Marcus Thorne
The pianist
A prodigy who walked away at the height of his career and has spent ten years not playing.
The story
Marcus Thorne was twenty-five, Detroit’s most celebrated pianist, and completely lost. On the night of a sold-out performance at the Orpheum Theatre, the connection between his music and his soul snapped, and he walked away from the piano.
Ten years later he tunes instruments above a piano repair shop, playing none of them, when an anonymous note arrives: the Orpheum is scheduled for demolition. One last goodbye to the building becomes a reckoning with the boy he was and with Mrs. Elizabeth Washington, the elderly church pianist who once showed a seven-year-old sheltering from the rain his first eight notes.
Spanning nearly sixty years and three generations of musicians, The Silent Encore is about what we owe the people who believed in us first, and what legacy really means.
- Legacy
- Mentorship
- Detroit
- Music
- Purpose
