Counterpoint

October 14, 2019
In this uneven debut, Washington Post and Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Kennicott recounts his efforts to learn to play Johann Sebastian Bach’s renowned Goldberg Variations to cope with his grief following the death of his mother from cancer. Kennicott is unabashedly honest, stating he wanted to avoid the fate of his mother, who was “unhappy and died that way, unfulfilled and angry about what she sensed was a wasted life.” This thoughtful mission, nonlinearly told, helps him to better come to terms with their complicated relationship (she “is my other ear... always listening for something simple and sweet,” yet she would also beat him). He focuses on Johann Sebastian Bach himself, offering insight into his approach to composing, suggesting he went to “great lengths to subvert our efforts to comprehend the formal structure of the variations.” Kennicott does not skimp on details, causing the narrative to feel more like a scholarly thesis devoted to the composer than an account of his own personal experiences, which tend to take a distant backseat and disappear. About the Goldberg Variations, Kennicot admits, “I had no illusions that I would ever master them well enough to be satisfied by my performance,” yet he realizes that life will never be perfect, though one can still find purpose and peace. While the memoir elements get lost here, aficionados of music theory and Bach will take delight in this raw and cultured narrative.

October 15, 2019
Pulitzer Prize winner Kennicott, senior art and architecture critic of the Washington Post, makes his book debut with an absorbing meditation on grief. Unsettled by the death of his mother, the author was drawn to Bach's Goldberg Variations, especially Glenn Gould's 1955 recording, an emotional, aggressive interpretation, "clarifying as with colored light the intertwining lines of Bach's thirty variations." As a piano student years before, he had not mastered anything by Bach, preferring instead dazzling pieces by Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms: "fast and with lots of drama." Now, he decided to confront the challenges of the Variations. "I had no illusions that I would ever master them well enough to be satisfied by my performance," Kennicott writes. "Rather, it seemed a way to test life again, to press upon it and see what was still vital," to attain "clarity, accuracy," and, not least, a sense of order and control. This desire for control in the face of sorrow, mortality, and loss recurs as a contrapuntal theme as the author chronicles his obsession with the Variations--their place in Bach's oeuvre, reception, and demanding technique--along with a memoir of growing up in a tense household dominated by his moody, brittle, often vindictive mother, whom he wishes he could better understand. As he questions what it means to truly know a piece of music, he asks, as well, what it means to know any person. During adolescence, he found in music "a refuge" from chaotic family life, "an adult space where I was fully responsible for my actions." At home, practicing piano functioned as a kind of "wordless communication"; "I would make music for an ideal mother who didn't exist, and she listened to a son who, through music, spoke without irony, or condescension." Now, as an adult, he seeks in music not solace, nor epiphany, nor a "miraculous entrée to higher consciousness," but instead a "raw moment of openness" to "an emotional resignation that is beyond pleasure, or healing, or anything that can be captured in words." Elegant prose graces a deeply thoughtful memoir.

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Starred review from December 1, 2019
Kennicott, who began his career at the Washington Post as a classical-music critic in 1999, is now the paper's art and architecture critic, for which he received a 2013 Pulitzer Prize. An accomplished, if not professional, pianist, he was moved to learn Johann Sebastian Bach's magisterial, fiendishly challenging Goldberg Variations in the years following the death of his mother, whose capricious, often-violent temper cast a long, dark shadow over his boyhood. It kept banal things at bay, he writes of the effect of Bach's music upon him in her final days and beyond, while bringing profound things close enough to be felt without being engulfed by their dread darkness. From his deep dive into the Variations, undertaken even as he pursued a demanding, full-time schedule at the Post, Kennicott here delivers an approachable, uniquely thoughtful rumination on a range of musical topics, from the unrelenting demands of musical practice and performance to the mysterious and fraught dynamic between parent and child, from the delicate art of pedagogy to Bach's place in the firmament of classical composers?its brightest star, arguably, manifest from almost anywhere. Recommended for anyone with an ear for classical music and an interest in biography.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2019

The Pulitzer Prize-winning senior art and architecture critic for the Washington Post, Kennicott turned to Johann Sebastian Bach when his mother was dying, finding a respite from grief by listening to his music and spending five years learning to play the monumental Goldberg Variations. In the process, he asks two perhaps contrapuntally related questions: What does it mean to know a piece of music? And what does it mean to know another human being?

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2019
Pulitzer Prize winner Kennicott, senior art and architecture critic of the Washington Post, makes his book debut with an absorbing meditation on grief. Unsettled by the death of his mother, the author was drawn to Bach's Goldberg Variations, especially Glenn Gould's 1955 recording, an emotional, aggressive interpretation, "clarifying as with colored light the intertwining lines of Bach's thirty variations." As a piano student years before, he had not mastered anything by Bach, preferring instead dazzling pieces by Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms: "fast and with lots of drama." Now, he decided to confront the challenges of the Variations. "I had no illusions that I would ever master them well enough to be satisfied by my performance," Kennicott writes. "Rather, it seemed a way to test life again, to press upon it and see what was still vital," to attain "clarity, accuracy," and, not least, a sense of order and control. This desire for control in the face of sorrow, mortality, and loss recurs as a contrapuntal theme as the author chronicles his obsession with the Variations--their place in Bach's oeuvre, reception, and demanding technique--along with a memoir of growing up in a tense household dominated by his moody, brittle, often vindictive mother, whom he wishes he could better understand. As he questions what it means to truly know a piece of music, he asks, as well, what it means to know any person. During adolescence, he found in music "a refuge" from chaotic family life, "an adult space where I was fully responsible for my actions." At home, practicing piano functioned as a kind of "wordless communication"; "I would make music for an ideal mother who didn't exist, and she listened to a son who, through music, spoke without irony, or condescension." Now, as an adult, he seeks in music not solace, nor epiphany, nor a "miraculous entr�e to higher consciousness," but instead a "raw moment of openness" to "an emotional resignation that is beyond pleasure, or healing, or anything that can be captured in words." Elegant prose graces a deeply thoughtful memoir.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.