Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • “Jeremy Denk has written a love letter to the music, and especially to the music teachers, in his life.”—Conrad Tao, pianist and composer
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker
In Every Good Boy Does Fine, renowned pianist Jeremy Denk traces an implausible journey. His life is already a little tough as a precocious, temperamental six-year-old piano prodigy in New Jersey, and then a family meltdown forces a move to New Mexico. There, Denk must please a new taskmaster, an embittered but devoted professor, while navigating junior high school. At sixteen he escapes to college in Ohio, only to encounter a bewildering new cast of music teachers, both kind and cruel. After many humiliations and a few triumphs, he ultimately finds his way as a world-touring pianist, a MacArthur “Genius,” and a frequent performer at Carnegie Hall.
Many classical music memoirs focus on famous musicians and professional accomplishments, but this book focuses on the everyday: neighborhood teacher, high school orchestra, local conductor. There are few writers capable of so deeply illuminating the trials of artistic practice—hours of daily repetition, mystifying advice, pressure from parents and teachers. But under all this struggle is a love letter to the act of teaching.
In lively, endlessly imaginative prose, Denk dives deeply into the pieces and composers that have shaped him—Bach, Mozart, and Brahms, among others—and offers lessons on melody, harmony, and rhythm. How do melodies work? Why is harmony such a mystery to most people? Why are teachers so obsessed with the metronome?
In Every Good Boy Does Fine, Denk shares the most meaningful lessons of his life, and tries to repay a debt to his teachers. He also reminds us that we must never stop asking questions about music and its purposes: consolation, an armor against disillusionment, pure pleasure, a diversion, a refuge, and a vehicle for empathy.
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Jeremy Denk. (2022). Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons. Random House Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Jeremy Denk. 2022. Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons. Random House Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Jeremy Denk, Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons. Random House Publishing Group, 2022.
MLA Citation (style guide)Jeremy Denk. Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons. Random House Publishing Group, 2022.
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- bioText: Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists. Winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He returns frequently to Carnegie Hall and has recently appeared with ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. His recordings have reached #1 on the Billboard classical charts and featured on many best-of-the-year lists. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Guardian, and The New York Times Book Review. Denk graduated from Oberlin College, Indiana University, and the Juilliard School. He lives in New York City.
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- NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A beautifully written, witty memoir that is also an immersive exploration of classical music—its power, its meanings, and what it can teach us about ourselves—from the MacArthur “Genius” Grant–winning pianist
LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • “Jeremy Denk has written a love letter to the music, and especially to the music teachers, in his life.”—Conrad Tao, pianist and composer
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker
In Every Good Boy Does Fine, renowned pianist Jeremy Denk traces an implausible journey. His life is already a little tough as a precocious, temperamental six-year-old piano prodigy in New Jersey, and then a family meltdown forces a move to New Mexico. There, Denk must please a new taskmaster, an embittered but devoted professor, while navigating junior high school. At sixteen he escapes to college in Ohio, only to encounter a bewildering new cast of music teachers, both kind and cruel. After many humiliations and a few triumphs, he ultimately finds his way as a world-touring pianist, a MacArthur “Genius,” and a frequent performer at Carnegie Hall.
Many classical music memoirs focus on famous musicians and professional accomplishments, but this book focuses on the everyday: neighborhood teacher, high school orchestra, local conductor. There are few writers capable of so deeply illuminating the trials of artistic practice—hours of daily repetition, mystifying advice, pressure from parents and teachers. But under all this struggle is a love letter to the act of teaching.
In lively, endlessly imaginative prose, Denk dives deeply into the pieces and composers that have shaped him—Bach, Mozart, and Brahms, among others—and offers lessons on melody, harmony, and rhythm. How do melodies work? Why is harmony such a mystery to most people? Why are teachers so obsessed with the metronome?
In Every Good Boy Does Fine, Denk shares the most meaningful lessons of his life, and tries to repay a debt to his teachers. He also reminds us that we must never stop asking questions about music and its purposes: consolation, an armor against disillusionment, pure pleasure, a diversion, a refuge, and a vehicle for empathy. - reviews
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September 1, 2021
Journalist Cheung relates growing up in Hong Kong-- The Impossible City--after its 1917 reunification with China, traversing its rich identities while exploring her education at various English-speaking international schools, the city's literary and indie music scenes, and the protests against restricted freedoms. One of America's top pianists, MacArthur fellow Denk recounts his upbringing and training, clarifying the complexities of the artistic life and the student-teacher relationship in Every Good Boy Does Fine. As Drayton relates in Black American Refugee, she left Trinidad and Tobago as a youngster to join her mother in the United States but was angered by the contrast in how white and Black people were treated and by age 20 returned to Tobago, where she could enjoy being Black without fear. What My Bones Know reveals Emmy Award-winning radio producer Foo's relentless panic attacks until she was finally diagnosed with Complex PTSD, a condition resulting from ongoing trauma--in her case the years she spent abused by her parents before they abandoned her. Growing up fourth-generation Japanese American in Los Angeles directly after World War II, Pulitzer finalist poet Hongo recounts spending his life hunting for The Perfect Sound, from his father's inspired record-player setup and the music his Black friends enjoyed to Bach, Coltrane, ukulele, and the best possible vacuum tubes. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Negroland, Jefferson offers what she calls a temperamental autobiography with Constructing a Nervous System, woven of fragments like the sound of a 1950s jazz LP and a ballerina's movements spliced with those of an Olympic runner to explore the possibilities of the female body. In Home/Land, New Yorker staffer Mead captures the excitement, dread, and questions of identity that surfaced after she relocated from New York to her birth city, London, with her family in 2018. Vasquez-Lavado now lives In the Shadow of the Mountain, but once she was a Silicon Valley star wrestling with deep-seated personal problems (e.g., childhood abuse, having to deny her sexuality to her family) when she decided to turn around her life through mountain climbing; eventually, she took a team of young women survivors up Mount Everest (150,000-copy first printing).
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from November 29, 2021
A boy tumbles into manhood while learning classical piano in this raucous coming-of-age memoir from concert pianist and New Yorker writer Denk. He surveys his youth through the lens of his piano studies—from his first plinkings in 1976 at age six with a neighborhood teacher in New Jersey to his rigorous studies at Juilliard’s PhD program—while navigating complicated family relationships and his awakening homosexuality. It’s a story of mind-numbing practice; obsessive attention to fingering, tempos, and tone; and wan hopes of glory, all made engrossing by Denk’s shrewd metaphors (“Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address”). At its heart are evocative sketches of Denk’s teachers and their lessons—which can feel like philosophy seminars (“You need to learn the difference between character and caricature,” one instructor says) or barroom brawls (“ ‘Why are you fucking waiting?’ he yelled in my face, coating me with a fine film of scotch-scented saliva”)—but always unveil some deep musical truth. Denk’s sparkling prose, frankness, and humor make for an indelible portrait of the musician as a bewildered kid.
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December 15, 2021
An acclaimed American pianist tells his story. Denk traces his journey from a tormented child to a globe-trotting performer. With remarkable detail, the author recalls the countless hours of music lessons, as well as the demands of his parents and teachers, that helped shape him into a MacArthur-winning musician and frequent performer at Carnegie Hall. When he was 6, Denk's family moved from North Carolina to New Jersey. Following a playground incident, his teacher suggested that he needed a hobby to keep him out of trouble. At the author's request, he began piano lessons. Unfortunately, as music began to bring stability, his "home life got worse. My father's job stress, in tandem with my mom's drinking, manifested for me...in the form of an unavoidable and senseless anger, a kind of autopilot screaming that inhabited the late afternoons." At age 10, his family moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico. Following a successful audition, Denk began private lessons with William Leland, a piano professor at New Mexico State. At the same time, Denk began an accelerated school plan. He graduated high school at 16 and entered Oberlin College, where he studied music and chemistry. At Oberlin, the author made the decision to pursue a career as a musician despite his parents' concerns. Working on his master's degree at Indiana University, he fell under the spell of his guru, Hungarian pianist and teacher Gy�rgy Sebők. While finishing his doctorate at Juilliard, Denk also took on a faculty position at Indiana. During this time, he began to fully comprehend the joys and frustrations that his teachers had endured. The author recounts the ups and downs of each phase of his educational career, with a particular focus on the input he received from his teachers. Along the way, he offers readers lessons in harmony, melody, and rhythm. Musicians and music enthusiasts will appreciate this journey of self-discovery.COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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October 10, 2022
Concert pianist Jeremy Denk looks back on a lifetime of music lessons in this reflective memoir sure to be treasured by fans of classical music. A gifted child, Denk was launched into an accelerated program of study, beginning piano lessons at the age of six and entering college as a music and chemistry double major at sixteen, all at considerable cost to his social life. With short chapters that insightfully expound on the principles of harmony, melody, and rhythm, this book is a paean to the complex relationship between musicians and their teachers as, together, they embark on a journey in pursuit of musical excellence. It's a life of grueling drudgery in practice rooms, electrifying moments of inspiration, and numerous humiliations dealt by teachers along the way, typically any time the student's ego begins to inflate. Denk demurely and sweetly touches on his late-blooming love life, among other domestic issues, such as his parents' strained marriage, but the gripping drama of his long search for the right teacher is what gives this story its beating heart. Denk's often high-flying insights into the work of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and their ilk is honed from decades of thoughtful study and grounded by a personable sense of humor and a practical yet deeply considered approach to the craft. (Of piano technique, he quips, ""Often the division of the hands is just juggling, a logistical question of which hand is available to pick up the notes--like which parent is able to pick up the kids from soccer practice."") Music fans will swoon.COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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January 14, 2022
Being a genius isn't easy. For Denk, who was recognized as a piano prodigy at age six, his dedicated study of music was a source of happiness as well as a refuge from family difficulties, but it was also a cause of frustration, isolation from his peers, and endless rounds of tedious practice and struggling to absorb the lessons of his teachers and mentors--a combination that would continue throughout his life. Initially a short piece of the same title in the New Yorker, this expanded memoir plunges fully into the personal and professional delights and despairs of a life centered on learning and teaching music. In between Denk's recounting of his personal history are chapters analyzing and ruminating on selected pieces of music (Bach's Prelude in C Major; Chopin's "Butterfly" �tude) as illustrations of how melody, harmony, and rhythm build music that moves listeners emotionally. VERDICT Already noted for his skillful writing on music, Denk proves equally adept at memoir. Anyone with an interest in music will find this an excellent read; those with a good grounding in classical music or with time to listen and reflect on the pieces Denk analyzes will find this book even more rewarding.--Kathleen McCallister
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • “Jeremy Denk has written a love letter to the music, and especially to the music teachers, in his life.”—Conrad Tao, pianist and composer
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker
In Every Good Boy Does Fine, renowned pianist Jeremy Denk traces an implausible journey. His life is already a little tough as a precocious, temperamental six-year-old piano prodigy in New Jersey, and then a family meltdown forces a move to New Mexico. There, Denk must please a new taskmaster, an embittered but devoted professor, while navigating junior high school. At sixteen he escapes to... - sortTitle
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