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orphius's review
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
The author's ability to describe music's workings even if you are not a musician is very good. They are very crisp descriptions.
Overall, the author contemplates not only how his music and his piano playing are intertwined with his mother and his complicated feelings around her death, but also takes a hard look at why he stopped pursuing music.
Most of this is done well and very thoughtful. I do think that towards the end the author repeats himself and his themes a bit. I think he could have trimmed parts near the end, though the actual ending is quite good.
Overall, the author contemplates not only how his music and his piano playing are intertwined with his mother and his complicated feelings around her death, but also takes a hard look at why he stopped pursuing music.
Most of this is done well and very thoughtful. I do think that towards the end the author repeats himself and his themes a bit. I think he could have trimmed parts near the end, though the actual ending is quite good.
cameroncl's review
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
An interesting, and at times profoundly sad, memoir of Kennicott's experience learning music, his complicated relationship with a deeply flawed parent, Bach's Goldberg Variations, and the intertwining of all three. Generally very, very good, although the last two chapters were a bit too abrupt relative to the rest of the book.
esuchyta's review
I found this memoir sometimes insightful and other times scattered. It jumps between the author's life, Bach's life, and musical analysis, the last of which can be difficult to follow for someone who isn't classically trained. It's not that it isn't interesting, but I'm not sure how much I'll be able to take out of it. The Bach anecdotes were amusing, but I think maybe a bit digressional at times. More generally, the flow sometimes seemed to get distracted from the main quandry of what it means to know a piece of music.
The author is a vocabulary virtuoso, a maestro of highbrow sounding language. I mostly enjoyed that but some might find it exhausting. I wasn't a huge fan of the audiobook narrator. He wasn't hard to understand, but the cadence was sometimes stunted.
Overall, this book was OK, but I wouldn't put near the top of my recent reading.
The author is a vocabulary virtuoso, a maestro of highbrow sounding language. I mostly enjoyed that but some might find it exhausting. I wasn't a huge fan of the audiobook narrator. He wasn't hard to understand, but the cadence was sometimes stunted.
Overall, this book was OK, but I wouldn't put near the top of my recent reading.
zgriptsuroica's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
I came into this wanting more Bach and less memoir, and might have enjoyed it more if I'd gone into it with more accurate expectations of what it would be.
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