We asked classical pianist Jeremy Denk... about the electric kettle he brings on tour, the blue-corn-and-mint soap that reminds him of home, and the hoodie that he steals from his partner.
Pianist Jeremy Denk’s recently published memoir dives into his early memories of classical music, education, and all of the nostalgia that comes with it.
Insights galore from the mind and piano stool of one of music’s sharpest thinkers.
Jeremy Denk’s memoir is not just about piano lessons but about life lessons—how the artist creates a self.
Music Lessons for Life: In his memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine, pianist Jeremy Denk lets music tell his story.
For pianist Jeremy Denk, music lessons are life lessons
This MacArthur-award-winning concert musician shows as much genius on his QWERTY keyboard as he does on his piano.
This lucid and bittersweet coming-of-age story takes place inside the humdrum world of the studio, where a succession of teachers guide [Denk] to musical maturity through pedagogical bluster, insistence and the odd Delphic aphorism.
Denk...has thought deeply and creatively about what a memoir is, and how to write it. By turns hilarious, original, and painfully revealing, “Every Good Boy Does Fine” is both an open-hearted coming-of-age story and a meditation on music’s inner secrets.
For classical pianist Jeremy Denk, life is like a series of music lessons
Pianist Jeremy Denk on how practice makes perfect
“‘Peanuts Vol. 3’ (I think) … made it cool to be excited about Beethoven’s birthday,” says the musician Jeremy Denk, whose new memoir is “Every Good Boy Does Fine.”
Group Denk into the category of “thoughtful” musicians, because when he plays he’s clearly thinking about the reasons for what he’s doing. More, he’s argumentative—in the sense of interrogating a piece and his own thinking about it.
“I really think this piece is a knockout,” Denk said of the concerto, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of its 2018-19 centennial season.
The skillfully told Every Good Boy Does Fine is a major new chapter in his corpus, and a significant contribution to the literature of musical artistry. It deserves a wide readership both inside and outside the world of music.
“One of John’s great skills is to start off with something fairly fixed, and as it turns and changes, the music begins to acquire a sweep that’s irresistible,” according to pianist Jeremy Denk, himself a Seattle favorite. Denk will appear as the soloist in “Devil,” also originally written for the LA Phil.
"Denk is among the most entertaining of concert pianists... insightful in his interpretations, entertaining to watch, and engaging in his stage banter."
"This American performer approaches everything with questing intelligence and energy. In both concertos – the enigmatic C major and the more popular, restlessly turbulent K466 – his ornaments and cadenzas are full of wit and imagination, his ear for detail incisive and bracing."
"Even before Jeremy Denk plays a single note in this twin Mozart piano concerto release, he makes his presence forcefully felt. As both soloist and director with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra... Denk strikes a compelling Mozartian balance between lyrical perfection and effervescent spirit" ★★★★★
The pandemic forced US pianist Jeremy Denk to cancel a major tour of book one of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, but next month – as artist-in-residence at the Lammermuir Festival – he’ll finally get a chance to perform it. He speaks to David Kettle about a creative process he describes as “loss, then therapy, then training”
Like so many artists and musicians grappling with their responsibilities in the movement for Black lives and social justice, pianist Jeremy Denk has committed himself to learning new repertoire, reading about the lives of composers who had been silenced by history and sharing them with audiences.
Among the spotlight events are the Opening Night Gala on July 10, an all-outdoor gathering at Miraflores celebrating the accomplishments of Music Academy faculty artists Jeremy Denk and Conor Hanick, who will be performing together for the first time.
[The Battle of Manassas] was a high point of a livestreamed recital that Jeremy Denk gave in October at Caramoor...In a short conversation with Lewis paired with his Caramoor performance, Denk describes “Manassas” as a fascinating example of “modernism before its time.”
Pianist Jeremy Denk has as much stamina for talking about music as he does for playing it. And that’s a lot.
Jeremy Denk — who, like many pianists, doesn’t know “the first thing about piano technology,” as he admitted in an interview — summoned his skills of personal persuasion. “I got my super on board, though it was dicey at the beginning,” he said. “I explained that this was my work — that my technician was essential.”
This spring, the pianist Jeremy Denk was supposed to present a three-part series on Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” in WQXR’s Greene Space, in downtown Manhattan, but, with the city locked down, he is recording it at his home in the Catskills instead.
Jeremy Denk lives surprisingly modestly for an American pianist of rising fame. The living room of his Upper West Side apartment barely contains his nearly 7-foot-long Steinway grand, so visitors are led to a tiny but light-filled kitchen, where last month he expounded on a range of musical and literary topics over herbal tea and green apples.
These are illustrious times for the pianist and writer Jeremy Denk. Last year he won a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, was named Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year and signed a book contract to expand a New Yorker article about piano lessons.
In January, the New Yorker ran an article by the pianist Jeremy Denk about the process of recording Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. It’s slightly unusual for an active musician to write a piece for a major publication — the norm is to have the musician speak through a journalist in the form of a profile.
Called “an artist with a deep soul, thoughtful, probing, alternately sublime and sassy,” Jeremy Denk is all of those things — and more.
With Jeremy Denk, expect everything to be well thought out. The pianist is published in The New Yorker and New York Times, and is working on a memoir.
