Practicing: A Musician's
Return to Music
Glenn Kurtz (Alfred A.
Knopf, 2007)
As a young boy in the
early seventies, Glenn Kurtz was accounted a guitar prodigy by the
staff and students of his local suburban guitar school. He could play
anything, it seemed, from folk tunes like "The Jolly Roving Tar"
to the classical 'Segovia repertoire', with side excursions, as the
decade went on, into rock and jazz. He was a musical true believer,
spending his afternoons in ecstasies of Beethoven and Bach.
Practicing is the story of what happened to Kurtz's dreams as
he came to maturity.
Disregarding his parents'
skepticism about a career in music, Kurtz accepted admission to the
New England Conservatory, which catapulted him into a whole different
league. NEC is centered on Jordan Hall, a performance space
surrounded by rehearsal spaces. "In every room deeply committed
musicians were aspiring to concert careers. The whole structure
vibrated with intensely focused ambition and the insidious undertone
of competition that came with it. Every hour of the day we were
immersed in one another's practicing, each contributing our part to
the din." The students study music history and theory,
conducting and composition, but what they are really there to do is
practice, and practice some more.
Each student, naturally,
has a teacher. Kurtz's teacher took him back to the very beginning,
because his technique had too much tension in it, and he had trouble
getting a clean tone out of the guitar. That was going to be a severe
obstacle to being the next Segovia, but so be it–he would start
again. The Conservatory being what it was, he was soon schooled in
another reality: "Even if I could play the melody by Brahms as
beautifully as the pianist next door, Brahms didn't write for the
guitar. I had thought I was a musician. Now, for the first time, I
realized that I was just a guitarist. Nothing had changed. I still
had to practice. But suddenly these études felt like a kind of
exile."
The guitarists had one
notable advantage in the conservatory environment: they were very
popular in the gig office. Kurtz could make a modest side living
playing in the background at parties and weddings–if he didn't mind
playing in the background. But he coveted the concert stage, which is
dominated by other instruments. Plenty of pianists since Liszt had
made a concert career of the piano, and plenty of violinists since
Paganini, but classical guitarists generally need some kind of day
job.
Kurtz made a sojourn in
Europe after graduation, but the story was the same. "Nothing
prevented me from earning a living as a classical guitarist–I could
teach, I could play at cafés and weddings, perform the occasional
concert. But this was not the life I had striven for. Time
splintered. Exercises became agony; preparing for competitions seemed
futile." So, in a fog, he came home and got a menial job in
publishing. Going on to graduate school in literature, he left the
guitar untouched.
Kurtz wrote this book
because he picked up his guitar again in his mid-thirties with a new
attitude, and a new understanding of what it is to practice. "I'm
trying not to repeat myself. My first time through, I practiced
badly, chasing an ideal that ruined music for me, turning what I had
loved the most into torture. Now I'm pursuing not an ideal but the
reality of my own experience."
It's complicated: he'll
never get back some of the speed and ease he had in his
twenty-one-year-old hands. But he can play every day; he can be
kinder to himself, and more in the moment. Nothing is wasted, really,
neither the time he gave to the guitar in his youth, nor the years
when he had to put it down and face the rest of life. From now on,
it's one day at a time.
Any Good Books, June 2019 Emailed.
Posts
