March 31, 2023

Just March Things

Sharon's Monthly Roundup

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Happy almost-end-of-March! As a reminder, these monthly posts for free subscribers are composed of selected/abridged snippets from the weekly posts for paying readers; this month’s posts were:

• March 3: “Stuff I did and more Brahms thoughts”

• March 17: “Chicago recap, Everything Everywhere, and studying abroad”

• March 24: “Mel Bonis, reading about food, and an interview gone awry”

• March 31: “Fall Out Boy mondegreens, Beethoven, and a Succession soundtrack theory”

A reminder that, if you are considering switching to a paid subscription, income from this newsletter is what funds my recording efforts; there is, of course, no pressure to do so, and I’m just happy you’re here!

Chicago (the city, not the musical)

I returned this week from Chicago, where Turn the Spotlight hosted its first (and hopefully not last—ahem, ahem) meetup of this year’s fellows. Here I am, second from the left, doing the sorority squat:

It’s always incredibly futile trying to describe a great meetup or social interaction—any deep conversation inevitably comes off as inane or cheesy the moment you try to summarize it for someone else—so I’ll just say that this is such a great group of people and I remain mildly flabbergasted that I get to be one of their number. It felt so special to meet and talk with so many people doing really cool, trailblazing work in the arts, and to discover how much we have in common. One of the Spotlight mentors who interviewed me said “The world of classical music is small, but it’s also very lonely” (absolutely correct!) and finding connection with so many other driven, passionate people encountering the same issues does a lot to mitigate that loneliness.

Unrelated, it was absolutely wild that, on my first ever visit to Chicago, I landed the day they dyed the river green and the city was out in full force to celebrate an early St. Patrick’s Day.

I was absolutely not prepared for the madness that is St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. I was woken up by the sound of crowds cheering outside and as my (very frustrated) Uber driver crawled slowly through hordes of green-festooned revelers, I kept gawking at the sight of people cheerfully standing atop barriers, cars and buses covered in green streamers and balloons, and the general type of merriment that you don’t expect to see while snow is falling. (Because yes, it was so cold in Chicago that it was snowing, and my soft Californian self did not know how to handle it.)

Other things I did

1. After obsessively rereading and rewriting and penning extremely long emails to one of my very patient mentors, I finally turned in a first polished draft of the book chapter to my editor. I have no idea what the feedback or edits will entail, but man did it feel good to get to that first finish line.

2. I booked two sessions—one this spring, and one in late summer—in the recording studio, so my pandemic-induced recording hiatus will soon come to an end! I’ll be recording music by Florence Price, Maria Szymanowska, and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.

3. I finally got around to posting my 2022 reading log on my personal blog. As you all know I read a fair amount and do a little write-up of some of the books I recommend here, but obviously not all the books I read make it into this newsletter. I also included, this year, a little FAQ because people tend to ask me the same questions about reading.

On mondegreens and stardust, and Beethoven somehow

The new Fall Out Boy album, So Much (For) Stardust, dropped last week, and I had a good time going through it a couple of times while waiting for Apple Music Classical to come out.

First of all, Fall Out Boy songs never fail to deliver on delightful mondegreens—I’ve previously mentioned how to me, “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race” has always been about an educated Lysol weevil.

My favorite mondegreen from the new album is one in “I Am My Own Muse.” The actual lyrics in the chorus are:

Smash all the guitars
'Til we see all the stars
Oh, got to throw this year away, we got to throw this year away like
A bad luck charm

However, someone pointed out to me that this is what they hear:

Smash all the guitars
'Til we see all the stars
Oh, got to throw this year away, we got to throw this year away like
Bad luck, Sean

And now I can’t unhear it:

This is a mondegreen that makes the song so much more delightful. It transforms the track into a story where someone from Fall Out Boy is talking about their year to their friend Sean. Massive improvement.

I also have no idea what is happening in “Flu Game” but the bit starting at 0:44 below made me go, “Did Fall Out Boy scoop up one of Panic! at the Disco’s songs on the way out?”

The bit that goes “I've got all this love I've got to keep to myself / All this effort to make it look effortless” just straight up sounds like a Panic! hook. There are multiple songs it reminds me of, but vibe-wise it has whiffs of Panic!’s “Crazy = Genius”:

My standout favorite from the album, though, is the eponymous track, “So Much (For) Stardust). It’s mostly because the song is melodramatic and suffused with despair and sounds exactly like something I would have rocked out to in high school (and whose lyrics I would have put in my AIM profile). It’s also partially because of the way the chorus repeats “thought we had it all, thought we had it all” (see: suffused with despair) over what I’m pretty sure is a Major III chord and I am a sucker for III chords in minor key pop songs.

The thing that gets me the most, though, is a thing that I love whenever it happens both in classical multi-movement works and in pop music, and that’s reference to previous thematic material. I love a recycled theme, a lil “Hey, remember when we did this?” (The first example that comes to mind is how in the fourth movement of her G Minor Piano Sonata, Clara Schumann takes a little transitional passage from the first movement and takes it somewhere else entirely. Absolutely delightful to hear, a nightmare to play because I always worry I’ll brain-fart back into the first movement.)

In the very first song on the album, “Love from the Other Side,” there’s a bit you can hear (starting at 0:44, embedded below) that goes “You were the sunshine of my lifetime / What would you trade the pain for?” (at 1:54, a lil variation happens where “What did you trade the pain for?” is followed by “I’m not sure”).

In “So Much (For) Stardust,” the last track (in my classical-focused mind, the last movement to “Love From the Other Side”’s first), Fall Out Boy quotes that bit from the first track when, at 2:56 (embedded below), they sing “In another life, you were the sunshine of my lifetime / What would you trade the pain for? I'm not sure.”

I love a self-reference, a lil quote, some cheeky recycled material. I LOVE it. And prefacing the line with “In another life” before harkening back to that first song? Creating a deeper meaning to the question “What did you trade the pain for?”?? LOVE IT. God, I can’t believe I’m nerding out over a Fall Out Boy album.

Finally, I have to applaud Fall Out Boy for making it clear that when they say “Moonlight Sonata,” they are specifically referring to the first movement. What we need more of in pop culture is people acknowledging that there are multiple movements to the sonata misleadingly (imho) and retroactively nicknamed “Moonlight.”

Now that I’ve gotten myself on the topic of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 27 No. 2 (I hate calling it the “Moonlight Sonata”! I’m sorry!) I cannot leave without mentioning this amazing bit by Rowan Atkinson, aka Mr. Bean, in which he air-performs the third movement. (I’ve embedded the bit starting at 2:07 below, but if you want to watch the whole thing, in which he starts with the slow movement of the Pathetique, here’s the link.)

Obviously this is hilarious, an example of utterly impeccable comic pacing, but it also strikes me as being so accurate. I don’t mean in what his hands and fingers are doing, which, yes, is shockingly correct, but in that when I watch this video, I think, “My god, he did it, he actually depicted how it FEELS on the inside playing this stuff!!!”

I am always so astounded watching videos of myself playing, or even watching other pianists, because even when we’re flailing around we have a sense of visible poise that absolutely does not show what is actually happening internally which is…this. My inner monologue in performance exactly resembles Mr. Bean doing a comedic bit.

Young 20-somethings should not post their study abroad experiences on the internet, unless they’re me

My timeline had a field day with this objectively awful woe-is-me piece by an NYU student about her “awful” study abroad experience in Florence. I fully believe that the Business Insider editors should never have published this, as it is very clear from the start that this was intended to be a hate-read and they made the deliberate decision to sacrifice this poor girl on the altar of online engagement.

This piece also made me think, “Gosh, you really should not be allowed to post anything on the main internet until your mid-20s at least” before I remembered that I blogged my entire study-abroad summer semester in Austria, and that all my posts are still up online.

I frantically raced to my posts to see what awful self-pitying things I wrote, and was faced with the realization that, oh my god, young me was adorable.

I wrote ecstatically, for example, about how small Austrian trash cans were:

The trash receptacles here are TINY. The trash compartments in my host mom’s kitchen are the size of what Americans consider desktop or counter-sized trash cans. The first time I saw a dumpster here I stopped and stared because it was so cute. You know how American dumpsters are so huge that people make swimming pools out of them? Austrian dumpsters are small enough that you can actually look down on them. Street trash cans, likewise, are tiny. My first day in the city I had a wad of tissues wedged in my pocket because I couldn’t find a single trash can, until someone pointed out that the trash cans were these little barely-two-gallon-sized cans tied to traffic poles. Despite the trash cans and dumpsters being small, they are never full. My conclusion is that Americans just produce way too much garbage.

I wrote about anxiously ordering at an Austrian McDonald’s and being stymied at what gender a Big Mac is:

So I went in, stood in a line, and anxiously tried to figure out how to order in German. Of course I could have gone up, done my requisite “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” and ordered in English, but for goodness sakes, I am taking German here. I just had my German midterm. If I couldn’t order at McDonald’s in German, then I would be a failure of a human being.

I ordered a Big Mac because what else is more representative of McDonald’s? I wasn’t sure whether to say “ein Big Mac” (masculine) or “eine Big Mac” (feminine) and decided on “ein” because Big Macs just seem masculine to me.

My present-day self lost it at my past self being utterly confused by being given a glass of water along with a cup of coffee:

My coffee arrived very quickly, on a silver tray with a small glass of water and two pretty packets of sugar. I could only assume the water was for drinking…? I hope there isn’t any cultural practice I’m missing out on in which you use the water to wash your spoon, or baptize the nearest infant, or something. In any case, I drank it.

I also laughed so hard I almost cried at how poor Young Sharon could not even figure out how doors worked:

It was a day of hilarious mishaps, related to my inability to navigate a world that isn’t filled with signs in a language I can read. At McDonald’s I opened the door to a private office because I thought it was the bathroom, and I walked into an unyielding board because I thought it was a door. At H&M I got stuck on the men’s floor because I couldn’t find the exit, and in my attempt to get out got myself stuck on the children’s floor. Then I got stuck on the men’s floor again. After I finally asked for help I almost opened an alarm-rigged emergency exit.

I fully believe that insufferable young Americans should not publish their study abroad experiences, unless they’re me, because I’m delightful. 🎹