Rough Ideas
Reflections on Music and More
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A collection of essays on music and life by the famed classical pianist and composer
Stephen Hough is one of the world’s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards, both for his concerts and his recordings. He is also a writer, composer, and painter, and has been described by The Economist as one of “Twenty Living Polymaths.”
Hough writes informally and engagingly about music and the life of a musician, from 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: how to trill, how to pedal, how to practice. He also writes vividly about people he’s known, places he’s traveled to, books he’s read, paintings he’s seen; and he touches on more controversial subjects, such as assisted suicide and abortion. Even religion is there—the possibility of the existence of God, problems with some biblical texts, and the challenges involved in being a gay Catholic.
Rough Ideas is an illuminating, constantly surprising introduction to 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.
