Musings on harmony, melody and rhythm

Every Good Boy Does Fine – a banal phrase that also just happens to be the key to limitless wonder. You may have learned it, like Tom Stoppard, as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, or perhaps as the rather more tension-fraught Every Good Boy Deserves Food (whose sinister implication haunted more of my childhood than I ever confessed to my parents). Whichever it is, this mnemonic for the notes that fall on the lines of the stave in the treble clef is where music begins for most of us: the key that turns hieroglyphs into sound and, eventually, meaning.

So it was for Jeremy Denk. But, unlike the rest of us, the American pianist, whose name comes bracketed with a long list of awards, including a prestigious MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship, is a foregone conclusion – a good boy who has done rather more than fine.

Which would be a problem if this were the kind of memoir that revelled in will-he-won’t-he cinematic tension.