Excerpt from All Tomorrow's Parties by Rob Spillman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My parents had come over in the summer of 1964, on Fulbright scholarships after having attended the Eastman School of Music. For American classical musicians, Europe—particularly Germany, with its hundreds of big and little concert and opera halls, each with voracious, supportive audiences—was a much easier place to launch a career than back home. My parents had started off in Stuttgart, where my mother was building her opera credentials, and from where my father could scramble around Europe playing prestigious, high-pressure contests that could make his career while also cobbling together paid work as an opera coach and accompanist. After I was born, in December, my mother took little time off and managed to sing the role of Mimi in La Bohéme thirty times in one year. Yet they lacked consistent, reliable work and when my father was offered a job as accompanist for legendary voice teacher, Madame Mauz, in Berlin, my mother had little choice but to put her ambitions behind my father's, and we all moved to the place I have always called home.

I have no memories of my parents being together. They separated six months before the concert at which my father was booed. It is hard for me to imagine them as a couple. Temperamentally, they are opposites—she logical and always in control of her environment and emotions, he impulsive, impractical, and driven by emotion. At the time, he was in turmoil over his sexuality, resisting what he knew to be true but which went against his conservative, central Kentucky upbringing.

After they separated, even though my mother was still in Berlin, I lived primarily with my father, and tagged along with him to rehearsals, lessons, and performances. I loved watching him play the piano, especially up onstage where he would unfurl his broad six-foot-two frame, sway and nod along to the music, and sometimes even cry. The music possessed him, animated him, and watching him play concerts, I felt buoyant, my stomach fizzing with happiness. But as the boos and whistles started that day, I wanted to sink through the cushy red seat. How could they be so mean to him?

As soon as the concert ended, I rushed backstage to comfort my father, but when I found him in the dressing room he wasn't upset. Instead, he was joking and drinking beer with the other musicians. He took me outside to explain that the turtleneck, beret, and cigarette were called for in the "John-Cage-wannabe" score and that he had to give everything he could to the piece, even though he didn't like it, but it was his job, and he loved his job, which was performing. He also explained that the audience wasn't booing him. German audiences care deeply for music, so they were "booing the pretentious piece of you-know-what."

"If I was out there," my father said, "I would have booed it myself."

Excerpted from All Tomorrow's Parties by Rob Spillman. Copyright © 2016 by Rob Spillman. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.