Food, reading, and music (what else do you need)
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
If you were wondering if there was supposed to be a post last week: yes, there was, and I started it, and then I got really tired and could not bring myself to do anything resembling work or responsibilities.
Last week I started off my unpublished post with this:
How many weeks does it take to recover from a performance? Because I’m on my second week out of Boston and am still in “don’t make me do anything” mode.
And then I realized this week that I’m not so much recovering from a single performance so much as I’m just in dire need of a break from a packed first half-year of overlapping deadlines. This is the first stretch of time this year that I haven’t had a recording session or performance right on the horizon (and said stretch isn’t actually that long—I have another recording session in August that I need to start preparing for).
Last week I also worked on another round of listening/feedback/proposed edits for the Szymanowska and Price works I recorded in May, which in theory sounds like a very straightforward task (listen to tracks, write notes, send email) but in practice involved several, uh, days of agonizing and procrastinating.
I don’t know quite what it is, but it hasn’t gotten easier over time: I hate listening back to recordings of myself, particularly when it’s something I’m preparing for public consumption. Everything sounds simultaneously fine and all wrong, and it becomes very tempting—after all that practice, after the mini-marathon of churning out takes, after all the prep and mental fortifying—to just scrap everything and call it all off.
Food, glorious food
If you follow me on Instagram you may have noticed that the amount of cooking content went up precipitously this week. It’s a potent combination of 1) me giving myself a break from frantic practicing and needing something else to pour obsessive care into and 2) me being shamelessly influenced by watching Season 2 of The Bear. (As of writing I have not finished the season, so no spoilers please!)
It’s legitimately very soothing to think about something other than music that I can be both exacting and improvisatory about, although the nice thing about music is that it doesn’t produce a sink full of dishes.
Firstly, a recommendation. I am, as many of you know, an avid tea connoisseur, but as the inexorable march of time forces my daily caffeine window to continue narrowing, I am always on the hunt for interesting non-caffeinated hot drinks that aren’t sad musty herbal teas.
A few months ago friends took me to Angler in San Francisco for a post-performance celebratory meal, and while many culinary delights abounded in the course of that dinner, one of my favorite mental souvenirs was actually the tea I had at the end. I frequently ask for herbal teas after big dinners, and have resigned myself to the fact that tea at restaurants, even nice ones, is usually an afterthought—many a time I have made do with a teabag and mug of indifferent hot water.
When I asked for a non-caffeinated tea, the server at Angler brought me a pot blooming with fresh mint, chamomile, and delight of delights! a few shavings of lemon peel, which made for a wonderfully herbaceous, fresh cup of won’t-keep-me-up warmth.
I was thrilled to find that the farmer’s market this week had fresh chamomile, so I have set out to perfect this herbal brew.
So far, notes: mint is very overpowering, so you want to go light on the mint and heavier on the chamomile. A lower water temperature (not quite boiling) makes for a sweeter blend of flavors, but if the temperature is too low it comes out just tasting like infused water. My next iteration will layer fresh chamomile with dried, to see if it adds any more depth of flavor. This is all very low-stakes, near-pointless thing to devote so much time and mental energy to, but I enjoy feeling like a fresh-faced foraging young witch.
I also this week, on an inspired whim, bought a bag of fresh caught prawns despite having never cooked a prawn in my life, and immediately started dreaming up things to do with said prawns despite, as I said, never having cooked a prawn in my life.
Turns out, prawns are very easy to cook, or maybe I’m just a cooking genius (tbh, wouldn’t mind the latter). I peeled and deveined them, let them slop around with oil, salt, and pepper for a while, then panfried them in butter, chopped garlic, and parsley for like, a minute tops. Tossed some fresh pasta and cherry tomatoes with the garlicky butter left in the pan, threw the prawns on top, and gosh I think I really am a cooking genius (she says, recreating a very common formula in both France and Italy). Served with a simple salad of fresh arugula, tomatoes, and mozzarella balls that also slopped around in oil, salt, and pepper, but crucially in a different bowl from the raw prawns.
The next day I did the exact same thing with the rest of the prawns, only this time I left them in their shells, and ugh, they came out so good. I think I’m a prawn person now.
Also, I am sorry for the objectively unappealing photo, but I went to Pop’s Bagels for the first time, notable because it was profiled in that New York Times article boldly stating that the best bagels are now in LA. (Suck it, New York!!!!!)
Look, I truly do love a New York lox bagel—my favorite being from Russ & Daughters with their caviar cream cheese, a spread I have yet to find in LA—but we’re really not missing out, because damn this was a good, good bagel.
Relevant to this bagel expedition was this article by Kate Kassin for Bon Appetit, in which one bagel shop breaks down the cost of a bagel sandwich. I have pretty much gotten myself accustomed to the fact that a bagel sandwich is never going to be a truly cheap meal, but it was still eye-opening to see just how little margin there actually is once you factor in labor and ingredients.
Stuff I Enjoyed Reading
Frank Lehman: How to Write Music for Rolling Boulders (New York Times)
The price of cinematic immersion, we have wrongly been trained, is a disregard for this great music on all but an unconscious level. So for film composers, the greatest challenge — and sometimes the greatest frustration — is to write dramatically apt and musically complex underscore for scenes in which the competition for our attention is at its fiercest.
I really truly enjoyed this multimedia interactive piece which you absolutely must read with the sound on (and, fyi, I had better luck with the interactive elements on my laptop than on my iPad). The article does a great job explaining the brilliance of John Williams’ film scoring in a way that’s easy for laypeople to understand. Also, I saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny last weekend, and it’s surprisingly good! It’s honestly way better than Temple of Doom (which, depending on your thoughts about that movie, may not be saying much).
For weeks, Rhode Island media has referred to “the Philadelphia trip,” a mysterious expedition during which terrible things happened.
I read this article a while ago but realized that I don’t think I ever shared it, so here you go. It’s a pretty boilerplate story of officials being awful, but the writing is unnecessarily delightful and made me laugh several times, and you absolutely cannot beat that kicker.
Rachel Pick: Strawberries Are Supposed to Be Small (The Stopgap)
There is something so visually appealing about the strawberry, between its zaftig shape, slatternly color, and frilly little hat. But all that sweet, shy charm hinges on the object itself being bite-sized enough that you could imagine the woodland creatures from the Redwall series carrying them overhead.
Zaftig! Slatternly! This little gem of a piece is 100% correct about strawberries, but more importantly, it makes me teeth-gnashingly furious that I will never wield the perfect adjective with such wit.
Stuff I’ve Been Listening To
I’ve been saturating myself in Janelle Monáe’s new album, The Age of Pleasure, which is such quintessential summer music.
“Champagne Shit” is an obvious favorite, and I also love the confident languidness of “Water Slide,” but I think “A Dry Red” is totally underrated—it somehow evokes the feeling of being in the shade by the water on a too-hot day with an array of condensation-covered drinks, evaluating everything from under the light-dappled brim of a giant hat.
On a totally different note, I tuned into KUSC this week during their “Modern Times” show and heard Joan Tower’s Concerto for Orchestra for the first time, and loved it. I am furious that I somehow cannot find a recording on streaming? The recording KUSC played was conducted by Marin Alsop, which I cannot seem to find, but here’s a version conducted by Leonard Slatkin:
I would love to hear this live—it seems like a damn fun piece that would have so much energy in a big hall.
I also recently was made aware of the fact that Sergei Prokofiev’s grandson, Gabriel, is also a composer, and one of the coolest works I think he’s done is his first Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra.
THIS IS SO COOL AND I LOVE IT SO MUCH. You can listen to the whole thing on streaming which I highly recommend because it’s just…so, so fun, and so virtuosic and exacting in a totally different way than what I’m used to. 🎹