August and September musings
Sharon's Monthly Roundup
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Today’s monthly roundup features edited tidbits from the following newsletters:
Aug 11: The small practicing creature, Libertango, and sexiness fails
Aug 25: On love, death, and Joe Hisaishi (also the habanera)
So if you care to find me, look to the western sky
This is less relevant to you if you get this newsletter, but sharing it here anyway—over on my personal blog I wrote a quick post on which platforms (including this one) I’m most active on right now given that I’m spending a lot less time on Twitter.
It’s not that I’m actively boycotting Twitter or anything, but I’ve just noticed myself opening the app way less (especially now that it’s that ugly X icon) and quickly exiting every time I do, because it is simply not a platform it feels good to be on anymore.
Some thoughts on talent
People who don’t know a lot about me or music (other than the fact that music is hard and I am generally good at it) really love to throw the word “talent” around: “You’re so talented, I took piano lessons for a few months but I had no talent like you, it takes so much talent to do what you do,” etc. etc. etc.
Because I am too pedantic to ever allow my brain to just take the compliment, and I have done more research on talent than probably most people have, I often find myself a little irritated at these statements. There are a couple of paradoxical things I know to be true about talent:
The more I learn about talent (and ability, and psychology, and environmental factors, and just music in general), the more I realize I actually don’t have a definition for what talent is. It’s such a nebulous concept, and I’ve read different definitions of talent by artists/musicians, psychologists, and scientists. The fact that I can’t define it suggests it doesn’t exist, and yet it’s something I know and recognize is real. Like Justice Stewart and hardcore porn, I know it when I see it.
Despite my irritation at people ascribing everything I do to innate talent: yes, I am talented. It is not big-headed or egotistical of me to say and acknowledge that; through experience, observation, and a lot of reading, I know it is a fact that certain things have come easier to me than they do to other people, and that the natural ability I’ve had in some cases has given me a leg up.
Talent is not rare or, frankly, special. Raw, innate talent is everywhere; it seems rarer than it is because it takes a lot of happy accidents and just-right environmental factors—which are affected a whole lot by economics, classism/income inequality, institutional sexism/racism/other general biases—for someone with raw talent to find an area in which to excel, to then receive the careful nurturing required to attain excellence, and then to find personal happiness or fulfillment.
You can be talented at something and still be bad at it. Again, talent is not rare, and in most cases it’s not enough to get someone over the finish line of “being really good at a thing” without being backed up by knowledge and experience. All of us who grew up taking lessons and doing yearly recitals knows the pain of having to sit through listening to that one kid who clearly enjoys playing and does it with ease, but also hasn’t applied themselves properly and plays horribly unevenly or super loud and is just really unpleasant to hear. We’ve all heard that kid; heck, we all might have been that kid at some point. And, not to be mean, but every music school has a handful of people who are just so bad that you can’t help but wonder, “How did they get in?”
To get my minor in music history in undergrad I had to do one big research paper and I chose a topic that would have me tearing my hair out over how to define the words talent, prodigy, and genius. I specifically combined a historical examination of the upbringings of six recognized musical geniuses/prodigies (W.A. Mozart, N. Paganini, L. v. Beethoven, C. Schumann, F. Liszt, and F[elix] Mendelssohn) with current research on child psychology and talent.
You know, a totally reasonable, bite-sized undertaking for an undergraduate music major.
I found, in an academic book delightfully titled International Handbook of Giftedness and Talent, a list of common behaviors exhibited by musically gifted, potentially prodigious, children; the list includes but is not limited to:
interest in musical sounds
musical memory (e.g. the ability to hear something and sing it back)
perfect pitch (the stereotypical hallmark of musical talent—though plenty of super-talented musicians don’t have it, and research increasingly shows that perfect pitch is, more often than not, taught, not innately possessed)
improvisational skills
sensitivity to musical expression
Other than perfect pitch—which as I mentioned is neither necessary nor, most of the time, innate—doesn’t this list apply to…most kids? Does this mean that every kid obsessed with “Baby Shark” or “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is a potential musical genius?
…Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m saying. Most kids have the raw seeds of talent within them. Like I said, talent isn’t actually rare. What makes it appear rare is that a lot of it goes unnoticed or unnurtured: parents with no musical experience might not recognize these signs in their children; struggling families may not possess instruments or be able to afford private music lessons (and let’s not forget that, in America, music education is often usually the first thing to get axed when budgets are cut); even kids who are lucky enough to have music lessons don’t always get the supportive environment or knowledgeable teacher required for them to really excel; systemic bias means that even a clearly talented kid may not be recognized for their potential because of their identity (just ask any Black classical musician how often they haven’t been taken seriously), etc. etc. etc.
Warren Buffett, of all people, describes the importance of environment for talent really well:
I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner. But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing — and make a lot of money doing it.
Hilariously (to me), a lot of potential talent goes unnoticed because some kids just really like playing with their friends. Back when I thought I would go into performance psychology (long story), I bought a used copy of The Science and Psychology of Music Performance where the authors pointed this out:
More extroverted children will find periods of separation from their friends more difficult to deal with and may well drop out of instrumental tuition during the early stages, preferring activities that are more social and group-oriented. Clearly, some instruments make more demands in terms of practice hours than others before an acceptable sound is produced.
They then go on to point out that children to whom this applies may find singing “more suitable.” ZING. I knew I was justified in bullying vocalists! (Vocalist friends, jk jk ily.)
I could go on on and on about the very specific conditions that need to be created for talent to blossom into something more, but 1) I’ve already written a paper on it (and touched on some of my research in an article I wrote for VAN!), and 2) much better writers and academics than me have already done the research and written actual books on the topic. (Many of you are probably familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hours rule; the body of research on talent, particularly artistic talent, goes much, much deeper than that.)
And for those of you who are reading this and going “You’re telling me I can turn basically any kid into Mozart? brb, signing my kid up for ALL THE LESSONS,” spoiler alert, the biggest determining factors for whether or not your kid actually makes it in music are how much money you have and how many inside connections you can provide.
Anyway. I’m at the point in my life—and I realize how statistically improbable it is that I’m here and how lucky I am to be able to feel this—where I genuinely cannot tell anymore where my talent ends and where the work and training begin. Is an objectively difficult, virtuosic passage surprisingly easy for me (and I have to say, what an utter delight it is to find hard things easy! It truly never gets old) because I’m talented, or because I’ve drilled so much that my fingers are simply used to those patterns now? Is pouring emotion into a thorny passage natural for me because, as people have pointed out since I was little, I am naturally very expressive, or is it because I’ve been sufficiently trained to compartmentalize the physicality of playing?
Furthermore, there are aspects of my playing that used to be weaknesses, but that I’ve worked on so hard that they’ve flipped back around and become strengths. For example, voicing—emphasizing chosen notes out of the many I’m playing at any given time in order to create the illusion of a distinct melody—was something I struggled with when I was younger, but that I do unthinkingly now and am praised for doing well. Is voicing purely a skill I learned through work, or is it that doing the work cleared up my fine-motor control enough to do a thing I always had the natural impulse to do?
I’ve been taking the self-questioning even further and wondering lately, “Why is the thing I’ve applied my talent to even considered valuable?”
Don’t get me wrong: I love what I do, and my willingness to do painstaking work for hours a day for weeks on end with no immediate gratification clearly indicates that I have troubling masochistic tendencies. However, I’ve been increasingly realizing that I am really lucky that the type of virtuosity I’ve honed happens to be be highly respected because it’s a fancy performing art with high-class connotations.
But virtuosity—which I loosely define as talent manifested as extraordinary ability—is all around us, and whether or not we deem it valuable is totally arbitrary.
For example, I was gobsmacked the first time I saw this video of this woman making perfectly wrapped and folded dumplings with the fastest fluttering of her fingers and flicking of a knife:
This is how prepackaged frozen dumplings are made, and yet “This is the product of virtuosity” is never my first thought when I pluck a bag of dumplings out of the supermarket freezer case.
Or, have you ever seen videos of farmworkers harvesting fruits and veggies? I have, and they’re mesmerizing:
It is so ironic that farmworking is often categorized as “unskilled labor” because holy crap, this is skill! Watching this video, I can’t help but think, this is rhythm, this is teamwork, this is what so many chamber groups and orchestras are trying to achieve, and some of them aren’t even this good.
Or, have you ever seen what the workers behind the counter of any cheap food joint are doing? The first time I went to Lanzhou in London—a tiny, unimpressive, hole-in-the-wall, I watched the noodle guy take a ball of dough in his hands and then…somehow, noodles happened:
It honestly seems unfair that people ooh and ahh at my abilities, and tell me how special I am, and say things like “I couldn’t do what you do.” I couldn’t do what these people do, and honestly I think they’re just as skilled and special! I mean, my finely honed ability to wiggle my fingers on a keyboard doesn’t even make food!
“But Sharon,” you say, “these videos are cool, but making dumplings/harvesting watermelons/pulling noodles really fast is just a function of doing something long enough that you get really good at is—it’s not real talent.”
To which I say, does the distinction even matter? I’ve been living in my head and body my whole life (I know, can you believe it?) and as I said earlier even I can’t tell what part of my skill comes from talent and what part comes from repetition anymore. It doesn’t matter at this point: I can do what I do, and I’m good at it [citation needed]. The same can be said for farmworkers harvesting vegetables in record heat, or low wage workers churning out packaged lunches.
We are absolutely swimming in talent and virtuosity—it feeds us, clothes us (I picked all food-related videos, but I am just as astonished by the virtuosity of garment workers making our cheap T-shirts), and keeps all our conveniences of daily modern life going. And the more I realize this, the more I’m weirded out by it. Whatever you want to call this application of human potential—talent, skill, virtuosity, whatever—it’s not rare and it takes many forms. Unfortunately, if the form happens to be utilitarian, it’s just not valued.
Of course, I can’t possibly explain all of this when someone at a party says “Wow, you’re so talented” (and that isn’t even getting into the fact that our modern conceptions of talent and genius are a relatively new phenomenon from the 19th century)—so instead of all of this [gestures] I just say, “Oh, thanks.”
We did it, Joe (Hisaishi)
I lost my damn mind at the Joe Hisaishi concert.
Seeing the man himself conduct music that simultaneously captured the soundtrack of my childhood and the poignancy of growing up and the bittersweet joy of adulthood…it was A LOT. You have not lived until you have heard 17,500 people scream in ecstasy as one upon hearing the first three notes of the Totoro theme.
It was hard to pick a favorite on the program, but I have always maintained that the Princess Mononoke symphonic suite is a staggeringly good concert piece even if you’ve never seen the movie, and should be a standard canonic work along with Beethoven’s 5th and the Rachmaninoff 2nd concerto.
It was absolutely electrifying to hear the second movement live (it starts at 3:18 in the video above)—all that relentless percussion, with the taiko drum just going and going, wow. I was just quietly bouncing with excitement in my seat.
It also—and I realize this is not a new thought, and what many John Williams fans will tell you—is really fun to hear favorite movie music in the context of a concert, because you really do hear everything in a different light. I associate so many moments in Hisaishi’s music with their corresponding scenes from the Ghibli movies that, until last night, I never realized just how skillfully Hisaishi transforms the main theme from Howl’s Moving Castle into a perfectly Straussian Viennese waltz.
Despite being so fun in all its sweeping, lush glory, connoting carefree flourishes of bright silks and sparkling lights, there is something inherently, quietly tragic about the Viennese waltz form—it evokes opulence and joy, yes, but it also speaks of the unsustainable decadence that comes before decay, of the fleeting good times before hardship comes for us all. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hisaishi used the Viennese waltz to accompany a film that overtly depicts the senselessness and selfishness of war and the superficiality of youth and physical beauty. I’m reminded of what people have said about Ravel’s La valse (which I also love). From the Houston Symphony’s program notes for Ravel’s work:
From the beginning, however, listeners began to hear something more than dancers swirling about a ballroom in its music, especially in the wild ending. Even Ravel’s student Manuel Rosenthal discerned in it “a kind of anguish, a very dramatic feeling of death.”
In the aftermath of World War I, the waltz was increasingly seen as a relic of a bygone era—an era that the war had destroyed. Many heard the finale of the piece not merely as a brilliant development of waltz-motifs, but as the distortion and disintegration of the waltz itself: a symbol of a decadent civilization out of control, tearing itself apart. The fact that this was a Viennese waltz added a further layer to some interpretations: Ravel’s piece was perceived specifically as a critique of Austro-German militarism.
Hisaishi’s music, and the Ghibli films in general, are so good at capturing the essence of the human condition: that everything is temporary, and that all our happiness is undergirded by sadness. I’m reminded of Eleanor and Michael’s dialogue from The Good Place:
Eleanor: You're learning what it's like to be human. All humans are aware of death. So we're all a little bit sad... all the time. That's just the deal.
Michael: Sounds like a crappy deal.
Eleanor: Well, yeah. It is. But we don't get offered any other ones.
Later Michael refers to this conversation and completes the realization:
Every human is a little bit sad all the time, because you know you’re gonna die, but that knowledge is what gives life meaning.
Feelings and modulations
I was musing this week today about how reserving your music-making for times when 1) it is ideal and 2) you have the ~feelings~ to pour into it is really actually a luxury. Cheesy Hollywood movies like to have big climactic scenes where, in the heat of the moment, the underdog protagonist digs deep and flashes back to whatever emotional thing happened in Act I, pours it all into their performance, and ends up getting the girl/impressing the mentor/winning the competition/etc. I don’t know if it’s this depiction of music, or if it’s that hobbyist musicians utilize music as a way to process their own feelings, but there seems to be this normie perception that professional musicians are just always digging deep like that.
I have a lot of unorganized thoughts about the whole psychological aspect of performing once you have to just be able to “turn it on,” but for now, just know that most of the time now when I’m pulling a lot of feelings out of the music, there’s just not a lot of drama going on in my head. Sometimes it really is just about the music.
Also, don’t underestimate the power of a really good modulation.
You can’t spell “Libertango” without “rant”
I went to the Hollywood Bowl and heard Anton Mejias perform the Grieg concerto (he was very good!) and as an encore he and Tarmo Peltokoski, the conductor, showed off a four-hands arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango.”
I am very jaded and tired and am still working through a lot of residual snobbishness so most popular classical works just get a sneer from me. However, I do suffer from strains of basicness (Exhibit A) and for some reason I LOVE! (exclamation point!!!!) Libertango. I love it so much! I know it is so basic and it is so overplayed and I am well aware that Piazzolla wrote so many other things but I am still so filled with joy every time I get to hear Libertango, on any instrument or combination thereof.
When I went looking for videos of four-hands Libertango arrangements, though, I remembered that Libertango’s cultural fatal flaw is that everyone just has to be cheesy as hell about Libertango. I get it: it’s sexy, it’s sensual, there’s an undercurrent of danger and we all want to convey that as much as possible.
Like, this is one of the better videos I watched of four-hands Libertango, and I still find the little smirks and head nods very irritating:
That might be because I have some thoughts, and therefore preconceived feelings, about Khatia Buniatishvili, who is objectively a very good pianist but whose persona just seems intentionally insufferable. I really truly try not to shit-talk other pianists and their non-musical decisions, and I don’t want to be mean-spirited, but (you know there was a “but” coming), have you seen Buniatishvili’s bio? It practically mocks itself. (Sorry for that slightly mean detour but I am medically incapable of mentioning Khatia Buniatishvili without sharing her absolutely bonkers bio.) Back to Libertango.
There are others, but imho the absolute worst offender in the realm of “Libertango, but we are going to be cringey and/or cheesy as hell about it” is Anderson and Roe’s music video:
No hate on Anderson and Roe—I love piano four-hands music and they’re genuinely good at it—but this video is so cringey that it actually distracts me from how good the arrangement is.
I am in pain watching this video, which just has me mentally going “please stop doing that” the entire time. (The setup with the lecture about physical bodies feeling attraction: urghhhh.) The contrived looks they’re giving each other make me so uncomfortable, and not for the reason I think they intend. The whole shtick of they’re using their bodies! in close proximity! and it’s SEXY! makes me feel like I am watching two people with absolutely no game attempt and fail to seduce each other using a questionable instruction manual.
I don’t mean to deny that Libertango is a very sexy piece, and classical music has a very weird relationship with sexiness and sensuality (women having power and agency being bad, predominantly male predators—Lydia Tár being both 1. an outlier and 2. fictional—exploiting the intimate structures of music being somehow okay, and the tendency of opera to portray women’s-suffering-as-sexiness being Art). I generally am pro-expression-anti-prudishness in art but that does not mean I am okay with straight up cringe.
Sexiness, to me, is in the same bucket as humor, in that I want to see more of it in art, but only if it’s done well because most artists are not good at it. I don’t mean that most artists aren’t sexy or funny people, but how you imbue a narrative with an expectation—of power or pleasure or delight or whatever—and then fulfill or upend that narrative is an entirely separate thing from feeling it yourself. Both sensuality and humor tip far too easily into the realm of cringe, because it takes actually quite a lot of skill, self-awareness, and commitment to walk that fine line in performance between reducing your audience into a puddle of quivery feelings or causing your audience to curl up in secondhand embarrassment.
These are the thoughts I have about how people approach a very basic piece that I still like very much. For what it’s worth, I think Peltokoski and Mejias at the Hollywood Bowl nailed the vibe, which was “two people obviously having a lot of fun letting it rip on a banger piece.” That is always a very good vibe!!!
For a cringe-free palate cleanser, here’s Yo-Yo Ma performing Libertango. (You can also stream it.)
Coming soon
I was back in the recording studio to record the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel G Minor sonata—the original version that the concerto I played in June was based on.
Each time I return to the studio, I get a little better at this strange process. (The irony is not lost on me that while I’m still learning to be comfortable with the recording process, more people know my playing from listening to my recordings than hearing me play live.) Glenn Gould thought of recording as being a purer, more honest form of music-making than performance—while I see his argument, I feel the exact opposite way. The heat and uncertainty of live playing, of drawing on the audience’s energy, toying with their expectations in real time, the inevitable imperfections, the ecstatic moments of brilliance that disappear immediately, never to be experienced by anyone again—that’s real to me, far more real than generating repetitions in a small empty room.
Violin goodness
I was stoked to see the other day that the LA Phil has released a recording of Arturo Márquez’ violin concerto Fandango, which I heard premiered in 2021 by Anne Akiko Meyers with Dudamel conducting. It was an electrifying piece to hear live and it happily translates very well to the recorded medium.
There isn’t, afaik, video of the whole thing, but Meyers did perform the final movement at the Hollywood Bowl last year and you can watch it to get a little sense of what it was like to see live:
I’ve just been listening to the whole piece over and over again; it’s one of those pieces that is just so appealing and fun. The harmonic structure of the first movement’s main theme is also so reminiscent to me of the Piazzolla tangoes and, well, we all know how I feel about those.
I also really love hearing/watching a violinist just go absolute ham; it’s why I’ve always loved the everloving crap out of Pablo Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, played here by Itzhak Perlman:
It’s clearly an unbelievably fun piece to play (especially the bit that starts around 7:50)—that’s the thing about technically demanding virtuosic works: if you’ve got the chops, playing them is some of the most goddamn fun you will ever have in your life, 10/10 would recommend. (Like, when I played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, I opted for the harder version, partly so I could say I did, but also because the harder it is to play, the funner it is. It’s science.)
I do get a little FOMO about the fact that I have never been and likely never will be good enough on violin to saw it up on Zigeunerweisen (those left hand pizzicatos, man!), so I guess I’ll just have to suck it up and accept that I will only ever know what “fingers go brr” feels like on the piano. (Oh, woe is me.) 🎹