approaches of teachers and the complicated way that we always interact with our mentors, and I suppose that is what I wanted to write more than a memoir, per se.”
But Andy Ward, who became his editor at Random House, encouraged Denk to flesh out that story and turn it into a book, and the pianist did just that. “It seemed to make sense to start with more or less first my piano lesson and go to my official last one when I was 26 — about a 20-year span,” he said. “At first, I was very unsure about writing that story, because I told Andy that a lot of piano lessons are really boring, and drudgery is built into the story, as any musician can tell you.”
But Denk persevered, finding lessons from his keyboard training that have continued to “radiate emotional meaning” and exploring how they have interacted with the rest of his life. “I began to get more confident that it could be a story in one way or another, [but] finding an ending was always tricky.”
Although he was always a voracious reader, he didn’t actively pursue writing until his early 30s, when a friend encouraged him to start a blog. “It was like opening a valve for me to express a lot of the solitary thoughts that happen when you’re practicing, some of the miseries and some of the pleasures of deep-diving into music,” he said. “It is a joy for me to think about music in that way, and to find the right collection of words to describe a passage of music gives me a little thrill.”
After his blog drew notice, publications began asking him to pen essays and other contributions about music. His arrival as a writer was cemented in March 2022, when he was featured in the New York Times Book Review’s weekly author’s Q&A, By the Book. Denk felt honored to be spotlighted in such a prominent way but also pressured to say something in the column that was recognizably in his distinctive voice and relatively entertaining. He was glad the questions came via email so he had time to craft appropriate responses.
In one question, he was asked to name his favorite musician-writers, and he selected three: rock singer-songwriter Patti Smith, pianist Charles Rosen and Schumann. “It’s always tricky to select three out of nowhere, right?” he said, recalling his response. “But those three stand out — they’re a good range in terms of the style of writing like Robert Schumann, who has this incredibly imaginative, effusive way of writing about music. It’s impulsive, romantic, wild and stylized, and he is able to get at certain things about music that way that ‘ordinary’ writers can’t.”
Denk was also asked to name his favorite memoir by a musician and he chose Notes of a Pianist by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869), a keyboard soloist who gained considerable fame in his time, but is now nearly forgotten. In his By the Book column, Denk wrote: “He was at once a genius, a narcissist and a con man — the true artist trifecta.”
