In a time of upheaval and uncertainty, the classical pianist and best-selling author Jeremy Denk, like many people, is trying to figure out how to cope. “One way might be to think through the issues that have brought us here, and how music plays into them,” he proposes. Denk recently joined us to discuss a few musical books that grapple with the cultural and political divisions in the United States, and how such works might help shape “how we think about our common humanity.” His comments have been edited and condensed.
Notes of a Pianist
by Louis Moreau Gottschalk
Gottschalk was born, in nineteenth-century New Orleans, to an English father and a Creole mother, and he begins his memoir by describing how his grandfather was nearly massacred in a slave uprising in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, expressing sympathy for both him and the revolution. From the outset, Gottschalk is steeped in American divisions and traumas. He toured the U.S. during the Civil War, and he played for the President while Confederate soldiers were marching near Washington.
The money he earned was tied to ticket sales, and this economic arrangement is reflected in who his music was meant to appeal to. He had a cunning sense of what people wanted, and his big hit “The Banjo” basically co-opted early minstrelsy. In a way, the song represents an incredibly vital art form’s first entry into the classical world. It also speaks to another American division, the one between popular and classical music, which Gottschalk inhabited in a powerful way.
Women and the Piano
by Susan Tomes
This very charming book introduces you to fifty women pianists you’ve never thought enough about, but it’s also political. I was left heartbroken, particularly by the life of Lili Kraus, an incredible Hungarian-born pianist who ended up teaching in Fort Worth. There’s an amazing scene in which one of her students is playing a Beethoven concerto onstage, and she stops his performance to say, “I won’t have the audience think it’s supposed to sound that way.” An entire realm of talented pianists were not given enough ado and were sometimes sniffed at. It’s still woven into the fabric of the business. This book invites you to listen to all of these different voices, and it was a huge service in my thinking through the systemic problems that women pianists face today.
What Happened, Miss Simone?
by Alan Light
This biography acts as a companion to the stunning documentary of the same name, where you can see footage of Nina Simone staring into audiences with a kind of fear and distrust. In some respects, performance is demeaning, but it’s also Simone’s great assertion of creativity. Is there an artistic life that feels more riven by American problems? This book outlines a lot of that. She was turned away from prestigious institutions, and she started doing clubs. Eventually, her genius was recognized, and she made her way to a colossal place in the cultural ferment. But her own fame began to seem poisoned by the injustices around her, and she rebelled against the system.
Simone’s performance of “My Man’s Gone Now” may be my all-time favorite piece of recorded music. She completely purges George Gershwin, the original composer, from the song and distills it down to its essence in a way that someone like Beethoven would. She was constantly rewriting, trying to break the chains of the musical environment in which she found herself.
Charles Ives: A Life with Music
by Jan Swafford
The first part of this book, one of the great musical biographies, recounts Ives’s upbringing in a small, picturesque town in Connecticut and all of the things that vanished over the course of his childhood. Ives tried to recover this lost ideal of an America that, for him, was always dialectical. He was also tormented, in a way, by the division between classical and popular music, and worked constantly to blur the line between them and to capture the counterpoint of many voices. Swafford does such an amazing job of sketching Ives’s early life that his music, which is hard for many people to understand, begins to make a lot of sense.
Time’s Echo
by Jeremy Eichler
Using four studies from the Second World War era—Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten—this book contends with how music memorializes catastrophes and deals with totalitarianism, which may feel a bit on the nose right now. There’s a heartbreaking section about Schoenberg’s Holocaust piece, “A Survivor from Warsaw,” which premièred in a university gym in Albuquerque. That passage is a bit funny and also quite beautiful; there’s a sense of Europe and America reaching out to each other or repulsing each other. Music can be consoling; it can be against the grain, like a protest, without you really knowing it. Shostakovich was really good at that maneuver, encoding dissent that could easily be interpreted as the patriotic line—something we might all have to get used to doing.