• Contrary to popular belief, not many critics are failed artists. (They might be better critics if they were.) Some, however, are what I call “recovering artists,” a category into which I fit, since I spent several years working as a professional musician prior to becoming a full-time writer at the age of 29. While my experience is anything but unique, it is one that, so far as I know, has never been written about in any detail. This is one reason why I found Glenn Kurtz’s Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music so compelling. Kurtz studied classical guitar at the New England Conservatory of Music and, like me, pursued a performing career before deciding to take up writing. A few years ago he started playing again, this time for his own pleasure, and now he has written a book, half memoir and half meditation, about the broken arc of his musical life.
The fact that Kurtz gave up the guitar altogether for an extended period doubtless explains why he is so good at describing the inner life of musicians. Because he lost touch with that life, he now takes no part of it for granted. He writes with great acuteness, for instance, about the unending drudgery without which no one, however naturally gifted, can hope to make music for a living:
You sit down, you look at your hands, you hold the instrument. You listen to the musicians you admire, who have this same equipment, hands and instruments. Then you look at your own hands again, and it doesn’t seem possible. . . . I think this is when your story as a musician begins. Playing, you’ve begun to practice. And practice has made “perfect.” Now you’ll never play the way you wish you could. Now one lifetime is not enough. You’ll never be finished practicing.
He is also very good at describing the alienation from everyday life that is, for better and worse, the artist’s lot:
My parents . . . silenced their emotions, delegated them to others. They sacrificed what was most important in order to preserve their comfortable lives. But I was part of a select society, with music and poetry as our secret language. It was startlingly clear: artists expressed exquisite emotional truths in tones that everyone heard but few had the courage to feel and understand. To speak these truths, to be an artist, was the ultimate calling, the antithesis of school and partying and repetitive family rituals.
In addition, Kurtz articulates what I can only call the spirituality of the artist’s futile quest for perfection: “Each day, with every note, practicing is the same task, this essential human gesture—reaching out for an ideal, for the grandeur of what you desire, and feeling it slip through your fingers.” What is most poignant about this quest is that the youngsters who embark on the artist’s way do so without any guarantee of success:
Because Salieri knows Mozart is a genius, his own failure then seems inevitable. But the real weight that he and every artist—every person who strives for greatness—suffers is the weight of not knowing. You must find in yourself the courage to leap off the cliff. Yet it is not up to you whether you fly or fall.
Glenn Kurtz fell, and it was a long time before he found within himself the courage to start again, this time as a committed amateur. Yet that painful experience made it possible for him to write this exceedingly beautiful book. No doubt he would rather have grown up to be a world-class guitarist—but I’m not so sure he got the short end of the stick.
