Music score illustrated on endpapers.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 377-381)

Virginia Lloyd spent much of her childhood and adolescence learning and playing the piano and thought she would make a career as a pianist. She originally started writing this book to understand the mystery of her very musical and deeply unhappy grandmother Alice, and how their lives both at and away from the piano intersected and diverged. Girls at the Piano also explores the changing relationship between women and the piano over the course of the instrument's 275-year history. Taking us from the salons of 18th century Europe to an amateur jazz workshop in Manhattan in the early 21st, this is a richly layered memoir that traces the experiences of real and fictional women at the piano over the course of the instrument's history. Funny, tender and fascinating, Girls at the Piano is an elegant and multi-layered meditation on identity, ambition and doubt, and how learning the piano had a profound effect on two women worlds and generations apart.