Status Updates From The Piano Shop on the Left ...

One of those books where you forget that you are reading. This is truly the perfect book for me haha, paris, random words in french, beautiful descriptions, a story based around the beauty of pianos and playing them? Perfection. 🎶

I am entranced with the story, the characters, and most of all, by the piano! Lovely!

100

Fun fact: a friend lent me this book 20 years ago, back when we were both preteens. Can't wait to meet up with her (we're still in touch!) and be like "Hey by the way, I read that book you lent me... 20 years ago."

I rarely say anything before I finish a book but I find this one to be a treasure. I'm not a pianist nor a musician but I love this so very well told tale!

“preparation causes tension and we miss the note. “Natural movement is riskier,” he acknowledged, “but life is risky and music is an element of life, so it is risky, too!”

“There are many ways of doing things, but there is always one way that is natural”

“playing music is a strange mixture of a given structure—the score—and one’s creativity in its interpretation. Being able to play all of the notes is just the beginning; the real work is in adding your own self transparently to the composer’s intentions”

“embrace the past without being lost in it.”

“One does not make music against someone else”

“We invest it with our dreams, we touch it offhandedly as we walk by, we crown it with favorite photos and treasured objects until it becomes a kind of domestic shrine. But when it is gone from our lives, it can’t really be replaced, not for what it encompasses as part of a life’s progress. Time moves on and the piano, like us, wears down

“Music and memory: can there be a stronger amalgam weighing on the heart? No wonder it’s hard to leave behind a piano that one has loved, or that one associates with friends and family, when circumstances force the abandonment of this supremely unportable possession”

“when it works, neither of you is conscious of the various elements. It’s like a wonderful conversation where anticipation and communication merge. It’s almost as if you are breathing together and the music is your breath”

“The human qualities an accompanist needs most, he told me, are tact, humility, and kindness, but also a firmness about musical principles”

“The human qualities an accompanist needs most, he told me, are tact, humility, and kindness, but also a firmness about musical principles”

“you have to be careful how you assert yourself. You must earn the confidence, the respect, and the trust of notoriously willful and self-centered performers”

“You must be able to hear precisely in order to play precisely.”

“there was never for me a feeling of the music coming back to me. It was an ordeal that had to be tolerated so that I could then continue to learn to play music for myself.”

“Music isn’t music unless we share it with others”

"la frustration est notre ennemi"

“The piano became a kind of flying carpet by which I could travel to an entirely different place, and I would leave the room with the half-dazed sensibility that children sometimes show when they have discovered a new and agreeable and utterly private world of their own”

“we reveal far more of ourselves than we suspect when we enter the bedizened world of our passions and our longings”

What a delightful little book.

Intriguing

Intriguing!

Intriguing...

Didn't finish. May try it at later time.

Never finished, regretfully. Maybe try again later.

Sailed through a couple (admittedly short) chapters while waiting for Jessie to get immunized. Sat there for so long the lady came up and asked me if I was waiting to be seen. The opposite – I was ready to pass my time invisible.

Continues to be poetic and sweet with the author's love for piano's heritage culture.