By Mike Moore
Special to THE DAILY

Guitar builders have a joke that goes: What do you call a guitarist who buys a $5,000 guitar? Answer: A dentist. It is an unfortunate reality that many people who can afford nice instruments do not make their living playing those instruments.

Glenn Kurtz was a gifted musician. As a young boy, he gravitated to the guitar, and spent his high school years developing his talent in both jazz and classical guitar. He gained national recognition for his accomplishments. When time came for him to make a college choice, he looked into his future and could see himself on the concert stages of the world, as he had once seen the great Andrés Segovia. Though his parents recommended a more practical choice, he nonetheless enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music to spend the next four years studying the guitar.

The classical guitar does not have a place in a symphony orchestra, nor does it easily blend well with other instruments as a jazz or rock guitar would, but seems to exist only to play ancient music for a limited audience. Its sound is often referred to as “mellow” or “relaxing,” not terms a serious musician would aspire to. To set one’s sights on becoming a classical guitarist must include the possibilities of teaching or performing at lots of weddings and receptions.

Kurtz chronicles his years in the Conservatory and his interactions with other musicians. Most of his friends were fairly secure in their future with an orchestra or as a teacher, but he was continually haunted by the prospect that he may not be good enough to do what he felt he should do. He was daunted by the prospect of practicing, practicing, hour upon hour, year upon year, only to be given the slightest chance to achieve his dream.

His education prepared him well as a musician, but it did little to open doors to a concert career. After stumbling around in Europe for a while, he not only lost his drive for a concert career, but he completely lost his taste for music, and the instrument that had been his soul mate for his life thus far.

Kurtz took a different career path. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature and has had a respectable career. But “Practicing” is not ultimately about the abandonment of a dream, but the rediscovery of a passion that had been claimed by outsized ambitions and an unrealistic goal. After years of neglect, and with no hope of achieving the level of virtuosity he had previously achieved, he embraced practicing as a means of re-connecting to the great music that had moved him as a young man.

“Practicing” allows us to look into the life of as aspiring concert musician, into the inner world of “practice makes perfect” — the “necessary lie that lets us pause to collect ourselves.” For practice is, concludes the author, by itself, a dream of perfection.

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