Here, have a sonata
New recording out today, to celebrate the birthday of a real one
As the prophecy last newsletter foretold, today (November 14) is Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s 220th birthday, and my recording of her Sonata in G minor is out!
You can listen to the sonata (in four movements, released as an EP) on your favorite streaming service, be it Apple Music, Spotify, or something else. You can also buy it on iTunes!
For those of you who have been following along for a while, this is the recording I made in the studio way back in...September 2023. Don't ask me why it took over two years for this to see the light of day, that's just how it is sometimes.
As this is a piece I’ve lived with super deeply for several years, I have a lot of thoughts about this sonata. I can sense some of you tensing up getting ready for the avalanche of words I’m about to pour out in this newsletter about the inner workings of this sonata.
But fear not! I will not dump several thousands of words of type on you.
…Because I will instead point you to this video, where I chat with Molly of HenselPushers about this sonata and we both get delightfully (I think) nerdy. (You can also, if you’d like, put it on and listen to it podcast-style.)
If you’ve ever wanted to experience two rabid Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel fans waving their little freak flags, boy is this the video for you.
Thank you so much to Molly for speaking to me and giving me an opportunity and platform to talk about the sonata, movement by movement. The somewhat annoying thing about releasing studio recordings is that I don’t get to talk about the music and what I find cool and compelling about it, so getting to chat about a piece I’ve worked on, with someone who is even more familiar with the composer than I am, is an absolute dream.
Also, I contributed to the new critical edition of the sonata published by HenselPushers, so if you want to peruse a score that makes, imho, a tad more sense than the (not terrible!) score published elsewhere, you can buy it here.
And as always, thank you to everyone who voluntarily pays for this newsletter, which is how my recordings get funded. You did this! (I mean, I also did it, but you did it too.)
Great reads
Jennifer Zhan: "EJAE's Glad Her KPop Demon Hunters Fame Came In Her 30s" (Vulture)
Along with the rest of the world I was overcome with KPop Demon Hunters madness—I know that when my listening recap for the year comes out, the album is going to be up there. I idly started reading this interview with EJAE, who provides Rumi's singing voice, and was floored by how self-aware and grounded she is and how well she articulates certain aspects of being an artist.
Like, she gets it:
Girl, if my fame came in my 20s, I don’t know who I would be right now. In my 20s, I had time to be a person and have relationships and learn and kill my ego. It was truly an ego-death period. Because of that and also my experience in the K-pop world on the other side, I was able to see fame in a different way. Now that it has somewhat come to me, I feel like I know how to deal with it. It might look shiny, but it’s sharp as hell, you know? You’ve gotta be careful with it.
She really gets it:
The difference between performing live and recording is so … it’s literally a different muscle. I wish people were a little more soft about that.
EJAE, let's be friends!
Peter McAllister: "Interview with Mick Herron" (Inkfish Magazine)
I've also been deep in Slow Horses obsession; Season 5's episodes couldn't come fast enough for me and it got so bad I had to get my fix by rereading London Rules, the book that Season 5 is based on, and ancillary content like the Slough House novellas and interviews with anyone who had anything to do with the franchise.
I was very soothed to read that Mick Herron, the author of the Slough House books, is Just Like Me:
When I’m writing, I go all over the emotional graph, from thinking, ‘this is the best thing I’ve ever done,’ to ‘this is awful. I can’t rescue this.’ And that can happen overnight, without my having even looked at the book in the meantime. At the point of submitting a book to my publisher, I generally think it’s awful, and it takes about a year before I can think of it with anything other than a shudder. And I need to be working on the next thing. That’s when I can look back with a more balanced view.
Sarah Jeong: "American politics has devolved into shitposting and aura farming" (The Verge)
Politics in the second Trump era can be mostly defined as people Posting adversarially in public. The politics that get covered in the media are mostly aura farmers fighting other aura farmers — people posturing at each other in an accelerating arms race that inevitably justifies violence. Punching Nazis is aura farming. Military parades are aura farming. Sending in the National Guard is the penultimate exercise in aura farming.
The aura farmers have tremendous sway over the populace — that is, over normal people acting normal. But they are by nature very vulnerable to shitposters. Meanwhile, shitposting has little efficacy when deployed against normal people behaving normally.
No joke, this might be the best analysis of what is happening in American politics that anyone has written. Thank goodness for writers who are Fluent in Internet.
This genteelly blistering obituary is proof that you should live your life in such a way that people don't write about you like this (and also that you shouldn't take full credit for work done by someone else, and also maybe don't be racist). It's also crafted so masterfully to have the energy of a tragic novel skewering the myth of the great man, compacted into obituary form.
Perhaps in reaction to Watson’s sky-high self-regard, in his later years his peers and others began to ask if his discovery of the double helix was just a matter of luck. After all, as a second lab colleague said, “Jim has been gliding on that one day in 1953 for 70 years.”
[...]
The legendary biologist E.O. Wilson, who was on the losing end of Watson’s putsch, called him “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,” one who treated eminent professors “with a revolutionary’s fervent disrespect. … Watson radiated contempt in all directions.” But in a lesson Watson apparently over-learned, “his bad manners were tolerated because of the greatness of the discovery he had made.”
Oof.
First of all, this article gets major points for citing Ed Yong's An Immense World, a book I really loved and highly recommend.
Second of all, this read is so humbling in how it reminds us of how narrow our species' understanding of the world is, and how science helps crack the window a little wider for us to broaden our understanding. It's also a great reminder that empathy is not a weakness, and in fact is a logical byproduct of rational thought and technical knowledge.
Humans’ inability, or refusal, to imagine other species’ experiences has led to suffering in ways most people barely register. Whales, the paper explains, are no exception.
[...]
In that world, human noise isn’t an irritant—it’s a form of violence. The constant roar of ship engines and seismic blasts from military sonar, deep sea mining and fossil fuel operations inflict agony. Chronic exposure disorients whales, drives them from feeding grounds and floods their bodies with stress hormones. At higher intensities, the noise can cause internal bleeding and permanent hearing loss.
[...]
History shows that when science deepens our understanding of other beings’ inner lives, society’s laws eventually follow.
theitinerantnaturalist: "The Ocean Sunfish: Why The Rant Is Wrong" (imgur)
Do you want to read a furious counter-rant by someone who knows a lot about the ocean sunfish and wants you to appreciate what evolution hath wrought?* Of course you do.
There are several hilarious anecdotes from the Monterey Bay Aquarium regarding the fast growth rate of these fish. This aquarium captures small sunfish that become trapped in Monterey Bay by cold water, displays them in its Open Ocean exhibit, and releases them when warmer water temperatures return (with a tag to track its migrations and to make sure it survives after release). They have been doing this since 1996. Currently one is on exhibit.
However, early attempts at displaying these fish didn't take the phenomenal growth rate into account. In August 1997, a young mola of 57 pounds in weight was collected and put on display, and in just 14 months it swelled to a monstrous 880 pounds on the diet of fish, squid and gelatine fed to it. The Open Ocean tank has a mechanism to coax the fish into a holding pen where it can be loaded onto a transport tank and released, but this fish was so huge it couldn't fit in the transport tank. As a result, an airlift had to be called in to fly the fish over to Monterey Bay, where waiting divers released it.
*One small correction to the linked post: it states that adult sunfish are 600 million times bigger than their size as fry; that is likely a mistype as the number is actually 60 million, which is still mind-bogglingly impressive.
Listening on repeat
It's probably not the wisest thing to recommend someone else's music in a newsletter where the main point is to convince people to listen to MY music, but I'm not great at self-promotion and I like to think that's part of my charm.
After my listening fever broke on the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, I needed something else for my ears to chew on, and then The Last Dinner Party dropped their new album, From the Pyre, and I was hooked.
As with their previous outing, I catch some ABBA vibes off The Last Dinner Party, but there's so much else going on (complimentary). I have moments where I go "is that some Fleetwood Mac energy?" or "that's kind of Florence & The Machine-ish!" all the way to "I see the girlies have been listening to Chappell Roan."
There's a dramatic-yet-cozy moodiness through the whole album that feels weirdly perfect for this time of year; this isn't quite the music for warm weather and endless sunshine, but is exactly what you need on gray days with early-falling darkness.
It's a no-skips album for me, and one where it's really hard to pick favorites. I love the wry drive of "Second Best" and the slow build of "Woman Is a Tree." And every time "The Scythe" starts, I have to pause what I'm doing to just feel it; "Make it quick so I can't see the scythe in its sheath / Don't cry, we're bound together / Each life runs its course / I'll see you in the next one / Next time, I know you'll call," they sing, and I feel a curious welling within myself that I don't often get from non-classical music.
You should listen to it, but only after listening to my music, obviously. 🎹