Alexandra Coghlan

Musings on harmony, melody and rhythm

Harmony is ‘all about erotics’, melody is ‘felt in the mind’ and rhythm is ‘a beat with a soul’, says the celebrated pianist Jeremy Denk

Jeremy Denk. [Getty Images]

Every Good Boy Does Fine – a banal phrase that also just happens to be the key to limitless wonder. You may have learned it, like Tom Stoppard, as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, or perhaps as the rather more tension-fraught Every Good Boy Deserves Food (whose sinister implication haunted more of my childhood than I ever confessed to my parents). Whichever it is, this mnemonic for the notes that fall on the lines of the stave in the treble clef is where music begins for most of us: the key that turns hieroglyphs into sound and, eventually, meaning.

So it was for Jeremy Denk. But, unlike the rest of us, the American pianist, whose name comes bracketed with a long list of awards, including a prestigious MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship, is a foregone conclusion – a good boy who has done rather more than fine.

Which would be a problem if this were the kind of memoir that revelled in will-he-won’t-he cinematic tension. But Denk is less interested in the competitions (often dismissed in self-deprecating parentheses), the rivals, setbacks and debuts, than in the quiet processes and people that underpinned them all: an amateur bassoonist local mayor; a too-rigid thumb; the strange sensuality of playing chamber music; a tendency to rush. Like that phrase itself, Denk’s career is just the framework for exploring something bigger and more interesting.

Anyone who has read Denk’s columns in the New Yorker will be familiar with the pianist’s wry, Sedaris-like tone of voice, his laconic approach to a revelation, his curiosity and breadth of interest and understanding. All make an easy transition to his beguiling first book, which follows his life from his childhood as the son of a former monk and a current alcoholic; an awkward piano prodigy, growing up in the not obviously propitious setting of smalltown New Mexico (summed up in an episode in which the young Jeremy decides to blow the minds of his classmates by blasting Strauss from his speakers on the school bus, to less than the desired effect); through his studies at Oberlin and Juilliard, stopping just short of major success; right on to the brink of the professional career that has since flourished.

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