Stephen Hough is an acclaimed concert pianist. With Rough Ideas he also proves himself in prose with an engaging collection of short essays. He writes vividly of the unique experience of hearing a 78 rpm recording played on a wind-up Victrola and of the laziness of conservatory students who rely on digital recordings for guidance in performing a composition rather than finding their own way around the written notes. He disputes the popular notion that music is math in sonic form, arguing that what makes music pleasurable and moving isn’t derived from the patterns familiar to mathematicians. “It is so often at the moments when logic is put aside that magic is conjured to life,” he writes.
