Rough Ideas
Reflections on Music and More
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Award for Storytelling 2020
'A rich, endlessly fascinating book.' Philip Pullman
'One pleasure after another.' Gramophone
'The delightful musings of a wise and worldly polymath.' Financial Times, Books of the Year
Stephen Hough is indisputably one of the world's leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards for his concerts and recordings, as well as being a writer and composer.
In Rough Ideas, Hough writes about music and the life of a musician, from exploring the broader aspects of what it is to walk out onto a stage or to make a recording, to specialist tips from deep inside the practice room. He also writes vividly about people, places, literature and art, and touches on more controversial subjects, such as the possibility of the existence of God, and the challenge involved in being a gay Catholic. Rough Ideas is an illuminating and absorbing introduction into the life and mind of one of our great cultural figures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A classical musician holds forth on music, ethics, religion, and much else in this hit-and-miss grab bag of opinionating. Hough offers dozens of short essays on a multitude of topics; most concern his musical career and include appreciations of composers such as Liszt and Tchaikovsky, sketches of colleagues, recollections of concert mishaps (including a study of "humiliation and vomiting at the keyboard"), disquisitions on proper piano posture, and speculation on what constitutes a gay pianist ("Vladimir Horowitz once said there are three types of pianists: Jewish, gay and bad"). Hough's interest then dilates widely as he touches on overly aggressive art restorations, the architecture of the Sydney Opera House, the morality of assisted suicide, the existence of God, and the sacrament of Communion (he's a convert to Catholicism). Hough's writings on music are endlessly knowledgeable, illuminating, and accessible, but his thoughts on nonmusical subjects are more diffuse and less engaging. ("The Big Bang, the first First, might well have been, above all, an explosion of love: the universe's orgasm," he conjectures at the end of a ramble on "encouragement, falsehood, and Auschwitz.") Still, music lovers, from professional musicians to casual listeners, will find the book a delight to browse through.
