Counterpoint
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€18.99
A01=Philip Kennicott
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Author_Philip Kennicott
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AVN
Category=AVP
Category=AVRG
Category=BG
Category=DNC
Category=VFJX
classical music
COP=United States
debut
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
dying mother
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eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_non-fiction
goldberg variations
grief
harpsichord
instruction
keyboard
Language_English
loss of a parent
piano
piano lessons
Price_€10 to €20
softlaunch
variation form
Product details
- ISBN 9780393868388
- Weight: 198g
- Dimensions: 140 x 211mm
- Publication Date: 07 Dec 2021
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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?
Philip Kennicott, the senior art and architecture critic of the Washington Post and a former contributing editor for the New Republic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2013. He lives in Washington, DC.
