On listening to myself, and the Geographical Fugue
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
When I, as a silly little teenager with college apps on the horizon, first held the intoxicating what-if of being a Professional Pianist in my head, I had very clear images of what that glorious life would be. Getting to pound out my feelings at a grand piano every day, constant jet-setting, a cavalcade of beautiful gowns in my closet, applause and adulation all the time: yes, sign me up, that’s way more appealing than an office job!
It turns out—and this, according to my friends, is true no matter what “dream” profession you’re in—that the reality of living your dream is far more sobering and tedious than your naive teenage self could ever fathom, and part of the daily covenant you have to make with yourself to continue living the dream is to just get cozy with the discomfort and tedium and to embrace the ritual of it.
I’ve more or less gotten used to Pianist Life, which involves thrilling things like running my fingers through 60-90 minutes of unexciting technical drills and rhythmic patterns every morning, dissecting beautiful works of music into clinical fragments that I schedule practicing in advance (folks, we don’t wait for inspiration), and emails. So many emails! I do not understand why there are so many emails all the time. If Clara Schumann didn’t have to deal with a perpetually out-of-control email inbox, why should I?
By far the worst of all tasks, though, that I still haven’t gotten used to, and maybe never will, is having to listen back to recordings of myself. I hate it with the burning, roiling heat of the Earth’s molten core. The way I feel listening to myself is the way Deborah Proctor apparently feels listening to operas with queer and BIPOC themes, only in my case it’s due to internalized self-loathing instead of cultural ignorance and bigotry.
I can’t explain to non-musicians why listening back to yourself is such a heinous task, but every musician I’ve ever talked to about it agrees: in a perfect world, none of us should ever have to hear ourselves being played back, and it’s awful that it’s a necessary part of the profession.
It’s taken me several weeks to listen to just over a half-hour’s worth of music that I recorded this year, because every second of listening inspires so much psychological pain that I end up in a spiral of doubt and disheartenment. When I mentioned it on Bluesky, Sam Bergman, everyone’s favorite violist, chimed in with words that made me feel very seen.
“I want to quit music” is a feeling I’ve gotten used to feeling, not in a serious “I actually want to quit doing a thing I actually do love so much” way, more like how a toddler having a meltdown might shout “I HATE YOU!” at their parents in a crowded grocery store. What I’ve realized is that if my brain goes into toddler mode and screams I WANT TO QUIT MUSIC on a regular basis, it means everything is working as intended.
This week I finally, finally, finally finished the latest pass of listen-backs and notes on the tracks my poor patient engineer-editor sent me. In addition to the self-loathing slowing everything down, it’s also such an insultingly tedious, time-consuming process; if I hear something off in the track, I have to find the timestamp in the recording, pinpoint the exact spot in the music (i.e. “the third sixteenth note of the second quarter beat in the lower voice of the right hand”), identify what the exact mistake is (a split note? a wrong note? an accidentally caught harmony?), and write it out so that a technical editor can go hunting for the correct moment in a clean take to patch it with.
There’s a lot of scrubbing back and forth in the track, of listening to that quarter-second of mistake again and again and again and again to figure out exactly what’s going on, running to the piano to play through the correct configuration, then listening back and forth between the suspect spot and the correct bit to confirm if it actually is something that needs an edit and, if so, what kind of edit it needs to be. It’s horrible work that takes up way more time than you always think it needs and I hate it so much.
About a thousand times during the process of having to write up my edit notes on my recordings, I just want to pull the rip cord, give up on everything, and walk into the sea. (I live in LA—the sea is never that far away, so it’s a very convenient option.)
In music school one of the more delightful group sight-singing assignments we had was to do four-person renditions of Ernst Toch’s “Geographical Fugue,” which is 1) delightful and 2) the reason I am now prone to shouting “TRINIDAD!” and can still say “The Popocatepetl is not in Canada / Rather in Mexico, Mexico, Mexico” very quickly with the type of diction you don’t usually hear from me, a born-and-bred California girl with our charming statewide tendency of freely dropping half the letters from words.
When it came time for my group to perform “Geographical Fugue” for the class, we made it about halfway through before something happened and someone—I’m not saying who, just that it definitely wasn’t me—got the tiniest bit off and suddenly we were all out of whack, flailing helplessly as our downbeats drifted away from each other, syncopations suddenly reversed, and the little rhythmic gears that were supposed to lock together were suddenly crunching in the most unsettling ways.
With the relentless stubbornness of someone who is aware that the performance is being graded and refuses to be penalized just because other members of the group aren’t pulling their weight [Jim from The Office face], I soldiered on, shouting my single part louder and louder as if I could somehow distract the professor from the fact that the rest of my ensemble was in ragged shambles.
So there we were, four music majors chaotically chanting place names like a group of confused mapmakers, me desperately screaming “TIBET! TIBET! TIBET! TIBET!” like I was trying to singlehandedly land a Himalayan-themed record deal.
It was so bad that of course one of us snapped. My classmate on the bass part, who couldn’t take it any longer, suddenly pitched the entire contents of his music folder in the air. We all burst into hysterical laughter as sheet music gently rained down like nuclear fallout.
The image of my classmate just giving up and throwing all his music heavenward is one of those things my brain is just going to hold onto forever. It was truly beautiful. And it is, now, the instinct my body yearns to obey when I’m hunched over my laptop, sheet music, and notebook, gritting my teeth as I listen to the recording of my past self desperately plowing through the music. I hear a regrettable split bass note and suddenly I just want to make like Josh and throw it all in the air, assignment be damned.
Anyway. Things are going great.
FYI
No articles/music/assorted delights today—this has been a WEEK (multiple minor emergencies, social outings, etc.) and I am currently very low on both time and mental energy. Hopefully I will have more bandwidth next week.
For those of you who subscribe to this at the $10/month and up level, I know you are supposed to get practice videos, audio sneak peeks, etc. and I apologize that I haven’t gotten any of those out for [mumbles incoherently]. At first I was deep in self-loathing and couldn’t bear to share any of the videos and recordings I was making, and then I hit my computer’s drive limit weeks ago, which in very technical terms means that it does the computer equivalent of throwing all its sheet music in the air when I try to do things, including transferring video/audio to my computer.
I am finally doing some digital housekeeping and hope to be back up and functional next week! Thanks for your patience and support. 🎹