January thoughts
Sharon's Monthly Roundup
Happy 2023 and welcome to the first monthly post of the year! As a reminder, the monthly posts for free subscribers are composed of snippets from the weekly posts for paying readers.
Some news
from the January 13 newsletter
After two months of Secret Behind the Scenes Workings, I can finally announce that I am a 2023 Fellow with Turn the Spotlight!
I am still flummoxed to find myself named as one of seven “creators and change-makers” in classical music; as part of this year’s fellowship, I’ll be working on a large-scale project with the help of my mentor, the wonderful Kathleen Kelly.
Full disclosure that I actually have no idea what my project will be yet—I’m kind of hoping that some marvelous idea will just hit me out of the blue one day. The year is still young, right?
Mahler thoughts
from the January 20 newsletter
I don’t love Mahler. I have tried, multiple times, to fall in love with Mahler the way so many people do so easily, but it is very hard for me to love a man who stuffs approximately three full-length concert programs’ worth of material into a single symphony as if a symphony were a vacuum-sealed space saver bag. I realize this is very rich coming from a person whose writing tendencies fall squarely in the category of “whatever the opposite of ‘concise’ is,” but I must speak my truth!
I don’t loathe Mahler the way I loathe Wagner (both the man and the music). I don’t even dislike Mahler the way I dislike Bruckner, nor do I care to make fun of Mahler the way I will endlessly dunk on Berlioz.
That being said, Mahler symphonies are simply not my jam. The amount of Mahler (approximately the first 30 seconds of the 5th Symphony) in Tár was the perfect amount of Mahler for me. If the human manifestation of a Mahler symphony were to approach me at a party, I would make no eye contact with him and scramble out of there like a spooked fawn before he could launch into conversation.
So when I got tickets to hear MTT (Michael Tilson Thomas) conducting Mahler’s 9th with the LA Phil, I was 1000% going for MTT. Both because of the long-standing parasocial relationship I have nursed with MTT—who is, after all, the foremost living Mahler interpreter—and because I am painfully aware that there are not many more opportunities to hear him. At this point, I would buy tickets to hear MTT conduct anything: Wagner, Berlioz, a handbell choir of toddlers.
Saturday’s concert had me totally enthralled; it was absolutely the most I have ever enjoyed Mahler. My seat was in the very front row of the section right below the stage, meaning that 1) I felt very at home as someone who used to play in orchestras and 2) I got to look directly at MTT and see every gesture and expression he made.
(If you are new to symphony-going or prone to boredom, I absolutely recommend sitting in the side or back-of-stage sections, because orchestral pieces are infinitely more exciting when you can see the mechanics of what is going on in the ensemble.)
Much has been made in concert reviews about the bittersweet poeticness of a conductor hyper-conscious about his mortality performing a symphony about the very subject, but the overwhelming sense I got from the performance was one of bliss. MTT just looked so joyful basking in the sound, conversing with soloists and sections with a flutter of his fingers. I’m so used to seeing conductors muscle through big symphonies with thrilling displays of tight control and determination, and it was so, so striking how MTT didn’t seem to fight anything (the music, the ensemble) so much as he was just…gracefully directing the flow. It was masterful.
I also appreciated very much how structurally MTT conducted; a lot of the time when I hear Mahler there are so many moments where I go “Oh that was a nice movement, here’s the end…oh, nope, it’s still going, oh god, how much more of this is there??” multiple times within a single movement. In this performance, he made the larger arc more clear, so there was no question when a section was (or wasn’t) ending, and he used tempo changes to give a jolt of energy to the proceedings without making it jarring. (It’s also something Yo-Yo Ma does really well; when I heard him play all the Bach cello suites at the Hollywood Bowl in 2021, he was so good at making audience aware of the structure and at making endpoints extremely clear. It’s an underrated but extremely critical element of performance.)
I love when my opinions are correct
from the January 13 newsletter
Last year I wrote about the full-body shock that Xian Zhang delivered, to me personally, when I saw her conduct Beethoven’s 7th with the LA Phil:
Last season at the LA Phil I found myself at a concert conducted by Xian Zhang, and the last piece on the program was my least favorite Beethoven symphony: the 7th. (This, I know, is sacrilege to many people.) I resigned myself to making it through, dreading the clichéd second movement. To my utter shock, Zhang’s performance of the symphony was one of my favorite things I heard all season and it just blew my mind: it all felt so incredibly fresh and vibrant and full of life. I honestly couldn’t believe what she’d done.
I am very comfortable thinking and feeling the things I think and feel. I was fully okay with being the only person in the world to think that Zhang’s performance of Beethoven 7 was utter black magic.
Then, I read this piece in The New Yorker by THEE Alex Ross:
Diminutive but dynamic, Zhang is an immaculate podium technician who incites playing of uncommon vitality. Last season, at the L.A. Phil, she facilitated the most flat-out electrifying account of Beethoven’s Seventh I’ve ever heard.
HELLO THE SOUND YOU ARE HEARING IS ME FIST-PUMPING SO HARD I JUST BROKE THE SOUND BARRIER BECAUSE ALEX ROSS AGREES WITH ME.
I AM, ALWAYS HAVE BEEN, AND ALWAYS WILL BE EXTREMELY CORRECT IN MY OPINIONS, BECAUSE OPINIONS ARE FAMOUSLY THINGS THAT CAN BE OBJECTIVELY CORRECT.
I hate slow songs but I love 6/8 time
from the January 20 newsletter
Help, I am obsessed with the new Måneskin album, Rush! Broadly speaking, it’s a no-skip album for me, and the songs (a very generous 17!) shake out into three distinct categories: bangers, slow jams, and weird ones.
The bangers: It is ridiculous how many of them there are here—just one after the other. My favorite bangers at the moment: “GOSSIP,” “BABY SAID,” “GASOLINE” (that chunk-chunk-chunk of the bass is electrifying), “READ YOUR DIARY,” “MARK CHAPMAN,” and “LA FINE.”
The slow jams: Where I’m shocked is that there are three ballads/slow jams—“TIMEZONE,” “IF NOT FOR YOU,” and “THE LONELIEST”—four if you count “IL DONO DELLA VITA,” and I don’t hate any of them!
I am, regrettably, a slow song hater. This is a prejudice that spans genres. Many slow movements of classical works do nothing for me. I have learned to tolerate the slow love songs in Disney movies. The slow tearful heartbroken ballads about love and loneliness that permeate pop music leave me feeling cold-hearted and bored. Many an album in my iTunes library has the slow tracks deleted. If I like a slow movement, piece, or song, that means it must be truly extraordinary…or just be in 6/8 time.
Because yes, of the three (or four) slow jams on this album, two of them are in 6/8! Both “TIMEZONE” and “IF NOT FOR YOU” utilize this meter to great effect—they’re like sexy lullabies.
I love 6/8 time—putting slow music in 6/8 is an instant hack to giving it a lilting propulsion that makes it 3000% more listenable to me. It’s the killer combo of the swinging one-two big beat, but with the inner movements of one-two-three, which usually manifest in a very compelling up-down or forward motion. (Other notable pop songs in 6/8: “King of the Clouds” by Panic! at the Disco, “Jerome” by Lizzo—I’m sure there are more but I don’t feel like going on a 6/8 hunting expedition right now.) I’m glad someone’s reading my tweets.
The weird ones: Ah, the best category. There are two absolutely weird songs on this album, and I am living for them.
The first time “BLA BLA BLA” started my face was like this:
Then I was like “…I like this??”
“BLA BLA BLA” is barely a song. There are no traditional verses or choruses; it’s basically Damiano David just talking in a repetitive monotone over a repetitive motif. What makes it compelling (other than the band sounding like they are just having so much fun) is that the band’s treatment of the motif changes every time it repeats. Then it hit me.
“BLA BLA BLA” is just the rock version of Ravel’s Boléro.
In a similar vein, “KOOL KIDS” is another “wtf” track (and imho isn’t nearly as compelling as “BLA BLA BLA”) that reminds me of two things: the megaphone monologue in Green Day’s “Holiday,” and John Mulaney’s Mick Jagger impression.
This song is clearly Måneskin taking the piss out of the UK and British rockers, right? Right??
Old Enough!
from the January 20 newsletter
THERE IS A SECOND SEASON OF OLD ENOUGH! ON NETFLIX. DROP WHATEVER ADULT NONSENSE YOU ARE WATCHING AND GO ENJOY THIS SUPERIOR SHOW.
If you missed last year’s Old Enough! craze, this is the gist: camerapeople follow Japanese toddlers being sent on errands. That’s the show, and it’s amazing. SNL also did an incredible parody of it:
The first several episodes of Netflix’s Season 2 have the producers following up with the original errand-goers years later; in one episode, you watch a pair of siblings going on an errand, and then two decades later they go back to send the older sibling’s child on an errand of their own!! It’s FANTASTIC. I am so mad there are only ten episodes. (Also, ngl, I now pretend I am a little toddler when I run errands myself now. I’m just missing the disguised camera crew running around me holding toolboxes.)