Mel Bonis, reading about food, and an interview gone awry
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
At the Spotlight lunch in Chicago, I was seated next to Carlos Carrillo, who leaned over after I talked about playing the music of French Romantic women composers like Louise Farrenc and Cécile Chaminade, and said, “Have you heard of the composer Mel Bonis?”
I love when people do this, because the fact of the matter is that I started this micro-journey by Googling “women composers classical music” and it is very, very hard to look for something if you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for. All of my recent forays into new-to-me composers have come via word of mouth, essentially; I started with Clara Schumann on my own and from there people have popped up to offer me names and pieces I otherwise wouldn’t have known.
Last weekend I suddenly remembered Carlos’ suggestion, so I obligingly ambled over to Mel Bonis’ Wikipedia page to gather some basic information and did an actual double-take as I read the summary of her life. I got so amped up that I rushed over to Twitter to unload what I’d learned:
(If you are allergic to Twitter—and I don’t blame you—you can read the threadreader app version here.)
Usually when I start listening to a new-to-me composer, I start with their piano works, because duh, but in this case I started with Bonis’ Femmes de légende, a three-part work for orchestra, from the album Poétesses symphoniques from the Orchestre national de Metz. (Said album just came out in February, which felt very timely!)
I recommend putting Femmes de légende, as well as the whole album, on loud with a good speaker or solid pair of headphones, as it’s a work that’s all about texture and atmosphere. As soon as the first movement, “Le Songe de Cléopâtre,” started, I got that feeling you get when you’re in a good concert hall and the orchestra starts to play Debussy, Fauré, or Ravel: it’s that feeling of having suddenly stepped through a veil into a vibrating, magical realm, of feeling that shimmery frisson of delighted pleasure when you realize that you are gloriously, joyfully alive.
The second movement, “Ophélie,” might be my favorite of the bunch. I did laugh a little inside when I realized that this is another entrant in the “French music about Ophelia” category, given what one of my favorite professors once noted about the difference between how the Germans and the French approach Hamlet:
I’ve gotten so stuck on Femmes that I haven’t even listened to anything else by Mel Bonis, and the replies to my Twitter thread on her are chock full of suggested listening. I’m still sitting in gratitude that there’s a recent high-quality recording of an orchestral work by her, and I hope hope hope that not too long in the future I’ll be able to hear something by her live in a concert hall.
Publicity gone awry
I also tweeted yesterday about an “interview”—said with the heaviest of quotation marks—of me that went up yesterday that I frankly find to be a hilarious instance of content farm ineptitude.
Essentially, someone from an online “magazine” that features creatives and entrepreneurs reached out about interviewing me, I said yes, and then they told me that the interview was done via questionnaire, which meant that I was directed to a survey page where I was told to pick generic questions from a series of dropdown menus and write answers to them, basically interviewing myself, but in the least interesting way possible.
In one text box I was asked to introduce myself, and since part of the job description of being a classical musician includes having several ready-to-go bios of yourself, I dropped in links to my existing bios. I figured the “editor” who had been tasked with “interviewing” me would know what to do.
She did not.
![Screenshot of a bit of a published article. The question in bold reads "Sharon, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?" and my "answer" reads "I am a classical pianist and writer. Below are 1) the “short bio” from my website [https://www.sharonsu.com/press-kit/], and 2) the “about me” page from my Substack newsletter [https://doodlyroses.substack.com/about]."](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFr7-EDzagAA9ku1.jpg)
I also encountered a webpage issue in which I was unable to provide photos of myself for the “magazine.” The page kept erroring out each time I tried to upload a photo, so I wrote a little message in the image credits text box, and let the “editor” know:
She never responded, which is why this is now actually part of the article that published:
The absolute kicker to this comedy of errors is that despite clearly doing no reading, much less editing, as part of the process, the “editor” emailed me about how much she enjoyed “collaborating” with me “again” (?) and then asking if I wanted to GIVE HER MONEY:
To be absolutely clear here, I’m not against email or questionnaire-type interviews—I’ve done several interviews in this type of format and think that it’s a perfectly valid way of conducting things especially for small, time/funding-strapped publications or writers. However, in every other interview I’ve done in any format, the interviewer has made it clear that they cared about me as a person and shown pride and attention to the final product—in the limited experience I’ve had writing for VAN, I’ve seen how much care can and should go into making something ready for publication.
This experience was a really interesting look into the bleaker, less human end of the publishing industry, which I can totally see colliding with ChatGPT and other AI very, very soon. (While I am reasonably sure the “editor” I emailed with is actually a person, they oddly have no online presence, and with AI chatbots getting better at functional communication, I can’t completely rule out the possibility that I was just talking to a bot the entire time.)
Why do I read about food so much
I looked at all the open tabs of articles I wanted to share and realized they all had to do with food. How do you know if you think about food too much? Asking for a friend.
Article I: Salad 🥗
First of all, I was utterly, utterly delighted at this piece by Troy Johnson which contains 100% correct opinions about salad:
I am the only person in America who eats salad right. It’s a strange flex, I’ll admit. But I know it in my bones. I alone sit on this hill of reason.
[…]
Because when you try to stick a fork in my wife’s salad and this restaurant’s salad and every salad that’s ever been served in this unholy salad wasteland called America—what happens? A bunch of leafy things liberate themselves, go full Shawshank on the eating experience. It’s like that gag-gift can of snakes, just shooting its contents all over the table.
[…]
And in order to lightly coat your salad to perfection with the dressing, you need a BIG ASS VESSEL, one the greens can toss and turn in a bit.
So, really, the only sane vessel for a salad is a bowl that is three, four, even five times the size of the contents. It should look like lawn clippings in a moon crater.
I love salad. I actually identify as a Woman Laughing Alone With Salad. My husband has laughed at the number of times I have wistfully told him of happy dreams in which I skip through a large field of salad greens, scooping frisee up in my arms. I love a big heap of fresh crisp greens drizzled with vinegary dressing, but I dread having to gracefully eat salad at restaurants because of the aforementioned problems with salad vessels (and also! too-large, unchopped leaves). I am ready for the salad revolution.
Article II: Fast food mysteries 🍟
Even more amusing and delightful is this piece by Daniel Miller which was worth every penny of my LA Times monthly subscription:
In one instance, Morgan Currier, who said she had received about 30 of the deliveries, was able to convince an Uber Eats driver to telephone the person who’d placed the order.
“When we called the number on the order, it was disconnected,” she said.
More often than not, though, recipients step onto their porches to find, say, two McDonald’s Shamrock Shakes, with no Uber Eats driver to be seen. (One of the company’s delivery methods allows for orders to be left at the door.)
[…]
Adding to the surreal vibes, The Times was alerted to the happenings on Range View by Robert B. Weide, the veteran “Curb Your Enthusiasm” director. The HBO show, of course, centers on Larry David — who plays a version of himself — and the awkward and annoying situations that befall him.
The entire piece is quietly hilarious, full of little twists that only deepen the mystery. I am invested; this is the only mystery/true crime podcast I would ever actually listen to.
Article III: Mortadella 🥪
Also via the LA Times, I learned last week that mortadella is, apparently, having a moment, and I feel extremely conflicted on this front. On the one hand, I love mortadella to such a degree that I have at times worried if there was something wrong with me (according to the article, there isn’t, I’m totally fine) so I’m excited about LA chefs enabling my mortadella encounters. On the other hand, those of you who put up with me on Instagram know that I am an inexplicable contrarian who hates trends and will run in the other direction of a trend, even one I like, and the minute I see a food influencer touting the tastiness of mortadella, I will be over here yelling that mortadella is OVER.
(I reference the Portlandia “OVER” sketch about five hundred times a week, because I constantly and unironically declare that things are OVER the instant I see other people doing them. I am a delight to be around.)
Article IV: Another invasive fish to eat 🐟
Remember when I went down a lionfish rabbit hole? New invasive species for me to eat just dropped.
The association between Asian carp and environmental menace was too strong; besides, when most Americans hear “carp,” they think of unappetizing bottom-feeders. There had been previous rebranding attempts for the fish by different states—“Kentucky tuna” didn’t stick—but other successful renaming schemes gave them hope.
[…]
I visited the firm’s loft-like office in Chicago’s West Loop to find out how exactly one rebrands a fish. Design director Bud Rodecker and project lead Nick Adam walked me through their unconventional marketing project. They were psyched about it.
I will do my part to save the environment. Let me eat the rebranded fish!!!!
This self-help book actually helped, dammit
Multiple people told me that KC Davis’ How To Keep House While Drowning was a really compassionate it’s-not-what-you-think-type book, which of course meant that I put off reading it for months and then went “why didn’t anyone tell me to read this earlier” afterwards.
Davis’ book is written with neurodivergent folks and people with mental health struggles in mind, but there’s a little something in it for everyone, and I found it incredibly helpful at a point when I was feeling overwhelmed. I have a tendency to get in an anxiety-perfectionism-paralysis cycle, and the book pinpointed the internalized messages around tasks and moral value that keep me trapped in said cycle. It was low-key revelatory for me to realize that so many of my perfectionist tendencies around care/house tasks are emotionally draining and not remotely productive, and I appreciated that Davis gives permission and advice without being preachy, annoying, or cheesy.
It goes without saying that a lot of what the book has to say specifically about household tasks can also be applied to other areas, and Davis’ compassionate approach has been really helpful for me in terms of reducing stress and guilt around getting things done. (Like many other millennials, I get really bogged down in the ethics of every small action or decision, Chidi-Anagonye style, and the book reminds you that you can’t really operate from a place of ethics if you’re not caring for yourself or fulfilling your own basic needs.)
In news that affects no one other than me
This week I finally, finally got my piano tuned and tinkered with. It had gotten just permanently out of tune enough that the sound hurt a little bit of my soul every time I practiced, and the keys and pedals had gotten sluggish in their responsiveness, which just created extra frustration in practice. (Mind you, I’m fully aware that all of this is stuff that the average person wouldn’t notice.) The instrument sounds and feels so much better now that I could have wept with relief every day that I practiced this week, particularly with every high register passage that finally sounded sweet and not strident.
It’s funny how the piano feels like such an extension of me that I feel lighter now that it’s in better shape, and I finally feel like I can now focus on other things. I’m also fully aware that the relief I feel will probably wear off next week and I’ll go right back to feeling dull and frustrated at the keyboard, but for new reasons. Ah well. 🎹