Pianist Jeremy Denk on Fresh Air

Jeremy Denk has given the perfect title to his memoir of learning piano between childhood and his mid-twenties: Every Good Boy Does Fine. Terri Grose interviewed him on WHHY's Fresh Air, and she played some tracks from his survey of 700 years of music. Both brought me new perspectives on stuff I've listened to and read about and done all my life.

Denk's recording of Bach's chromatic fantasy got him into the subject of learning scales, because the piece is all scales "with demonic little curlicues," he said. He took years to understand what repetitious playing of scales did for him; I never did learn. He says that every time you play the same thing, your body is teaching you how to do it better. In his description, the whole body is involved, not just the fingers.

This got him into an observation about composers' use of rests. The Bach piece has no rests; Denk used a word like "majestic" to describe how Bach straps his music to the beat for his explorations of the harmony. But Mozart is so different, using pauses to punctuate and shape his musical thoughts. Yes! But I never thought of it that way.

I laughed out loud hearing Denk's recording of Piano-rag Music by Stravinsky. Denk sees it as a joyous piece in which Stravinsky takes all the characteristics of ragtime that he loved and "putting them in a blender."

When he went to Oberlin, Denk loved Brahms and rejected the ugliness of atonal 20th century composers -- until he joined the university's new music ensemble. Within a month, he saw Brahms as old-fashioned and sought the "crunchiest" chords he could find. Before playing some Stockhausen, Terri asked if Denk could honestly say he liked the music. Denk told her that, sure, Stockhausen avoids any kind of "home" -- home key, melody, repetition of rhythm -- but instead gives us little episodes and sounds that we just listen to and appreciate -- the way we see the colors in Jackson Pollack. (I thought maybe of fireworks.) With that in mind, I actually enjoyed the piece -- though I wouldn't have liked it much longer.

For fun, he coupled that with its opposite, Philip Glass's Second Etude.

We also heard how his mom, with no musical training herself, nonetheless shouted one critique to him while he practiced: "It doesn't dance! Make it dance!"

I've visited Denk's website jeremydenk.com, and look forward to exploring his work, maybe his book, for the rest of my life. I see he also premiered John Adams' latest piano concerto.