Glenn Kurtz

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Glenn Kurtz
Pen name	GAK
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	United States
Writing period	Present (2007–)
Genres	Memoir
Subjects	Classical Music, the Guitar

Official website http://www.glennkurtz.com

Glenn A Kurtz (b. 1960, Roslyn, New York,) is a professor, author, memoirist and practicing classical guitarist. His first book, a memoir entitled Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music, was released in 2007 by Alfred A. Knopf to great critical acclaim. He lives in New York City where he is currently working on a novel.^[1]

1 Biography
2 Writing career
- 2.1 Practicing
3 Footnotes
4 References
5 Further reading

[edit] Biography

Glenn Kurtz grew up in Long Island, in an upper middle class household. At the age of 6 or 7 he began taking guitar lessons. He dreamed from early on of being a professional classical guitarist. At 17, Kurtz backed Dizzy Gillespie on the Merv Griffin Show.^[2] In 1981, he won the Long Island Teen Talent Competition. ^[3]

Glenn Kurtz graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music. He lived in Vienna, Austria until the age of 25, when he moved to New York City to work. Growing tired of this, Kurtz moved to San Francisco to receive a Doctorate of Philosophy in comparative literature from Stanford University.^[4]^[3]

Kurtz went on to teach at Stanford University where he remains a visiting scholar. He has also taught at the San Francisco State University and the California College of the Arts. The foci of his classes tend towards the history of thought, formal philosophy, media studies, and German as a language and a culture.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Writing career

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His writing has been published in ZYZZYVA, Artweek, Tema Celeste, GamaSutra, Lost, The Industry Standard, and in numerous collections of essays. His doctoral thesis, entitled On Being Numerous, dealt primarily with 'multiplicity and form in Neitzsche, Freud, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams' and he is regularly called upon to add to scholarly collections dealing with these authors and their texts. He is a columnist at The Huffington Post, where his columns focus on the place of classical music in the modern world. He is a resident of New York City.

[edit] Practicing

Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music was released in America on June 19, 2007 by Knopf. It is his first published book, being a memoir of his life and his music as they relate to his teaching, learning, and rehearsing. Primarily it deals with the activity, not of playing music, but of practicing music. This is a subject which the author examines as something disparate from actual musical performance.

In his words:

Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music is a book about the dream of becoming an artist. Drawn from my experiences as a child performer and concert classical guitarist, Practicing tells the story of my youthful ambition to achieve musical artistry, the collapse of that ambition in my twenties, and my surprising return to music later in life. As a child and young adult, I practiced full of passion and expectation, certain I could change peoples’ lives with music. In my late twenties, despairing of a viable career as a classical guitarist, I quit in bitterness. For ten years, I couldn’t bear to touch the instrument. Now, in my forties, a lover of music chastened in my goals, I’ve returned to practicing to understand what went wrong, to learn to do it better.^[5]

As the author of Practicing, he has been featured in numerous publications, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times, and his books has been reviewed by fellow authors such as Rosanne Cash, Jay Cantor, Mark Salzman, and fellow academics from such schools as Juliard and Berkeley. He has been interviewed on radio broadcasts both nationally (NPR) and locally in New York, Florida and Connecticut, and has given lectures across the country. A paperback release of the book is planned for the summer of 2008.