Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More

by Stephen Hough

Overview

A collection of essays on music and life by the famed classical pianist and composer

Stephen Hough is one of the world’s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards, both for his concerts and his recordings. He is also a writer, composer, and painter, and has been described by The Economist as one of “Twenty Living Polymaths.”

Hough writes informally and engagingly about music and the life of a musician, from the broader aspects of what it is to walk out onto a stage or to make a recording, to specialist tips from deep inside the practice room: how to trill, how to pedal, how to practice. He also writes vividly about people he’s known, places he’s traveled to, books he’s read, paintings he’s seen; and he touches on more controversial subjects, such as assisted suicide and abortion. Even religion is there—the possibility of the existence of God, problems with some biblical texts, and the challenges involved in being a gay Catholic.

Rough Ideas is an illuminating, constantly surprising introduction to the life and mind of one of our great cultural figures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250785732
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	638,697
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.18(d)

About the Author

Stephen Hough, one of the most distinctive artists of his generation, performs with the world’s major orchestras and in recital at the most prestigious concert halls. He has made more than sixty CD recordings and has composed works ranging from solo piano to orchestral. As an author, he has written articles for The Guardian and The Times (London), and he wrote a blog for The Telegraph for seven years. His first novel, The Final Retreat, was published in 2018.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Forum
The Soul of Music
‘Our concert halls are like museums’ – Yes, isn’t that great!
Music in churches: magical ghosts or profane distractions?
Our wonderful, ageing audiences
Dumping the interval
Classical music – for everyone?
Poking bows and spitting mouthpieces
Can you be a musician and not write music?
Can you be a musician and not play or read music?
Hidden musicians, hidden talents
Don’t listen to recordings
Joyce Hatto and listening blind
Meaning what you sing
Old pianists
Gay pianists: can you tell?
Leaving politics out of concerts
Telling tails: do special clothes make a difference?
Stephen, that was really dreadful!
Stuck in a hole or building a tunnel?
Caruso’s garlic breath
Punctured rolls
Is there too much music?
Relics
Bechstein’s fall and rise
What kind of piano do you have at home?
Lonely on the road
When I don’t play the piano
Never mind the metronome, learn to use an alarm clock
Disgrace at a concert
Most of the strokes winners, none of them good enough
Staying power The Russian crescendo
Fickleness of feelings
This one’s happy, this one’s sad
What music makes you cry?
Can atonal music make you cry?
Symphonies under ice
Clothing the naked melody
Two women, two songs: in and out of harmony
Is New Age thinking bad for musicians?
Memory clinic and Mozart
My terrible audition tape
Quaver or not: should orchestras use vibrato?
Parlour songs
Breaking the law: a short speech for the Middle Temple
The Proms

Stage
Once more onto the stage, dear friends, once more
Bored on stage
Neurotic on stage
Nervous on stage
Take a deep breath
Routine on a concert day
Flying glasses
Page-turning: part of the performance
As the page turns . . . or not
The musical page-turner
A crucial tip when playing with the score
Out of the cockpit
Humiliation and vomiting at the keyboard
Stage fright and playing from memory
Bad self-consciousness as the death of good self-confidence
Beautiful bloopers: the joy of making mistakes
Can wrong notes be right?
Clap between movements? Please!
Don’t feel you have to clap between movements
Ample amplification
PPProjection
Charismatic
Stanley Kubrick and recording
Red-light district I: the background
Red-light district II: frenzy
Red-light district III: solo lows and highs
Red-light district IV: live or alive?
Red-light district V: play it again (and again), Sergei
Red-light district VI: did I really play it like that?
A promiscuous weekend in Amsterdam
Ringtone in Padua
Hysterical laughter on stage

Studio
The practice of practising: for professionals
The practice of practising: for amateurs
Random practice tips
There’s no such thing as a difficult piece
Unfinished
Fingering
Remembering what watered our roots
A good edition
Where do you sit to play the piano?
Romantic in soul not body: sitting still at the piano
Depressed: the amazing world of the pedal
Depressed again: the (not so) soft pedal
Seldom depressed: the middle pedal
A different depression: finger pedal
Trills I: easy does it
Trills II: a good fingering but not with the fingers
Trills III: six random tricks
Up to speed
Agile wings not muscular legs
Beats and bleats
Those who do can’t necessarily teach
Masterclasses
Why don’t (music) students attend concerts?
What does the most talented young pianist need most?
Trying to practise away from the piano and trying to try to pray

People and Pieces
How much do we need to know about a composer?
Elgar the Roman Catholic
Tchaikovsky didn’t commit suicide
Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto
Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto: why I changed the second movement
Tchaikovsky’s Concert Fantasia
Artificial gushing tunes
Authenticity playing Rachmaninov
Recording Rachmaninov
The other Rach
Three
How Beethoven redesigned the cadenza
Brahms First or Second?
Dvorák’s Concerto for Ten Thumbs
Schubert’s hurdy-gurdy man
Schubert and Simone Weil: a note for a CD
The shifting sandals of York Bowen: a note for a CD
Mompou and the music of evaporation: a note for a CD
I don’t love Bach
I don’t hate Bach
Liszt I: the man who invented concert life as we know it
Liszt II: the man who invented modern music
Liszt III: the man who broke pianos
Liszt’s abstract sonata
Both Liszt concertos in the same concert?
Why Chopin’s B minor Sonata is harder to play than Liszt’s
Why Liszt’s B minor Sonata is harder to record than Chopin’s
Chopin and the development of piano technique
Chopin, Rothko and the bowler hat
Debussy: piano music without hammers
Debussy and Ravel: chalk and cheese
The three faces of Francis Poulenc
My Mass and my tears of joy
My First Piano Sonata: fragments of fragility
My Second Piano Sonata: insomnia in a seedy bedsit
My Third Piano Sonata: tonality, dogma, modernism
Alfred Cortot: the poet speaks
Two formidable ladies
Josef Hofmann and Steinway: two greats in an era of greats
Glenn Gould and modern recording
Happy (un)together
Die Meistersinger: Terfel is Sachs
When Ernest twiddled the knobs
Douglas Steele’s repetition
RIP Joseph Villa
RIP Vlado Perlemuter
RIP Shura Cherkassky
RIP Lou Reed
Great Greens I: by way of an introduction
Great Greens II: Gordon and the smokescreen
Great Greens III: Maurus and the smile
Great Greens IV: Julien in the kitchen

. . . and More
What is your motto?
Rilke, and poetry as the root of everything
Beauty, beauty, beauty
No poetry after Auschwitz . . . but music
Beethoven is my religion
The expectation of change: dis-ease in twentieth-century art
Teju Cole and neutering poets
Architecture as eureka in Sydney
Mastromatteo’s obsession
The ring of silence: the pots of Anna Paik
Paul Klee at Tate Modern
Almost the same: van Doesburg and Mondrian
Gerhard Richter not naked
Old Masters: either we kill them or let them die naturally
Maths and music: joined at the hip or walking down different paths?
Sport and music: on the same team?
The curse of the perfect number
The essence of underpants and the lap of luxury
Do musicians tend to be socialists?
The Final Retreat: my novel of desire and despair
If I ruled the world
Pleasure
Holy smoke
Beef Stroganoff and a bag of bones
Electronic books: the end of one kind of intellectual snobbery Good Americans
Thanksgiving for Thanksgiving
Willa Cather, Thanksgiving, and the soul of America
Working hard by letting go
Pascal: the brilliant sun or a warm fire?
Monks do it best
Myself or my brain
Daring to hope in Alzheimer’s despairing inner world
Going gentle into that good night: the blessing of hospices
Suicide? Let me assist you
Dignity?
But on the other hand . . . some different thoughts on end-of-life issues
Encouragement, falsehood, and Auschwitz

. . . and Religion
Rock or tree?
Empty hands
I am not a Catholic pianist
Could God exist?
What if God doesn’t exist?
Religion’s moth-eaten tapestry
Do not touch me: the wisdom of Anglican thresholds
Heaven’s above
Becoming Jewish and staying Catholic
Is it Christian to single out the Christians?
Putting the ‘Mass’ back into Christmas
Christmas carols
Sacraments and the sugar-plum fairy
Reformation: the individual or the community?
Crack!
The ghastly story of Lazarus
Assumptions about the Assumption
The three greatest fears
Is he musical?
In earlier times . . .
Sodom and Gomorrah: straight, upside down, inside out
Abortion: can I go there?
A light that is so lovely
A Final Reflection

Stephen Hough: Discography 1985–2018
Acknowledgements
Index

Editorial Reviews

11/25/2019

A classical musician holds forth on music, ethics, religion, and much else in this hit-and-miss grab bag of opinionating. Hough offers dozens of short essays on a multitude of topics; most concern his musical career and include appreciations of composers such as Liszt and Tchaikovsky, sketches of colleagues, recollections of concert mishaps (including a study of “humiliation and vomiting at the keyboard”), disquisitions on proper piano posture, and speculation on what constitutes a gay pianist (“Vladimir Horowitz once said there are three types of pianists: Jewish, gay and bad”). Hough’s interest then dilates widely as he touches on overly aggressive art restorations, the architecture of the Sydney Opera House, the morality of assisted suicide, the existence of God, and the sacrament of Communion (he’s a convert to Catholicism). Hough’s writings on music are endlessly knowledgeable, illuminating, and accessible, but his thoughts on nonmusical subjects are more diffuse and less engaging. (“The Big Bang, the first First, might well have been, above all, an explosion of love: the universe’s orgasm,” he conjectures at the end of a ramble on “encouragement, falsehood, and Auschwitz.”) Still, music lovers, from professional musicians to casual listeners, will find the book a delight to browse through. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

A Financial Times Book of the Year 2019

"Hough's writings on music are endlessly knowledgeable, illuminating, and accessible . . . Music lovers, from professional musicians to casual listeners, will find the book a delight to browse through." — Publishers Weekly

"[Rough Ideas is] highly episodic, with entries ranging from a few dozen words to a few hundred. Many of them begin with questions — the sort of things he’s repeatedly asked, one guesses, by adoring audiences and sponsors over post-concert drinks and nibbles before packing his bag to move on to the next venue . . . But if the questions are sometimes routine, the answers are like Hough’s playing: original, fresh, deeply considered, personal. And sometimes quirky or contrarian. We know the 10,000-hour rule to prepare for genius. But Hough shows it helps to have genius as well." — Alan Rusbridger, The Spectator

"Stephen Hough’s brilliance isn’t limited to the concert stage or recording studio. The classical pianist, as his fans already know, is something of a polymath. This lively collection of writings gathers dozens of unfailingly perceptive, often charming, and occasionally moving reflections on the musician’s craft, the symbiosis between performer and audience, Rilke, Simone Weil, Lou Reed, and the importance of practice—which allows “'the time to make mistakes and the leisure to correct them.'” —Commonweal

From the Publisher

★ 01/01/2020

Named one of "Twenty Living Polymaths" by the Economist, pianist Hough, the first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship, muses on a myriad matters, musical and otherwise. Despite the title, these 200-plus essays are anything but rough; they are polished bits of prose, some previously published, others developed from notes made on the road, all skillfully composed and a joy to read. Hough takes us backstage, onstage, and into the studio, wryly noting that he has "written about music and the life of a musician (not always the same thing)." He expounds on composers, including Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Frédéric Chopin; people he's known and places he's visited; and religion (Hough is a convert to Catholicism) and social issues. VERDICT Hough writes with wit, grace, and a singular point of view. His book offers rare insight into the mind of one of the leading performers of classical music.—Carolyn M. Mulac, Chicago

Library Journal

2019-11-19
A potpourri of pieces (most about music) in a variety of keys and rhythms.

A prolific classical pianist, recording artist, and writer, Hough (The Final Retreat, 2018) has a lot on his mind. There are scores of entries here—the table of contents consumes eight pages—as the author addresses countless topics, from "The Soul of Music" and "Can Atonal Music Make You Cry?" to "Debussy: Piano Music Without Hammers" and "The Three Faces of Francis Poulenc." Some are adaptations of previously published pieces, and others are versions of Hough's blog posts. His subject matter ranges from music (history, technique, personalities, pianos, autobiography, even some obituaries) to sexuality (he writes in several places about being gay) to religion (he's a Roman Catholic) to art museums, abortion, and more. All of the pieces are tightly focused—some are not even a page long, some of which readers may find themselves skimming over—and most are articulate and packed with questions for readers to ponder. ("I'm allergic to telling anyone what to do," he writes early on.) Hough educates us on his routines, including how he likes to dress up to play and his practice methods while on the road, and he is unafraid to point out his own embarrassments—e.g., a broken pants zipper just before a performance. The author also consistently credits others who have greatly affected him: early teachers, colleagues, performers from earlier eras. Of course, some of the more technical pieces about playing the piano—uses of the pedals, how to play trills—will be of principal interest to other musicians. But much of the book is for general readers: Hough's thoughts about wallpaper music (he hates it), comments about smoking, generous remarks about Americans (he's from the U.K.), and discussions of favorite writers (he loves Willa Cather).

Proof that music is not just in notes; it's also in words.

Kirkus Reviews