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I wanted to love this piano. I wanted to invite music back into my life.
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piano
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Thad Carhart |
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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.
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piano
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Thad Carhart |
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Life is a river,' he once told me, 'and we all have to find a boat that floats.
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Thad Carhart |
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Natural movement is riskier," he acknowledged, "but life is risky and music is an element of life, so it is risky, too!"
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Thad Carhart |
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the exuberance of the moment drowning out all other sensations but that of music's delicious momentum.
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Thad Carhart |
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What allowed a person sitting in front of this strange giant to call forth beautiful sounds just by moving his fingers up and down?
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Thad Carhart |
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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.
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Thad Carhart |
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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, complicite, 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,..
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Thad Carhart |
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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," Sebok 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."
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Thad Carhart |
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Should I tell them of my lifelong love of pianos, of how I hoped to play again after many vagabond years when owning a piano was as impractical as keeping a large dog or a collection of orchids?
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Thad Carhart |
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Val de Grace is a large late Renaissance church that is unusual for Paris; its exuberant carvings and animated facade are more typical of Rome, and the most beautiful dome in the city graces its undulating mass of light yellow stone.
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Thad Carhart |
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This pronouncement suggests how France differs from America in this respect. In the United States, private institutions--schools, conservatories, hospitals, universities--are very often the richest and most prestigious of their kind, while this is rarely the case in France. The government-run conservatories are showered with resources while their private counterparts must make do by raising money in a country where there are few private fou..
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Thad Carhart |
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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")."
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Thad Carhart |
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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.
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Thad Carhart |
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b1a5a1f
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This sensitivity to the qualities of wood was as essential to the pioneers of piano building as it was to the great makers of stringed instruments like Stradivari or Guarneri.
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Thad Carhart |
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I sat down on the bench and started playing, instantly lost in the perfection of the moment; I was elsewhere.
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Thad Carhart |
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Music isn't music unless we share it with others," she told me, but even then that sentiment seemed unsatisfactory to me."
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Thad Carhart |
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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.
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Thad Carhart |
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Remember, too, that the trees for the wood that was used to build this piano were most likely planted in the late sixteenth century.
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Thad Carhart |
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Luc explained that the woodworking tradition was firmly established in Germany from the Middle Ages, and that guilds and families regularly replanted trees in order to provide the right kind of wood for their descendants.
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Thad Carhart |
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On ne fait pas de musique contre quelqu'un" ("One does not make music against someone else")." --
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Thad Carhart |
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Etre patient avec soi-meme!" ("Be patient with yourself!")"
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Thad Carhart |
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It's a world with its own traditions and lore, some of which are hidden within pianos themselves.
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Thad Carhart |
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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.
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Thad Carhart |
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On a visit to the Steinway showroom in New York, I saw Henry Steinway, the last member of the family to be connected with the company, take out a felt-tip pen and sign the painted metal frame of a piano for an enthusiastic customer. It was like watching a baseball player sign a ball, or an author his book, and seemed in keeping with our age of celebrity.
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Thad Carhart |
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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..
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Thad Carhart |
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a "melomane," the French word for music lover;"
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Thad Carhart |
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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.
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Thad Carhart |
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emerged with a shared sense of the exultation that great music can bring.
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Thad Carhart |