Quotes from Thad Carhart

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.

Life is a river," he once told me, "and we all have to find a boat that floats.

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.

I wanted to love this piano. I wanted to invite music back into my life.

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.

Life is a river,' he once told me, 'and we all have to find a boat that floats.

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.

On ne fait pas de musique contre quelqu'un" ("One does not make music against someone else").

Natural movement is riskier," he acknowledged, "but life is risky and music is an element of life, so it is risky, too!

the exuberance of the moment drowning out all other sensations but that of music's delicious momentum.

What allowed a person sitting in front of this strange giant to call forth beautiful sounds just by moving his fingers up and down?

Etre patient avec soi-même!" ("Be patient with yourself!")

It's a world with its own traditions and lore, some of which are hidden within pianos themselves.

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.

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," Sebök 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.

a "mélomane," the French word for music lover;

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.

I sat down on the bench and started playing, instantly lost in the perfection of the moment; I was elsewhere.

Music isn't music unless we share it with others," she told me, but even then that sentiment seemed unsatisfactory to me.

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.

emerged with a shared sense of the exultation that great music can bring.

Remember, too, that the trees for the wood that was used to build this piano were most likely planted in the late sixteenth century.

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.

I hadn't considered the suite, as the French put it, the follow-through to circumstances and events that lends life its air at once poignant and meaningful.