Book Review. With Your Own Two Hands: Self-Discovery Through Music

Now that I am reframing my book as a prescriptive nonfiction, I am surveying books that are comparable in some measures to what I have in mind. This book comes close to an aspect of my book in presenting the art of piano playing, and the practice of the piano, as a way to reflect on oneself and one’s life and context.

Seymour Bernstein is an eloquent writer. His words are precise and economical, his rhythmic sentences lead you from one to the next easily, and the whole book is well structured. A prescriptive nonfiction is all about the balance between useful information and identifiable stories as examples. While this book tends to be heavier on stories and light on information in my opinion, transitions between these aspects flow well.

I also learned from this book that too eloquent a book that flows too easily makes a reader like me doubt its authenticity. I found myself wondering if the accuracy of his wisdom and convictions were not colored at all to beautify his prose.

And while I fully appreciate how the process of research back then must have been so much more laborious, the book refers very little to science or history, relying heavily on his personal convictions, interviews with his past mentors and peers, and his experience with his students. He does refer a bit to psychology (including Jung’s notion of collective consciousness), history (more on ancient Greece than music history), and neuroscience, I already found two errors in his mentions of brain regions after some Google search. What troubled me more, however, was that he had absolutely no need to mention these brain regions by name for the sake of his readers and points he was making. He referred to them to establish his authority over his readers. This was a big lesson I need to remember.

I am more critical than necessary in reading this book, because I think of it as a prototype to some parts of my book. The book did give me a few useful information about what to focus on and how in my practicing. One was his use of weights around the wrists to experience the arm weights being applied to one’s playing (Chap. 7). The other was how one joint to be free, the bigger joints must be steady to provide support (Chap. 5). And the notion of breathing as a mean to heighten one’s feelings, and the idea of mind-body psychotherapy (a.k.a. bioenergetic therapy) was new to me (Chap. 4).

A few more words in support of this book. I appreciate that the author is genuinely good wiled about sharing his wisdom with a diverse and trans-generational readers. It is also encouraging that someone back n 1980’s also wanted to promote piano playing as a spiritual practice. And the message remain relevant. Ethan Hawke directed a documentary about Seymour Bernstein in “Seymour: An Introduction” to a critical acclaim.

My practicing the morning after reading this book (I read it in a day, granted with few very lightly skimmed chapters) was inspired. Reading about piano playing always felt unnecessary to me – like I knew about it already. I wish I could have read this book, and books like these, as an impressionable teenager.