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Thad Carhart has lived in France for much of his life. He was educated at Yale and Stanford and has worked as an events coordinator in the music industry and as communications head of Apple Computer’s European division. A freelance writer and consultant, he lives in Paris with his wife, Simo, and their two children. We talked to him by phone while he was in the U.S. touring to promote his first book, the Book Sense 76 pick*, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank.

Before writing The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, had you written much?

I've written articles, way back when I wrote for my college newspaper. I've written a few pieces in Europe for magazines, an Irish one and a couple of Canadian ones. But I can't say this has been an avocation until now. I finally decided I was either going to fish or cut bait; this was the time, this was the book.

How is your French?

I've lived in Paris for 12 years and I spent a lot of my childhood there, so my French is pretty good -- without sounding egomaniacal! I learned to read French before I learned to read English. I went to French schools when I was a kid.

Do you speak any other languages?

My wife's Italian so I speak garden-variety Italian. My wife is really phenomenal. She's a chameleon in the best sense of the word -- she picks it up like there's no thinking about it. I'm sure it's not a thought process, it just comes to her: six languages at last count. She's been spending a lot of time in Japan recently and she's been learning Japanese, too.

Which language did you write the book in?

I wrote it in English. I did a lot of the interviews and notes in French and then I transcribed them to English. I did learn French earlier than English but I think the issue of "What is your native tongue?" is a lot more than, "Which one did you learn first?" or "How many years did you speak it or read it or go to school in it."

I think it has a lot to do with our experiences later in life, what we read, and how we read. I can't imagine having written this book in French. The subject is a look at France from another perspective -- what the French would call the Anglo-Saxon perspective, the Anglo-Saxon world, which is everything that isn't French and is English-speaking. I could have done it in French, but it just wouldn't have been interesting. They wouldn't have been the same observations. For instance, one of my bilingual French friends read it in English, and she really liked it, but at the end she said, (and it's something I wouldn't have thought of but it made perfect sense), "There is entirely too much shaking of hands in this book." [Laughs] I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "It's like saying, "He took a breath." In France you don't just walk in and start talking, you shake hands whenever you see someone. It's a different rhythm, a different custom.

I tried not to overdo it, but for the English-speaking reader I had in mind, to some extent I had to say, "We shook hands." Whereas for a French person it just goes without saying.

Has it been published in France?

No. There have been a couple of nibbles and there may well be something. There are two angles to this. One is that I don't think it would do particularly well in France because the French aren't that interested in hearing what foreigners have to say about France. The secondly issue has to do with Luc [the piano shop owner]. When I decided I was going to write the book, I told him what I had in mind, and his only condition was, "Please don't lead the public to my doorstep." I said, "I won't." That's an ethical and practical issue but people aren't going to ruin Paris because of me.

On your signing tour, are you going to play pianos in bars, friend's houses, etc.?

No, I'm not going into bars -- talk to me at the end of the tour! I'm staying with my family in Massachusetts and they have a piano so I'm playing it. In New York the people I'm staying with do not have a piano so I have to call a friend -- a friend of a friend actually! -- and say, "Marian tells me you have a piano that you'd like to have played." It's sort of like offering to walk someone's dog, at least that's the approach I take. "Of course you want to have your piano to be exercised." People have been very good about it. There are plenty of pianos out there.

I think the sad thing is that there are so many pianos that go unplayed. They're either a piece of furniture or a little piece of social pretension in the living room, which is very often the case. Or the kids grew up and moved away and mom and dad don't play the piano. There are literally millions of pianos in America and it's kind of an interesting question as to how many of them are never played. I'd say a majority. I personally find it unfortunate. It's not like I think every piano in America should be played all the time -- that would probably put the earth off its axis or something!

It's not a problem to find a piano, the problem is to find the time and the...I'm shying away from that hideous phrase, "the mental space." I'm not somebody who can just drop everything and roll off a couple of adagios from Mozart and my little Schubert impromptu I'm working on and then 10 minutes later go to catch my train. It's not that I need funereal quiet, either, but I need a little space and, as you see in the book, I don't like an audience.

It seems a little bit unfortunate in relation to being on tour. You could read and then play a tune.

Oh no! I wish I were one of those people. Next to concert pianists who are the thoroughbreds of the genre...but there are only a couple of those. One of my hobby horses, is this whole business of, "You could become a concert pianist, you're could devote your life to music." It's vastly overrated. The whole apparatus of teaching is oriented to that conceit that you might be the next Horowitz, you might be the next Mark D'Aggaritch, or Aliza della Rocha. There are only a couple of those a generation -- that's the way it works. Arts in general are hierarchical not democratic. That, I think, is self-evident.

Piano, and piano teaching in particular, still has one foot squarely in the nineteenth, or perhaps even in the eighteenth, century where there is this notion that That's the way we should approach it. I'm a firm believer in discipline and the rigor that art, and music in particular, imposes. That's one of the appealing things as an adult about music that it is unforgiving: you can't bullshit your way though it. You're either going to set yourself a task of Beethoven bagatelles or not. If you do, you're going to be able to play them or you're not. A lot of is has to do with technique, a lot of it has to do with interpretation. That's very different from saying, "I'm going to be on this ladder that goes all the way up to Carnegie Hall."

Unfortunately, a certain part of piano pedagogy is still stuck in that mire. It really comes from the Russian and Central European traditions of how piano is taught. It's legitimate -- that's how you turn out concert pianists when that's the undertaking. But I think there's another way, which is to recognize tht music has its own satisfactions whether or not you're ever going to play the Hammerklavier. I think, unfortunately, the one displaces the other and it need not. I don't think they should be mutually exclusive systems or traditions.

I think that's what occurred to me as an adult. I don't have to buy into this whole thing. Music can come back to me, or I can go back to it. I've talked to a lot of pianists and musicians in who have said the same thing. Partly it's that you have the wherewithal, the leisure, a certain amount of time and money to take piano lessons as an adult. If you want to learn sailing, or go back to the piano as an adult, it seems to me one of those things you can do without this superadded aspect of, "Are you going to be performing or not?"

I think the really, truly, extraordinary pianists are the ones who can go into a bar and can play, and play reasonably well. There's an amazing musicality to somebody who has an ear like that. They have an amazing repertoire, and an extremely good technique, but more than that, they play off the cuff, they can improvise. A good jazz pianist often will come from that tradition, because it has to do with the ear before it has to do with the fingers. That's really where true musicality lies. Just about anybody can get the fingers to do one thing or another -- not all of us can be at top of the heap -- but to actually go to where the music is: "Can you play this showtune?" "Gee, there's a Gershwin thing that you might have heard of..." and they have, and they can play it, too! I think that's extraordinary. I think the piano, just by the nature of what it is an instrument, lends itself to that more than anything. It's just the way it's built.

The piano is not a private instrument. Maybe that's why it's falling off in usage; it's too loud, it's too big...

That's very definitely a consideration. Let's face it, it's big -- the size of a huge desk. Not everyone has the space for one in their apartment, never mind the expense. On the other hand, there's this whole generation of Yamaha Disklavier cutting-edge electrical pianos. They are extraordinary! They have the key-touch now, it used to be the first ones were really doggy, it was like an organ. Now they have the keys balanced so that it really feels like an honest-to-god keyboard. The tone can even come close. It's not the same resonance, I can still tell the difference and so can most people, but it's a whole lot better than it used to be. Put on a set of headphones and you play on a Disklavier keyboard and you're way ahead of the game. Nobody hears you at all. I come in somewhere between the two extremes of, "I've got a concert piano and damn the neighbors," or "I've got my headphones on and no one can hear me." The way the world is headed is too bad. Maybe that's because I see my kids with headphones on all the time and I'm constantly yelling at them to "Take those headphones off! Talk to me." But between the two extremes of complete isolation and total public performance there is a lot of middle ground. Even old pianos have mute pedals. You can't really hear that much. The standard deal in Paris is after 8pm you don't play your piano. But if you put the mute pedal on you can play it up to midnight and no one can hear it.

Throughout the book you're playing classical music. Is that what you usually play?

It is. The pianists I think are most impressive are jazz pianists. If Mozart were alive today (and this is one of those idiotic suppositions because nobody really knows!) and if he were playing music... I think that's where the invention is. These guys are phenomenal. There are good and bad jazz musicians, just as there are in every tradition, but I think it's more impressive -- even though I adore the classical repertoire and the Beethoven Sonatas are something very fundamental in my landscape. To be in a club where a good jazz pianist is improvising and inventing is phenomenal. It's not from nowhere, it's still the pentatonic scale and harmonic tradition that Western music has, and yet, it's the cutting edge -- it's somewhere else entirely. I'm not pretending that I follow all of it, but even in my imperfect apprehension I just think those guys are amazing. Proportionately it's a huge irony that so much money and time is given over to recreating the classical repertoire, when in fact there is so much going on that is interesting and new and potentially more inventive [in jazz].

Do you go to jazz clubs in Paris? Is the scene still as alive as it was in the early to mid 20th century?

There are a handful of quite good clubs, and they would be not-so-different from a very good jazz club in London or Los Angeles. New York is where it's at where it comes to the whole jazz scene. Artists still go on tour and Paris is on the circuit, but it's a bit of a backwater. That said, Jacques Terrasson is a terrific jazz pianist. Laurent De Wilde is awfully good and respected. He lived in New York for years and then went back to France. There are half-a-dozen exceptionally good French jazz pianists whom I see from time to time in the jazz clubs. But I also go to classical concerts. I don't think these things should be mutually exclusive. I've always had a pretty catholic taste in music.

Are you working on another book?

I am. I'm not prepared to say too much about it, but it's something that has to do with the connection between early 19th century America and Europe and some of the individuals who were literally and figuratively on the frontier. I'm an informal student of history and that particular part of history is interesting me now. So much of it has been done from the American perspective, but living in Europe, I'm thinking, "Wait a minute! These are the guys that went over there and did or did not come back."

Did that come from writing The Piano Shop on the Left Bank?

I can't say it did, but there are a couple of overlaps because it was just as the piano was coming into its own as an instrument and the New World is one of the places where it was most readily developed. But that was later in the 19th century...this is more the first part when it was a frontier that was worthy of the name.

What are you reading?

Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis -- he got the Pulitzer Prize -- I think that's a fine book. There's a new translation of Anna Karenina that is just phenomenal. It's a perfect example of why translations are needed for each generation. There have been umpteen translations of Anna Karenina and some them phenomenally good, but they're not for our years. I read one of them when I was a teenager and I loved the book and it didn't strike me, "My god! There's something wrong with this book!" When you read the new one, you realize (I've read some reviews, it's not like I'm making this up off the top of my head), "This is right." You've got to keep going back to these. Especially Russian [novels]. I really don't have anything like the language, so you're so at the mercy of the translator. It's not that the previous ones got it wrong, it needs to be made fresh. That's a very long-winded way of saying it's one of my favorite books.

I've been reading a couple of other books about Paris that are highly regarded. and rightly so. Adam Gopnik's book [Paris to the Moon] and the Edmund White book, The Flaneur -- it's a funny title because it's the French word for strolling, although it's richer than that. It's a dandy book -- and very different from mine! Patrick McGrath's Martha Peake. She starts in England then comes over here, and it's a different take. The England side of that was phenomenally good. I've got to mention one more, a book that was just reissued, West With the Night by Beryl Markham, which I think is one of the great reads. I just read it again for the third time. No one would be anything but proud to have that book to her or his name. I went through it like a buzz-saw, told my kids, "Hey, this is something you should think about reading." I bet my daughter will be reading that before too long.

I like pretty much anything Robert Hughes writes, he's got a great take on America. American Visions, it's a picture book history of American art. It's non-academic in the bad sense of that term, yet it's very serious, and it's very, very good. He's very different from Simon Schama, but like him -- he has a story that he manages to bring alive, and it's compelling, convincing. I love that kind of writing; it's nonfiction, but it takes you somewhere almost entirely imaginative and makes you think.

Is that what you were looking for in your book?

Yes. I do think there is a difference between fiction and nonfiction. I don't buy this, "It's all the same. It's all storytelling, and narratives are all invented." There is a point to be made there, but I think far too much has been made of it. That said, with nonfiction you do reach a point where, if you do your homework (that's one of my bugaboos: you've got to do it and get it right! God knows what's still wrong my book. I sometimes wake up thinking, "Oh no! I called it the minor fourth and it's the diminished fourth!") and if you get the details right, there is a point at which an accretion of detail starts to take you on a trip. That's the kind of nonfiction I've always liked: Simon Schama or John McPhee, where there's the right amount of detail and it starts to be a story -- it's not made up and it's still true, but it's not just reportage. That's what I was trying to do and it took me a while to figure that out: "Nothing superfluous and nothing wanted," which is an old formula which is so easy to say and so hard to do. You need to get the balance right and then it starts to be more interesting than just the history of pianos, or, "Here's what I did in Paris."

Did you have fun researching the book?

Oh yes. Not every minute of the day [laughs], but by and large that was absolutely the best part. Part of it is that you have a calling card when you're writing a book and people will talk to you -- sometimes quite interesting people, sometimes not interesting! But you've got to take it as it comes. Circumstance or serendipity played a role, too. To sit down with Gyorgy Sebok and listen to him talk about music in an entirely fascinating and yet not pedantic or condescending way...he died the year before last, but he was part of the living tradition. His teacher was Zoltan Kodaly and he also studied with Bartok. Or asking the Prefecture du Police in Paris, "Do you have any riots in concert halls these days?" (because there's the whole story about the riot at the premiere of "Rites of Spring") Unfortunately the answer is, "No!"

Were you tempted to investigate further communities and niches in Paris?

I am tempted. I've written, and will probably continue to write, articles about that. What I don't see doing is stringing together a series of articles on Paris and [saying] "Here's my Paris." Frankly, I just don't think that that would be interesting to the reader. I think I will probably do that take on Paris as articles, but if something really pleases me and I want to go deeper, then I think that's what books are for, both for writing and reading.

That's not where I am with Paris right now. There are other things right now that are interesting me. Paris is part of the picture -- even of the project I mentioned before. The fact that I'm living in Europe and expect to keep living there probably has a lot to do with anything I write.