Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music

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.