Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey by Perri Knize Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey
Book Review: Facinating Grand obsession
Summary: 4 Stars
A great read. At first glance, the search for one woman's ideal piano, and her struggle to make it produce the sound she first encountered on the showroom floor does not sound like a promising premise. However, the author skillfully weaves an account of her efforts to achieve her artistic goals while also delving into the psychological, accoustical, and technological aspects of piano manufacture and maintenance. Her story involves a number of facinating characters, and along the way some rather technical subjects are explored in a manner that the non specialist can understand. A very good book-- and not just for pianists or pianist-wannabes.Book Review: Hearing a thousandth of a semitone
Summary: 4 Stars
I ordered Grand Obsession after reading its New York Times review. I loved it and have already given copies to friends. It's a detective story dressed up as a romance.
The book begins as its author Perri Knize realizes at the age of 43 that "I was meant to be a pianist... This is what I was meant to do with my life." She begins lessons, though without an instrument of her own. After playing and rejecting every piano she comes across for two years, she falls in love with a Grotrian cabinet grand. She names the piano after Marlene Dietrich and remortgages her house to buy it, believing "if only I could play this piano every day... I could be the pianist I have always dreamed of becoming." Knize first loved Marlene's "smoky and mysterious" middle section; her treble, "bell-like and sparkling... full of color, a shimmering northern lights." The piano is shipped from a New York City showroom to Knize's house in Montana, but en route something terrible happens: Marlene is delivered with "a hoarse, broken voice." A Grand Obsession chronicles Knize's attempts find out - and if possible to have fixed - what went wrong.
Knize is an elegiac writer - describing a spruce destined to be a piano, she writes, "The wedge is driven true one last time, and there is a crack, the first sounding of the voice of the tree, a voice heard only in death." But in writing a book about sensual pleasures, Knize risks an emperor's-new-clothes effect: she is describing things that some of her readers will never know, since few will have ears as sensitive as hers. The challenge is to find a metaphoric language to match her experience: so a Charles Walter grand has "lots of complexity and depth in tone" while being "warm and good-natured, kind of like the girl next door." Playing a Chopin prelude on Marlene creates "arcs of electricity through the air." Marlene's treble peals "with tones of silver" or "moonlight on water." When tuned correctly, a "delicate whoosh rises off the soundboard in the wake of the notes, like sparkling confetti or a cloud of fireflies glimmering. The colorful mixture scale." So far, so pretty. But Knize is after bigger game: she wants to understand the soul of her instrument through its mechanism. Somehow she is able to bring the reader along with her.
Yet though the book's tone is rarefied, it is never pretentious. This is partly because Knize has enough self-knowledge to make fun of herself. So she will quote her husband advising her to damage her overly sensitive hearing ("Become a logger and forget to wear your ear cuffs,") or Marc Wienert, philosopher king of piano tuners, who yells at her in exasperation, "The ear does not hear a thousandth of a semitone!"
I have a one complaint: surely Scribner could have included diagrams of the piano's inner workings for those of us without intimate knowledge? Just like editions of Moby Dick include illustrations of whaling ships & whalers' tools?
But that's a minor aside; after reading this book, I will never hear or play a piano the same way again: "A piano tuning is a myriad of tiny little lies brought together into one great big lie of being in tune... Pianos tear themselves apart; every time the hammer strikes the strings, it's destructive. You are captivated by a brief moment in time."
Book Review: Love the Piano, Love this Book
Summary: 5 Stars
This book was recommended by another student in our adult piano group. Having gone through the process of searching for and selecting 3 current pianos, I am fascinated by how one finds a particular instrument's "voice" captivating among all the excellent "voices" on the market today (new and pre-owned). Grand Obsession takes the reader on this journey: from the question of the impacts of tempered tunings to the physics of vibration and "String Theory". Written from a piano lover and seeker's point of view, the book left me with tremendous gratitude for the gift of music and the ability to hear "tone". Well worth the read! Book Review: Engrossing read with a few flaws
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a wonderful read for anyone with an interest in the piano, or in music in general. For others, perhaps not so great.
The author's search is not so much for a particular piano, but for the particular sound of a piano that she heard once in a showroom just before she bought that particular instrument. Lots of great information about the amazing people that are involved in building, selling, and more than anything else, maintaining pianos. Knize's emotions go over the top to the point of irritation at times, and on about page 273 she descends into physics and metaphysics, which I could have done without, particularly since she gets some of the physics wrong, and the mysticism is just sort of silly.
Let me recommend, as other reviewers have done, another book, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank. That author is searching for a piano, and the book is, if anything, even better than Grand Obsession.
Book Review: a wonderful book
Summary: 4 Stars
I happily bought and read this book after I met the author during a series of readings, performances, and discussions she organized on Piano Row in New York. The book will resonate with anyone who has ever been seduced by the power of the piano or music in general. It described many of my own experiences as a recent adherent.
The issues under discussion are: what is it about the sound of the piano that bewitches us? How do piano technicians penetrate the mechanical mysteries of the instrument and turn on its seductive powers? You won't find convincing answers until you've played and tuned pianos for a few decades. But the journey described in the book is very interesting, and I recommend you take it. It was very heartwarming to come to the end of the book and find that the author's problems with her beloved piano had been resolved.
I found one part of the book excruciating: the chapter dealing with how physics explains the author's intense emotional response to her piano. It's all resonance, explains the composer Michael Harrison (a very nice guy, by the way; he sold me a beautiful piano). No, no, look into quantum mechanics and string theory, says someone else - that's where the answer is. Make me puke, will ya? I'm an accomplished professional physicist as well as an outstandingly modest pianist, and I can't stand it when physics is accused of importance in emotional issues. I'm tempted to give a long lecture here about the nature of resonance, quantum mechanics, and string theory, but I'll resist. Suffice it to say that these concepts, at the level evoked is this book, do not have the explanatory power that is implied. It's a mystical, spiritual thing. Why can't we leave it at that?