Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 7 reviews on
As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn't seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach's music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer's greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood.
He describes the joys of mastering some of the piano pieces, the frustrations that plague his understanding of others, the technical challenges they pose, and the surpassing beauty of the melodies, harmonies, and counterpoint that distinguish them. While exploring Bach's compositions he sketches a cultural history of playing the piano in the twentieth century. And he raises two questions that become increasingly interrelated, not unlike a contrapuntal passage in one of the variations itself: What does it mean to know a piece of music? What does it mean to know another human being?
Piano player and teacher, guitar player, singer, bookkeeper, Cubs fan, leftie.
@PhilipKennicott I’m a musician and piano teacher. I’m 4 chapters into “Counterpoint” and it is having a profound affect on me. Thank you for this beautiful book. I can’t wait to introduce it to other musicians and teachers.
Books and such @willenfieldlit. Extracurriculars: cinema, docs, visual arts, music. Dog person.
@emilyhallnyc @CampMarmalade I really enjoyed art critic Philip Kennicott's memoir Counterpoint, which is as much about Bach as it is about his music, the Goldberg Variations in particular, and this serves as the framework for a wonderfully rich meditation on grief.