April and May shenanigans
Sharon's Monthly Roundup
Apologies! Apologies! I did not get a monthly post out for April, and figured I would do it in May, and…somehow it’s June now. Look, the concept of time’s passage is a difficult one for me.
Today’s monthly roundup features tidbits from the following newsletters:
April 7: A Felix and Fanny discovery, my personal nightmare, and Ted Lasso's spiritual heir
April 14: Soreness & Salonpas, Herbie Hancock, and a new numbers obsession
April 28: Philosophical thoughts about the piano, rhythm, and C Major
May 5: Thoughts on the orgasm thing and music school failings
Because this is basically two months’ worth of selections, it’s kind of long. Oops.
For those of you who haven’t seen, or are new to this newsletter, or whatever: I’m performing a new piano concerto by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel! Yes, Hensel died in 1847; this concerto is “new” because it’s an arrangement (a brilliant one by Patricia Wallinga) of her G Minor Piano Sonata, which I have a theory was meant to be a concerto for piano and orchestra.
Here’s the page with info where you can buy tickets; the first performance is on June 15 in Boston, and now that we’re into June (what) I am in hardcore performance-prep mode.
Uhhh, a super quick and dirty recap of what I did in May: I performed a new-ish solo piano program for a real live audience, and then I went into the recording studio and recorded works by Florence Price and Maria Szymanowska. In between I finalized stuff and signed a contract for the first performance of the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel concerto. Things are happening and it’s great but I’m also VERY TIRED.
If you’re on Bluesky, it’s my new bad-take-free hangout space. My handle is @doodlyroses.bsky.social.
AI’ve got some thoughts
Earlier this week I was musing on all the philosophical discourse around AI-generated art and music, and can I just say how much I hate having to think about AI? I’m an analog girlie—I play acoustic piano, I drive stick-shift, I fill my fountain pens from ink bottles, and up until recently I gave musical feedback by writing pencil sketches on manuscript paper and taking photos of it. Do I have intelligible thoughts about machine learning, when pressed? Sure, but I’d much rather be left to play with my pencils and inks and an instrument that requires me to call an expensive technician whenever the levers in it start clicking. Please don’t make me think about how computers think and—argh, it’s too late.
I tweeted some broad thoughts about how classical music is marketed in the modern era and why I think it’s so often made to undermine itself, and I’m serious about wanting someone else to write about this because I really don’t want to have to write about it myself. [Proceeds to write about it]
Basically, I think so many of the stock reasons that classical music defenders provide for why it’s worth listening to (or, even worse, why it’s superior to other art forms) have only set the scene for the art form’s own devaluation. I absolutely do not mean this in a handwringing “AI will kill classical music!!!!!” kind of way—it’s more that the economics of music making (and listening) continue to shift and if we keep harping on things like “it’s relaxing!” or “it’s mathematically complicated!” it’s going to be harder to make a case for why the genre—which is ridiculously labor- and resource-intensive by design—should be valued and supported when technology (not just AI) continues to make it easier and cheaper to produce music along the “relaxing” and “complex” axes.
I think we’re seeing a similar thing happening in visual arts with NFTs and now AI. While I’m aware that NFTs began with the goal of supporting artists, the thing I saw in the NFT craze was that the people really going all in on the concept were not doing so because they primarily loved art and wanted to financially support artists—they were people who had bought into the idea of art ownership as a status symbol and believe that if you own the right works, you have an investment that will provide future financial returns. (I’m painting with a broad brush here—no pun intended. I’m not here to make aesthetic moral judgments, and I’m sure there were at least some people who found the Bored Apes very visually pleasing, and “bought” them for that reason.)
Art representing status and wealth is, of course, not a new concept, and arguably art has played that economic role since the dawn of humanity, and I don’t know how to reconcile my distaste with art as a vehicle for holding wealth with my belief that art is and should be valued highly in our society. But the very logical endgame of this line of thinking is this: if art serves an economic function, then logically the way to extract more value out of it is to reduce the human labor that goes into it—and that’s what I’m now seeing with the trend of AI-generated art.
Again, I don’t want to be one of those pearl-clutchers decrying AI as the ender of worlds. AI is a tool—one that’s fancier and more powerful than others, but a tool nonetheless. The part that troubles me is that the line of reasoning I’m seeing from a certain crowd is that AI art is revolutionary because you can now generate custom-made art for yourself without having to pay money to a human being who would have the audacity to charge you a lot of money for their skill and labor and time.
This is not technology suddenly appearing on the scene to destroy systems and livelihoods. This is technology enabling a logical progression based on values people have assigned to art. My very long-winded point: justifying the existence of art and artists by claiming that they serve some kind of function is inherently a losing proposition.
A while back I was looking into ways to promote my own recorded music and, after clicking through a trail of resources for artists, landed on a submission page for an all-classical piano playlist with a purportedly large following. This seemed ideal—after all, it would make sense to encourage people who already like solo piano music to listen to me.
My heart sank as I read through the submission guidelines: all submitted tracks, they said, had to be “pleasant” with no “loud,” “fast,” or “pounding” parts. (That instantly rules out…uh, most pieces written for the piano—even slow works usually build to at least one loud climax.) I realized this wasn’t a playlist for fans of solo classical piano—it was a playlist of soothing ambient background music, in which “classical” served as shorthand for “passive.”
I very briefly considered submitting the Farrenc etude I recorded, which does get loud, but not terribly so, then realized how depressed I’d be for all the passion and thoughtful research I put into that recording to be, in the end, mindless background fodder. (I also didn’t want to become algorithmically linked to the types of playlists and accounts that promote classical music as a calming aural backdrop.)
I make music in the hopes that somebody gives that music a moment of their attention and feels some sort of emotional resonance—and I never fail to marvel at how magical that ephemeral connection is. When someone messages or tweets at me about how a track I recorded brought them to tears, I think about how implausible this web of events is—that I encountered music written by someone long dead who could not imagine my existence, that I poured a lot of mental, physical, and spiritual energy into turning those notes into sound, and that that work would then cause a stranger in the future on the other side of the world to feel something so strongly that they had a physiological reaction. That’s a goddamn miracle. That’s what art is, to me.
(I am not completely sure if any of this train of thought connected in a sensible way—I’m typing through a headache and may very well be hallucinating the philosophical connections here.)
For related reading, a music writer on Twitter reminded me of Jennifer Gersten’s excellent article, “The music industry sells classical as soothing background music — robbing a great art of its power.” It goes into a lot of reasons why the “classical music is relaxing” line is so problematic, and also touches on the issues of selling it as something superior to popular music.
I also got a lot out of Jaime Brooks’ piece, “The Last Recording Artist,” which is long but a very worthwhile read—it puts AI and music technology in the context of larger issues in the recording industry, streaming, and the commercialization of music.
Performing vs. recording
Even though recording and performing look totally the same (I sit down at the piano, I play something I’ve practiced to death, someone hears it in some fashion), they’re totally different endeavors. Not to sound like a vampire, but when I perform for an audience, I get to feed off their energy, so there’s something wonderfully regenerative-feeling about the process; it’s kind of like when you have a really, really good conversation with someone you get on a deep level, and you both leave feeling amped up and full of joy. Recording, on the other hand, involves giving and giving and givingto an empty room and getting absolutely nothing back in the moment—it’s physically, emotionally, and mentally draining.
And if performing is a sprint, recording is a marathon. There’s something deliciously risky and freeing about giving a performance—you only have one shot, so there’s little margin for error, but at the same time, everything you do is immediately lost to the ether, so a split note here, a fumbled run there, doesn’t matter because as long as you maintain the line and the illusion, everyone’s going to have a good time. Recording requires at least one clean take of every note in the music, which completely changes your priorities and approach. In this week’s recording session, I had to play big cathartic climaxes over and over and over again, finding the balance between getting as clean a take as possible while also replicating the “I’m giving it my all” intensity so that the engineer would have enough material to work with.
I was also reminded of how much on-the-spot adaption and awkwardness recording requires. I’ve been trained to pedal to the room, so that in a “dry” space without much reverb or echo, my right foot on the damper pedal strategically bleeds the sound to create the illusion of more resonance and linearity. The recording studio is a very dry room by design, but I had to change up my pedaling on the spot and play more drily than I’d practiced because in a recording situation, you don’t want that resonance or bleeding, because it makes it harder to do edits, and reverb can be added in post.
I found myself musing on how recording sort of tests skills that are the complete opposite of performance. When performing a work from beginning to end, there’s a natural ebb and flow, a clear narrative that sounds cohesive in the moment. When I was recording multiple takes of individual passages, I had to start at odd segments and hit the same peaks and valleys at the same pacing, slowing and speeding up in the same way, even though it made no sense out of context—all so that things could be stitched together and sound like one coherent flow. I was surprised at how reliably I was able to crank out takes, which kind of goes against a lot of romantic ideals about how art should be made.
One of the greatest dismissals anyone can make of a classical musician is that they’re “robotic” or an “automaton”—even though the art form requires performers to practice hours and hours on end and be able to churn out technically refined passagework and painstakingly sculpted phrases, we also demand “freshness,” that illusion that the performance you’re watching and hearing is happening spontaneously in the moment. Really great studio recordings sound almost improvisatory, but unless everyone else besides me is a one-take wonder, these recordings are a lie. The track that sounds like one effortless performance is actually a polished artifice, a skillfully pieced quilt with invisible stitches made from hours of repeated attempts.
I used to think that my inconsistency in performance/recording was a sort of point of pride: I’m an artist, I can’t just churn out solid performances like a one-person musical factory! I’ve gotten stronger at this kind of thing, though, and I think about how legendary artists like Clara Schumann survived the perils of flash-in-the-pan Wunderkindism by proving that, year after year, they could deliver and deliver and deliver. It’s made me realize that consistency is its own kind of brilliance.
The Connies will make you cry
The absolute best thing I’ve read all week—and possibly all month—is this delightful, heartwarming, amazing NYT piece by Connie Wang called “Why Are There So Many Asian American Women Named Connie?”
It’s so lovely and, spoiler alert, it ends with a meeting of Connies (including the photographer!) with the OG Connie Chung at the center.
Hell is my idea of a good time
Thomas Adès’ Dante was one of my favorite things I’ve ever heard at the LA Phil (other all-time favorites: Nokuthula Ngwenyama’s “Primal Message,” Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations, and Xian Zhang’s Beethoven 7th which I still won’t shut up about). So imagine my sheer delight when I discovered that the entire work has been recorded and is now available to stream.
Earlier this week my head and eyes were so achey and I was so tired and useless that I turned off all the lights, put Dante on very loud, and lay down with a heated eye mask. Turns out, lying in the dark blasting Adès’ balletic depiction of Hell is my idea of having a good time, and I highly recommend it. While no recording holds a candle to the experience of hearing the work live in a concert hall, it’s still a solid, very enjoyable listen (good speakers or headphones/earphones are a must, as with all classical music, and frankly, the louder the better).
Current jam
I have been putting the new Misterwives song, “Out of Your Mind,” on repeat and it’s a very satisfying banger.