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 enlarge | Author: Glenn Kurtz
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $8.12
You Save: $5.83 (42%)
New (36) Used (8) from $7.89
Avg. Customer Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 32208
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0307278751
Dewey Decimal Number: 787.87092
EAN: 9780307278753
ASIN: 0307278751
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW
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| Customer Reviews:
 An excellent and inspiring read! April 30, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Like the author, I too have hit two playing-ending walls and have regained my ability to practice. I really appreciate the author's insights into the various voices that can inform and jade our ability to play.
I'm so appreciative to have found this book.
 Very artful writing about being a classical guitarist in the modern world. February 15, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm a jazz guitar major at a university, and our semester assignment was to read this book. I found it to be very artful in its descriptions of being a classical guitarist in the modern world. Though I could have done with out the twenty or so pages of guitar history, Dr. Kurtz does a wonderful job of laying down the realities of being a musician in a world that doesn't necessarily need them. However, I wouldn't suggest this book to just anyone. It is more suited to people who love and can relate to art music such as classical or jazz. Overall, very nice writing!
Solfege February 14, 2008
101 out of 103 found this review helpful
Glenn Kurtz' meditation on music, an extended history of the origins of the guitar with biographies of the great composers who wrote for the instrument and even the history of the development of the ancient and modern forms of the stringed guitar, makes for some of the most rewarding reading on a topic of surprising ingenuity.
The 'story' outline of the book is brief: Kurtz recounts his childhood fascination with the guitar, his extended sessions of study and practice as he prepared his career by attending the New England Conservatory of Music, eventually gaining performance time in this country and in Europe, and his decision that his talent was not of the class that merited a successful career in music that brought him to the point of giving up the guitar, to the final reason for writing this book - practicing is not a chore but a means to finding the soul of music and the soul of self in the process.
But such a short 'plot summary' in many ways defeats the purpose of this immensely satisfying book, a book that will not only be deeply admired by musicians of every rank, but a book that is so poetic and elegant in style of writing that it will entertain those whose lives have been touched only tangentially by music. 'Like every practicing musician, I know both the joy and the hard labor of practice. To hear these sounds emerging from my instrument! And to hear them more clearly, more beautifully in my head than my fingers can ever seem to grasp. Together this pleasure in music and the discipline of practice engage in an endless tussle, a kind of romance.'
From his stance as a 'returning musician' Glenn Kurtz has the retrospective edge on restating all the beauties that surround the subject of music and music making. His diversionary paths into many related subjects as listed above make this a book that is not only tender and entertaining, but also a book full of rich information for every reader. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, February 08
"I thought I knew what the music should mean." February 11, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Glenn Kurtz's PRACTICING relates his story of how he unlearned this audacity of thinking he knew what "music should mean." After years of practicing as a boy and appearing on television, after attending and graduating from the New England Conservatory of Music, after a few years in Vienna, Kurtz's anticipated career as a classical guitarist frittered away into nothingness. "The guitar is just an instrument. Others had mastered it, overcome its technique and history to become performing musicians. But I would not." For a decade he didn't touch his guitar. Instead, he earned a doctorate in comparative literature and taught college. Then, one day he listened to tapes of his senior year performance and discovered more limitations in it than he had once thought: "Instead of playing the music, I'd strangled it." This freed him from his long paralysis of feeling a failure to again take his guitar in his hands and practice: "My first time through, I practiced badly, chasing an ideal that ruined music for me, turning what I had loved the most into torture. Now, I'm pursuing not an ideal but the reality of my own experience. I began to practice again because I felt I could do better this time."
PRACTICING alternates chapters that take us through a single present-day practice session and through recollections of Kurtz's musicianship until he quit after Vienna. If Kurtz's guitar playing even approached his talents as a writer, the author is doubly blessed. He conveys beautifully his development as he labored so intensely to reach the perfection his own expectations dangled out in front of him. He smoothly includes a short history of the guitar. He peels away the various methods -- some very inventive - his various music teachers used to draw whole, not mechanical or forced, music out of him. He lets us virtually sit with him in his San Francisco apartment as he progresses through three hours plus of scales, etudes, and scores. Nothing -- not even the length of his fingernails -- is neglected in his coverage of the subject of what it means to a musician -- even a lapsed one -- to practice and to perform: "Everything that practicing accumulates and protects, performance releases." Too often, the younger Kurtz saw himself falling short because he had a "fear of giving music away and having nothing left for myself." Yet, in a few golden passages, he does transform the relentless accumulation of his practices into a "powerful and expansive" fusing with an audience: "Concentrating as deeply and pleasurably as I ever had before in my life, I felt an utter ease in the performance, as if the notes in their vibrations created the physical space, the flow of time, and the relationships among us all."
Kurtz is perhaps still a perfectionist at heart. He does, after all inform us that "I began to practice again because I felt I could do better this time." But if he is, I hope this time his guitar will not be shoved into a closet again for another decade. I hope he will practice -- and perhaps even perform -- with less tension, less tightrope expectation.
Any musician, professional or amateur, will likely be enthralled by PRACTICING. It offers a plethora of ideas that can deepen anyone's practice. But one doesn't need to play an instrument to love this book. It's practically perfect.
 Good but not great February 3, 2008
2 out of 8 found this review helpful
I love the concept of a book about the love of the classical guitar, but the writing is what threw me off; it seems as though there is a lot of irrelevant information to fill pages. A lot of material is devoted to the history of the guitar, other classical guitar players, and the tranistions are sudden from subject to subject. If anything, the book almosts stresses that classical guitar playing is unapprecitated and laughed at among music critics. The author's frustration about the perceptions of playing the classical guitar left me feeling that it is nothing more than a hobby. It is apparent that the author is not a writer.
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