A concert recap and current obsessions
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
WHAT A WEEK. I don’t know what was in the air/water/stars this week (hippies and astrologists, please weigh in) but it really felt like the universe was out to get all of us. Everyone I know is tired and Over It.
Anyway, I went to an LA Phil concert this past weekend that low-key gave me a new perspective on how curation can work in concert programming. You all know that I am a huge huge fan of the LA Phil and their programming and I am at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and Hollywood Bowl so often, I’m surprised they haven’t started charging me rent.
I bought tickets for this particular concert as soon as I saw two of the pieces featured on it: selections from Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations and a premiere of a concerto-ized version of Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 1. I first encountered Bonds’ Montgomery Variations when the Phil played a few selections at the Hollywood Bowl two seasons ago, and I was hooked.
It’s still grossly underplayed and last I checked there were no professional high-quality recordings on streaming, but the Minnesota Orchestra recently put up a full-length audio recording on Youtube:
As for Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 1, it’s my favorite of the four Fantasies, which I first heard on Samantha Ege’s album. (I’ve listened to some other interpretations, including Lara Downes’, and I have to say that I much prefer this one):
No. 1 was actually the one I really wanted to play, but when I went on a Florence Price sheet music buying spree, I couldn’t find No. 1 anywhere. I messaged Ege asking where she got the music for it, and she responded saying that it’s currently unpublished and she flew to Arkansas to get access to the sheet music in person.
Well, all right then.
So I fully expected to enjoy the concert based on the inclusion of those two pieces alone, and was really pleasantly surprised by the entire program. The concert was curated by Julia Bullock as an experiential overview of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds and their intertwined artistic partnership; interstitial recorded video statements by Bullock and remarks by Michelle Cann, the piano soloist, were really helpful in providing more context and backstory for the composers’ works.
I tweeted earlier this week about some of my thoughts about Florence Price in context of what I learned from this concert, and one of the surprising takeaways was how shamelessly funny Price could be:
So overall I thought it was a really solid example of how a program can be intentionally and intelligently curated to serve multiple functions: it was an enjoyable and entertaining night of music, it was educational for me as someone who is essentially self-educating myself on the works and styles of composers I wasn’t taught in school, and it felt like a great introduction of these artists to audiences who might not have a lot of context for them (or classical music in general).
Some nitpicking of the experience: while I appreciated the breadth and range exhibited by Bullock’s curation, I felt that the program was on the long side; it started at 8 PM and finished close to 10:45 PM, and even though I was enthusiastically soaking it all in I did start feeling mentally fatigued near the end. Part of this was due to the sheer quantity of music, heavy on the songs, and part of it was due to the many stage changes and entrances forced by the constantly changing instrumentation, which naturally dragged the concert’s run time out by quite a bit. Two of my teachers have separately told me that the key to good concert programming is to leave your audience wanting more—advice I have taken to heart and which has served me very well.
I also felt that the concert could have used a bit more generous authority in signaling or cueing the audience, given that it was already a program with an educational/outreach-type bent. I was torn between whether or not the Montgomery Variations should have been prefaced (or followed by) a brief explanation of the events it illustrates; the end of Movement 5, “One Sunday in the South,” which uses percussion to devastating effect to depict the bombing of a Black church, sent chills down my spine but made one audience member bark with laughter (?).
The biggest cringe moment, to me, came after the Montgomery Variations, the penultimate piece on the program; because the concert concluded with a solo organ suite, the conductor, Lidiya Yankovskaya (who did a phenomenal job all around) led the orchestra in a bow, and then the orchestra exited the stage. This 1) took a while, because orchestras by design are not efficient stage-exiters, and 2) read overwhelmingly as a “this concert is definitely over” signal, which meant that a very large chunk of the audience got up and headed for the exits before the organist even entered the spotlight.
All that aside, I still really enjoyed and got a lot out of the concert as a whole. As can be expected, my favorite work was the orchestrated Fantasie Nègre; it worked so well as a concerto and I was delighted by the savvy orchestration choices. (It’s not like I’m particularly fixated on stuff like that at the moment because of a current project or anything.)
(Whew, I just looked at what I typed up and whoops, I did not mean to write a whole-ass concert review. My bad.)
An Article I Enjoyed
(Just one, today, because almost everything I’ve read in the past week is either political news or stuff about Twitter.)
Dawn Fallik: Philly chickenman invites city to abandoned pier to…watch him eat (Billy Penn)
A number of people said they planned to come and see your chicken finale. Why?
I’ve had long stretches of being tortured and people can relate. The city of Philadelphia has had a lot of pain, but it’s a city with a lot of perseverance. That’s what makes this city very special.
Why make this a public event?
It’s a powerful thing I’m doing and it only felt right to share it.
It has been an utter delight witnessing, via the internet, the sheer weirdness that is this dude making an event—but not a party—out of him eating chicken. As such I thoroughly enjoyed this interview.
Current Obsessions
Obsession the first
I previously wrote (Substacked?) about my obsession with a whole cavalcade of word games, and I am thrilled to announce that my obsession has evolved into a full-throated fixation with Sudoku.
I don’t know what it is; I suddenly have no taste for word games and have essentially quit Wordle, Waffle, etc. cold turkey and am just a Sudoku person now. It is just incredibly comforting and satisfying to put my headphones in, play repetitive catchy music, and logic my way through a grid of numbers. (Armchair psychologists, feel free to tell me that this is my way of enacting safety and control and rationality in a chaotic and unpredictable world.)
My current routine is to vibe my way through the NY Times “easy” sudoku of the day—and by “vibe my way,” I mean I just try to blow through it as quickly as possible without counting or actively thinking. I’ve gotten weirdly good at just clocking what numbers go where by doing a visual scan of a row/column/block and just letting my brain go, hmm, feels like a 3. So far I can do the “easy” level sudoku this way under 6 minutes without any errors.
After doing that I settle into doing the “medium” and “hard” levels using actual logic, which feels really soothing after vibing through the easy level.
It is entirely possible that after two or so weeks of being obsessed with this game, I will suddenly tire of staring at grids of numbers and move on to something else.
Obsession the second
I simply cannot help it. I am OBSESSED with the ongoing—and surprisingly expedient—meltdown of twitter dot com.
As stated earlier, I have read a lot of articles about what’s happening at Twitter, but these are the two most recent that I think sum up best what’s been going on:
Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer: Inside the Twitter meltdown (Platformer)
I can’t look away. Yesterday (Thursday) I just kept popping on to scroll the timeline and gawk at the chaos parade: “verified” accounts posting the wildest stuff, tech journalists breathlessly sharing accounts of calls and emails with details so weird they sounded fake, features being launched and unlaunched in less than a day, weird glitches in the app all along the way.
As “fun” as it is to witness the spectacle, I can’t help but be mournful for a platform that, regardless of its fate, will never be the same again. Twitter is where I met people who became important collaborators and supporters; it’s how I accidentally started a writing career and found an audience for what I thought was niche work; it’s how almost everyone reading this newsletter found me. (Hi! I appreciate you, thank you for being here.)
I’ve downloaded my Twitter Archive in case of platform failure and set myself up on Mastodon (my handle is @doodlyroses@space-pirates.org). We’ll see what the social media landscape looks like in, what the heck, a week.
Miscellany
There won’t be a practice video on Monday; this week was really weird for mundane personal reasons and I managed to just barely hit my minimum practice goal and did not have the time or energy to record a practice video. Here’s hoping next week is better. 😵💫