The Piano Shop on the Left Bank Quotes

“I wanted to love this piano. I wanted to invite music back into my life.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“The effect is captivating as all of the tones mix, like a watercolor with hues swirled together, and lovely carrying notes long after the fingers are lifted from the keys.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“Life is a river,' he once told me, 'and we all have to find a boat that floats.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“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.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“On ne fait pas de musique contre quelqu’un” (“One does not make music against someone else”).”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“emerged with a shared sense of the exultation that great music can bring.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“Motionless, he held the final chord for a long moment and we felt—I could almost say watched—the harmony rise into the light-filled cold of the atelier.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“There is no such thing as music note by note just as there is no such thing as a book word by word. We have to accept that things are ambiguous,” Sebök said to one of the students on the last day of the master class. Is there any more fundamental lesson that we must learn as we mature? As my friend had told me, he might have been talking about all of life, not just music.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“This special moment takes the two pianists—master and student—someplace that no one else can go. The French call this sort of sharing, this meeting of minds, complicité, and the word captures perfectly the special bond that instantly develops as two pianists explore together the edge of music. If chamber music can be likened to a conversation, with a constant give-and-take, a joining and separating of the voices, this is all simultaneity, more like a duo of dancers who perform exactly the same figurations. By some remarkable chemistry a momentum builds that puts the two pianists in perfect concurrence.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“Natural movement is riskier,” he acknowledged, “but life is risky and music is an element of life, so it is risky, too!”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“Remember, too, that the trees for the wood that was used to build this piano were most likely planted in the late sixteenth century.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“I particularly liked the rationale it advanced for renouncing the tradition of competitive concours: “On ne fait pas de musique contre quelqu’un” (“One does not make music against someone else”).”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“Val de Grâce is a large late Renaissance church that is unusual for Paris; its exuberant carvings and animated façade are more typical of Rome, and the most beautiful dome in the city graces its undulating mass of light yellow stone.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“The teaching of music in France is taken very seriously; while admirable enough in itself, very often it veers toward an overly formal and academic approach.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“a “mélomane,” the French word for music lover;”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“A voicing apprentice came to work at the Steinway factory one day to find his master, a man of great reserve, in tears. The master was standing before the disassembled action assembly of an old Steinway grand that had been sent back to the factory to be reconditioned. “What’s wrong?” asked the apprentice. “How can I help?” The master then explained that when he had removed the action assembly from the piano, he had found the name of another Steinway technician hidden on the inside, the signature of his late father.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“It’s a world with its own traditions and lore, some of which are hidden within pianos themselves.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“Religions at least give hope; that’s something, even if it’s based on dreams. But those who promise heaven here on earth, whether it’s Communists or Masons, they’re the worst of the worst.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“Etre patient avec soi-même!” (“Be patient with yourself!”)”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“I sat down on the bench and started playing, instantly lost in the perfection of the moment; I was elsewhere.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“Think of a full-size harp, the kind used in orchestras. Pivot it mentally from the vertical, as it normally stands, to the horizontal and put it in a box shaped to its frame. There you have the shape of the grand piano.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“What allowed a person sitting in front of this strange giant to call forth beautiful sounds just by moving his fingers up and down?”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“the exuberance of the moment drowning out all other sensations but that of music’s delicious momentum.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“Music isn’t music unless we share it with others,” she told me, but even then that sentiment seemed unsatisfactory to me.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“If someone had beaucoup de caractère and took pleasure in making music, no praise was too great.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“Summer set in early and the sidewalks in the quartier came alive after hours. In a city where few apartments are air-conditioned, the terraces of cafés and restaurants become the common refuge from a withering heat in the evening. The long light of June and July encouraged those gathered at the outdoor tables to linger well into the night, while swallows threaded the air with their shrill whistles. Before the August dispersion, everyone in the neighborhood seemed to revel in the slower pace that the heat imposed.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“The room beyond was quite long and wider than the shop and it was swimming in light pouring down from a glass roof. It had the peculiar but magical air of being larger on the inside than the outside. This was one of the classic nineteenth-century workshops that are still to be found throughout Paris behind even the most bourgeois façades of carved stone. Very often the backs of buildings were extended to cover part of the inner courtyard and the space roofed over with panels of glass, like a giant greenhouse.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier

“When we talked, Luc often touched obliquely on the piano’s dual nature. He liked that they could be a repository for our dreams and a bauble that can readily be bought and sold, and he often pointed out that the same instrument could be both sophisticated and vulgar, subtle and brash, classical and jazzy.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank

“A piano builder or restorer, then, has to be part master carpenter and part structural engineer, fitting a mechanism as intricate as the finest timepiece into a wooden cabinet that is strengthened with a massive steel frame. A musical historian I once met commented that the mechanism was as complicated as a clock. ‘But the big difference’, he pointed out, ‘is that you don’t pound on a clock.’ This combination of delicacy and sturdiness, of finesse and vigor, makes the piano unique, and the skills to build or repair it are not often found in one person.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank

“Life is a river,” he once told me, “and we all have to find a boat that floats.”
― Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier