Career advice, my worst audition, and leaving Substack
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
Happy new year! I am absolutely not ready for 2024 given that mentally part of me is still stuck in 2020, but I’ve more or less resigned myself to the fact that I will forever be surprised at the progression of time.
Quick fyi that I’m figuring out my plans for moving this newsletter from Substack to another platform—more on that at the end of today’s post.
By the time this post publishes, I will probably be asleep; I’m giving a talking-about-my-career seminar virtually to the Royal College of Music in London on Friday morning, which is very exciting, but because of the time zone difference the seminar starts at 4 AM California time. I fully anticipate that on Friday I will get nothing done and require many, many naps.
The class I’m talking to is part of the Concerto Performance module, itself part of a larger course (I’m…not entirely sure how British conservatories work), and as I understand it the module this year is focusing on the role of writing in musicians’ careers. As the professor in charge explained the structure and philosophy of the module, I was struck at how it sought to address something I never fully learned in music school: that how well you play is actually one of the less consequential elements that informs your career.
By the time you’ve gotten to a certain level—and where that level starts is somewhat nebulous to me, which is why in moments of doubt I’m not even sure I am at that level, but that’s a separate thing—your ability to play well is a given. What’s more important is all the stuff that seems peripheral: what kinds of narratives you’re able to tell (about yourself, the music you play, etc.), how well you can capture people’s attentions, how effectively you can convince gatekeepers to give you a chance. On a more granular level it also comes down to how well you can keep yourself motivated, how well you manage your time and energy (especially if, as most musicians do, you have to wear a lot of hats), how well you can work with others and do things outside your comfort zone.
In music school I had the sort of naïve understanding that if I just kept toiling to get better and better, and played as much as possible, someone would come along and hand me a ready-to-go performing career. There was a time when this was, generally, how things worked; Helen Drees Ruttencutter’s book Pianist’s Progress documents exactly this.
(Fun fact—and that’s “fun” for you, not for me: I once auditioned for Robin McCabe, the pianist profiled in Ruttencutter’s book, and was so intimidated and star-struck that I completely flubbed my audition. I don’t mean that I just didn’t play as well or hit a couple of wrong notes; I mean that after I told her how inspiring she was to me, showing her my personal copy of the book, she lobbed me a softball by asking me to play a pretty easy movement, and I completely forgot everything about that movement on the spot. Like, I couldn’t remember what key it was in or what the first notes were or how it was supposed to go, and I played in a way that suggested that I had never actually learned it. The audition committee was politely silent, and at the end McCabe graciously signed my book, both of us knowing that I hadn’t made it and that we’d likely never meet again.)
Anyway. What I’ve learned in the intervening years is that there are many ways to a performing career, and what I plan on telling a hall of students is that for me, writing provided one of those paths. While I personally identify performance as coming first and writing coming second for me, the fact is that a lot of people—almost all of you reading this newsletter, in fact—knew me for my writing first, whether it was the blog I first started to document my life in college, my Twitter threads, the satirical profile I wrote for VAN Magazine, or the newsletter that started on Patreon and became whatever this is.
Because the hard truth is that there are a lot of pianists out there—like, a lot—with similar upbringings and educations and stylistic influences as me, and no amount of practicing or instruction will make me the best of them all (not that you can really objectively rank that kind of thing, anyway), so any attempt to distinguish myself solely on the merits of my playing is a fool’s errand. What I’m learning to recognize is that the writing I’ve been doing all along has been bound up in what I have to offer that maybe other pianists don’t. I don’t write for the sake of producing “content” (ugh), I write because I have very strong thoughts and feelings about things and I feel sometimes that I am going to burst if I don’t write them down, and in doing so I’ve gotten better and better at finding my voice.
We’ll see if I do an adequate job explaining that to a bunch of postgraduate students in the wee hours of the morning when my brain isn’t fully switched on.
Today I learned about Augusta Holmès
VAN Magazine published a piece by Julia Conrad about Augusta Holmès, a composer I hadn’t heard of until now, and I am very into this:
If you haven’t heard of Augusta Holmès, a French composer of Irish descent, her virility may in fact be why. As with all women composers of her era, Holmès’s music was evaluated more as a gender performance than a musical one. “The most surprising thing about her musical talent is its completely virile quality,” the poet Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam enthused. “Her music has a vigor, a virility, an enthusiasm, which deserve better than the banal praise usually bestowed on female composers,” added La Liberté. By 1900, however, Holmès’s fame, sexual freedom, and toned brass chorales began to work against her. “This music gives me the impression of being transvestite,” a Le Courrier Musical critic wrote that year. “Oh, Ladies, be mothers, be lovers, be virgins…but don’t try to be men. You will not succeed in replacing us, not entirely.” After her death, her music was rarely heard again.
But it was too late. The throbbingly virile works of Augusta Holmès had already proved that virility, like artistic merit, has no gender. “I have the soul of a man in the body of a woman,” Holmès once declared. Born in Versailles in 1847, the composer was raised in the company of her Irish military father’s mounted weapons, as if to prepare her for the battle of being a woman composer in Third Republic France. Primarily self-taught (women were barred from the Paris Conservatory), she was anointed by the infamously virile Wagner and Liszt, and lusted after by the less-virile-but-trying Saint-Saëns, Gounod, Massenet, Franck, D’Indy, and more. A composer of art songs as much as large-scale works, I don’t even need to tell you that she wrote her own texts.
This is a prime example of the hilariously sad Catch-22 that women composers of the 19th-20th centuries found themselves in; if they wrote music that was pretty, they were criticized for being too weak and feminine, but if they wrote music that was powerful, they were lambasted for trying too hard to be masculine.
Also, I latched onto this like a dog with a bone:
Holmès’s “Ode triomphale” is so virile that it has never been recorded. Scored for a 300-piece orchestra and 11 separate choirs, this magnum-sized opus premiered at the Paris World Exposition for the unsheathing of France’s largest phallic symbol, the Eiffel Tower.
A THREE HUNDRED PIECE ORCHESTRA! ELEVEN CHOIRS! This work is a jobs creator. I am furious that no one is mounting this piece; I must hear it.
History is like fossil fuels. You think, “There were only so many dinosaurs that existed, surely we’ve exhausted all the oil there is to be had,” and yet nations keep digging and oil keeps flowing. Every time I think I’ve encountered all the obscure polymaths, f*ckbois, and weirdos of music history, more just keep coming.
Anyway. How delightful, to learn about Augusta Holmès. I’m one of today’s lucky 10,000.
Moving out
As stated at the beginning of this newsletter, I’m looking into different newsletter platforms; my goal is to make the move as seamless as possible. (Those of you who stuck with me when I moved from Patreon: sorry to do this to you again.)
I’m planning to leave Substack for the same reason a lot of other people have/are; Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s co-founders, published a distressingly shrug-emoji “No, we won’t ban Nazis” response to Jonathan M. Katz’s Atlantic article about Nazi and white supremacist newsletters gaining traction on the platform as Substack evolves from a boilerplate newsletter service into a content recommendation network. When Casey Newton of Platformer gave Substack a rather generous chance to explain themselves better and do the bare minimum right thing (removing a small number of low-level publications explicitly calling for violence against certain groups of people), the way the Substack team mishandled the situation was not a good sign.
It’s not that I don’t want to be on the same platform as people whose political views I disagree with. (I spent years on Twitter, for gosh sakes.) It’s that Nazis and white supremacists are widely regarded by rational people to have crossed an ideological point of no return; once someone holds pro-Nazi views, no amount of public discourse will walk them back, and allowing these little communities to flourish establishes a radicalization pipeline that turns disgruntled-but-harmless folks into frothing advocates for violence.
It is for that reason that private companies—which Substack is—often draw a line between “distasteful political views that many people don’t agree with” and “belief systems that advocate that entire populations of people simply shouldn’t exist.” Substack claiming that they are incapable of drawing that line, when this problem is in its infancy on their platform, does not bode well for how they will make hard business decisions in the future. I have never seen a platform or company follow up “Sure, we’ll let white supremacists hang out here” with admirable decision making in other areas, and I don’t plan on waiting around long enough to see if Substack is going to be the exception.
To quote Newton’s post:
We didn’t ask Substack to solve racism. We asked it to give us an easy, low-drama place to do business, and to commit to not funding and accelerating the growth of hate movements. Ultimately we did not get either.
I’m currently leaning towards moving to Buttondown, but am open to entertaining other options. I’ll probably make the move around late January or early February, and will do my damnedest to do this in such a way that you don’t have to do any work whatsoever. Is this what I want to spend precious time and energy working on? Absolutely not, but c’est la vie. As I have learned many times over, having a music career requires doing many things other than playing music. 🎹