An honest, searching exploration of the artist as a young man.
In this debut memoir, a young pianist recalls touring the United States with his program of contemporary American music while struggling with his closeted sexuality.
After graduating from music school with honors, Tendler came up with a bold idea: “I’d always wanted to travel, I loved modern American music, and I had nothing else to do. I would call it America 88x50—eighty-eight keys by fifty states.” His program showcased four American art-music composers—Charles Ives, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Alberto Ginastera and Aaron Copland. After emailing his proposal—which he now describes as “a grandiose web of half-truths”—to 50 presenters, he got no positive responses. “Clearly, you are not a professional musician,” said one presenter in an email reply. He decided to tour anyway. Tendler was ill-prepared, at first lacking a website, publicist or even a poster. (He now has a website with sound files, photographs and reviews.) Nevertheless, Tendler lined up a handful of concerts and hit the road, playing wherever he could get a booking—a nursing home, an elementary school, a noisy coffee shop—and eventually, he reached his goal. Even nonmusical readers could become engrossed in Tendler’s narrative as he struggles with self-doubt, logistics, health and coming out, as well as the underlying fight to maintain his pursuit of art through the generosity of others when funding is slim and audiences tiny. The elderly, he discovered, are the most likely to take chances and show up, “while my own hipper-than-thou demographic of twenty-somethings could scarcely ever be found.” In many ways, his quest is personal, though Tendler “learned long ago that only by playing before an audience can a pianist really discover the truth about what they know or don’t know about a piece of music,” and his exploration of this relationship is fascinating. For instance, when he played his dissonant music at a Hurricane Katrina benefit and a disrupted family was in the audience, his host told him that, to them, “Your program made perfect sense.”
An honest, searching exploration of the artist as a young man.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-70009-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Dissonant States Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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