Skip to content
You are not logged in |Login  
     
Limit search to available items
Book Cover
book
BookBook
Author Kennicott, Philip, author.

Title Counterpoint : a memoir of Bach and mourning / Philip Kennicott.

Publication Info. New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2020]

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Farmington, Main Library - Adult Department  786.209 KEN    Check Shelf
 Newington, Lucy Robbins Welles Library - Adult Department  780.92 BACH    Check Shelf
 West Hartford, Noah Webster Library - Non Fiction  780.92 BACH K    Check Shelf
Edition First edition.
Description 244 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [241]-244).
Summary "A Pulitzer Prize- winning critic reflects on the meaning and emotional impact of a Bach masterwork. As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began listening to the music of Bach obsessively, and 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 memories of a difficult, complicated childhood. He describes the joys of mastering some of the 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?"-- Provided by publisher.
Subject Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685-1750 -- Appreciation.
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685-1750. Goldberg-Variationen.
Kennicott, Philip.
MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Classical.
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685-1750. (OCoLC)fst00031701
Goldberg-Variationen (Bach, Johann Sebastian) (OCoLC)fst01359262
Art appreciation. (OCoLC)fst00815447
Genre/Form Autobiographies.
ISBN 9780393635362 (hardcover)
0393635368 (hardcover)
9780393635379 (epub)
-->
Add a Review