February 16, 2024

Life is edits and my latest article is live!

Today's post is short and sweet because I am in the middle of a bunch of Busy Life Things right now so I have maybe 15 minutes of downtime to provide a quick update.

Life is edits. At least, that's how it's felt for the past few weeks: I've been listening to the latest round of edited tracks from my last recording session and writing out new edit requests; This American Life has been in touch every couple of days with follow-up questions, fact-checks, and informational requests, with little updates on how the editing process is going ("We've made another pass and the producer said this!"); on top of all this I was going back and forth with my editor at VAN Magazine on edits to my latest article.

Being in the middle of so many editing processes made me feel like a lump of unrefined material: sure there's potential there, but it needs so much polish. I feel so self conscious knowing that my recording engineer in LA is working with some 3-odd hours of material I recorded for an under-20 minute work, that I laid down 5 hours of tape for This American Life for someone in NYC to edit into a single episode, that my editor in Berlin had to wade through almost 8000 words I put together for an article that was supposed to be 1800 words. Why is it that I produce such large quantities of roughness, and how can it be that so many people around the world have to be tasked with making me fit for public consumption?

I know that all the polished material out there—books, articles, podcasts, TV shows, movies, etc.—is the result of many many people doing a lot of editing, but it's very weird to see how the sausage is made and to realize how not-effortless all of it is.

Do you want to see just how much editing my VAN editor had to do? Here's what one page looked like when I got the first pass of edits back from him:

Here's another big section where a long ramble—akin to the type of thing I write in this very newsletter all the time—was mercifully dispatched in favor of what I have to admit was the only paragraph that really mattered:

Editors around the world, on behalf of all us artists who vomit out large quantities of words and notes, I salute you.

Anyway! Speaking of the article, IT'S UP.

I'm pleased (and very relieved) that "The Price is Wrong" (my editor came up with that, not me) has so far gotten a lot of amazing feedback. I'm floored that so many people read it—including friends who aren't even in music, much less know anything about music publishers or marginalized composers.

The lending library I mentioned in the article reached out to VAN with a note saying they felt validated that I recognized the painstaking work that editors, scholars, and librarians do to make workable music for performers, and so many people I look up to in classical music have said really nice things about my writing. The issues I wrote about are complex and multifaceted and tend to ensnare a lot of disparate segments of the classical music industry, and it was a privilege to provide my own angle as a performer.

That's it for now—have a great week, everyone!