November 1, 2024

It's hard when things aren't hard

Or, why I'm now just confused all the time

Something has to be wrong with you in a very specific way to enjoy playing the piano. I realize this every time I talk to a non-pianist musician; they’ll gripe about the insane things you have to do with your brain and fingers at the keyboard to produce sounds that people will generally deem pleasant, and how much they hate it, and I’ll be like, oh crap, I’m not normal? Sometimes these gripes come with comments like “Look, I don’t have your talent,” and lately I’ve started wondering if my secret isn’t talent so much as it is…masochism.

For most of my piano playing life my teachers would assign me pieces slightly beyond me, which sometimes made me feel a little bit like one of Procrustes’ shorter victims being stretched. The thing is, I loved it, because apparently I am a perverse little freak. There’s something frankly addictive about taking on something that seems borderline impossible, pushing through the exquisite resistance, and bending it to your will so thoroughly that it not only becomes possible, it becomes play. The heady rush of power I get when this happens makes me feel like a freaking god.

And the road to that haha-I-am-a-god-fear-me-and-despair!!!!! feeling is a routine so well-worn it’s comforting: take your impossible piece of music, julienne it into tiny manageable slivers, drill it backwards and forwards with accents, rhythms, and all the other little tricks, slow to fast with the metronome, until it’s beaten so thoroughly into your brain and hands that you can no longer remember a reality in which you did not fully embody these notes.

One of my teachers called this process “woodshedding” and I always knew that if I was woodshedding, I was doing something right: passing through the gauntlet that would qualify me to turn these drills into actual music. I’d deflate and lose motivation any time I was given a piece that was well within my existing skillset, minimal woodshedding required, because I internalized early on that if I wasn’t feeling pain, I was wasting my time. This might explain why so many musicians have terrible love lives.

All the knowledge and experience I’ve built up in music is based on the reality that preparing music is an all-or-nothing slog. There are certain feelings I’ve gotten accustomed to, like signposts assuring me that I’m on the right track, and most of these feelings require an insurmountable hurdle. Sometimes it’s the mental taxation: when I’m slowly putting together a multi-voiced passage from memory, I feel like I’m defusing a bomb, concentrating so fully on holding all these delicate threads aloft without crossing them and exploding. (I don’t actually know how bombs work.) Often times it’s the daunting challenge of looking at a passage that demands this-is-not-what-hands-evolved-to-do feats that have to be broken down and then drilled for hours with military discipline. Every once in a while it’s something deceptively simple and charming—anything by Mozart, basically—where figuring out how to make it sound childlike but not stupid is enough to break my brain. I learned from years and years of lessons that if something seemed doable, it was because I was missing something glaringly obvious, so everything has to be really really hard for me to know things are going well.

In the last several years, I’ve increasingly encountered this utterly perplexing situation where I sightread a passage or start to rote-memorize it and…it’s already kind of there. A multi-voice situation is more or less fitted together, a melody already has a clear shape, a noodly filigree has already formed itself into my hand, all without the hours of drill work. I knew, rationally, this was bound to happen at some point—most classical music is largely just different combinations of the same patterns, and when you’re at it long enough these patterns become familiar and your hands have seen it all—and yet I am so confused every time this happens.

Me trying to figure out how it is I can mostly play a passage without having drilled it for weeks.

There have been several times the immediate possible-ness of a new-to-me piece has been so confounding that I’ve stared at the music, gotten up, and just walked away. Rationally, this is something you do when something is so difficult you don't know where to start; it doesn't seem like something you should do when something is way easier than you expected.

See, I thought I knew how to practice: basically, repeat the crap out of something, throw yourself at it again and again until it breaks, chisel away for hours and hours until a rough shape emerges. It’s unmooring and bewildering to find that I don’t always need scores of repetitions and exhausting variations to get to a baseline level of playing, and it makes me severely worried that I’m missing something obvious.

This is not to say that nothing is hard for me anymore and playing the piano is suddenly super easy. Every new challenge I encounter in practice is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I still have regular moments of doubt that this time I’ll be able to crack whatever problem I’m working on. But something happened somewhere along the way to make things gel faster than I’m used to, and I have to recalibrate how this all works for me.

I suppose that’s just life—you work hard to figure out how something works and assume that’s just how it works! only to discover that all that effort leveled you up to a new world where the rules are different. It’s very bittersweet and, honestly, existentially frightening to realize this has happened to you.

I always assumed that when I leveled up, I’d not only know it, it would feel good. There would be triumphant video game sounds, my little health bar would fill up, I’d march onto the next challenge full of confidence. So far none of that has happened; the only thing I’m full of is confusion.

Leggo my ego

This VAN Magazine piece by Hugh Morris about a bizarre composer scammer was a wild ride from start to finish, but I was not expecting the OOF of this paragraph which reared up out of nowhere to wallop me.

Composing is a tough vocation. When the work is quiet and inspiration has run dry, sometimes the only thing left keeping you in the room is ego: a belief, never entirely rationalizable, that what you’re doing matters. Egotism is a dirty word, that’s often deflected or delocalized—the belief that what you’re doing matters to someone, somewhere—but it’s an essential creative muscle, that can be massaged, strengthened and damaged, and that kicks in when it appears there’s nothing left to give.

(Fun) broken systems

I weirdly enjoyed this post on Ask a Manager in which people wrote in about the bizarre, overly complicated systems their places of work (or in some cases, one particularly stubborn colleague) made them adopt.

I work in museums. Another museum in our region had a staff member who kept all their crucial records – important not just for day-to-day work, but for the continuity of the entire institution – in a dead language that they were fluent in. It was a deliberate ploy to keep from ever being replaced.

One, brilliant. This seems like something Evie from The Mummy would do. Two, what dead language do we think this was?

Stuff I've been listening to

The other week Sam Bergman recommended French quintet Quatuor Ébène's album 'Round Midnight, and after giving it several listens I have no choice but to wholeheartedly cosign that recommendation.

I'm going to fully admit that after having to study Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht in school, it never occurred to me to ever listen to it again, much less for fun, and now I'm all "wait, Verklärte Nacht is awesome!!! Who knew???" (My professors knew, that's why they assigned it.)

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Damiano David, the lead singer of Måneskin, released this (solo) track, "Born With a Broken Heart," and I am extremely into it.

I am normally not a fan of the "one step up" modulation that pop songs do all the time, which just reads to me as lazy (sorry!!!), but every time I listen to this I get really excited for the slammin' chord on the piano kicking off said modulation, which initially hits the ear as a wrong-note dissonance. It's so great. More yikes-that's-wrong-oh-never-mind chords in pop songs, please!

Poster’s madness

Every time someone uses a note with 4+ ledger lines instead of an 8va/vb situation I think they should pay me. We can call it a “performer annoyance fee”

— 🎹sharon su 🎹 (@doodlyroses.bsky.social) October 11, 2024 at 3:12 PM

me to a note with 6 ledger lines

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— 🎹sharon su 🎹 (@doodlyroses.bsky.social) October 11, 2024 at 4:58 PM

Playing in the hall of the mountain king while you try to complete a delicate task

— Truckstop Vigilante (@brenthor.bsky.social) October 11, 2024 at 8:07 PM

How has no one made a sitcom about Liszt and Chopin

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— 🎹sharon su 🎹 (@doodlyroses.bsky.social) October 18, 2024 at 4:22 PM

Me, Reading Dylan Thomas: Yes, haha! Don't go gently into that good night! Rage! Fight! Me, Experiencing The Slightest Physical Discomfort: Alright, gotta go gentle mode. Time to gentle up, for sure. Good night not lookin' so bad, think imma lean into it.

— KAFUI 🇬🇭 (@mykafuiohkafui.bsky.social) February 26, 2024 at 7:56 AM

Say no to despair

I generally don’t go super-political on here, not because I’m afraid of “alienating my audience”—being a multicultural child of immigrants who is very vocal about expanding the classical canon to include non-male and non-white composers tends to automatically filter out the people who would be alienated by my whole deal—but because I generally don’t have much to add that is more insightful or helpful than what you’d find elsewhere.

That being said, if you’re in the US and next week’s election fills you with dread and you want to put that energy somewhere it might make a difference, here are several outlets for that (I am assuming you have already voted or plan on voting, because everyone who gets this newsletter is the best):

1. Sign up to canvas in battleground states.
2. Donate to fund canvassing efforts.
3. Participate in “curing” rejected ballots—this can be done from home and you can read more about vote curing here.

Blue skies, smiling at me

It seems there was another recent exodus from the-platform-previously-known-as-Twitter to Bluesky—my timeline has been full of newcomers going "Ohhhh, this is where stuff has been happening!" The community is still small compared to peak-era Twitter, but honestly the ship seems to have sailed on the bird site (Hugh Morris wrote a bit about that here).

I threw together a Bluesky "starter pack" with people you might know from Classical Music Twitter to get you going if you're just making the jump; please note that starter packs max out at 150 accounts so I'm not able to add more people to it at this point.

Also, my darling baby (my piano) was successfully moved this past week, so I started setting my practice space back up and remembered this person who changed my life:

If this was you, thank you!