May 10, 2024

On ruining perfectly good love and doing the reading

If you love and cherish a piece of music, learning to play it is a surefire way to ruin it all. This is a lesson I keep learning, forgetting, and learning all over again, like a less freaky version of Groundhog Day. (I look forward to promptly forgetting this little truth and then relearning it with the next piece I’ve fallen in love with, as I have done on a regular basis for the past 2+ decades. Everyone, set your calendars.)

Hearing a piece of music and falling head over heels in love with it is like seeing a beautiful person and experiencing that brief flash of insanity where you are absolutely sure that if you could only be with this person you would be deliriously happy for the rest of your life.

This is me to each piece I fall in love with right before I start butchering it.

Learning said piece of music—particularly if you are a trained perfectionist, prone to spiraling, whose career and identity are tied up in your ability to play it—is like discovering that this beautiful person is flawed and will push your buttons and fight with you and somehow seems a little less beautiful when they’re around you. There’s also the complicating factor that other people will get with this beautiful person who seems to be far happier when they’re with anyone but you, which I guess makes this an unhealthy polyamory situation, and oh gosh this metaphor is falling apart, isn’t it?

Once you’ve been really deep in the bowels of a piece, unpicking its skeleton and experimentally raking your fingers through its internal workings—yeah, we’re abandoning the metaphor, this is getting disturbing—it becomes impossible to go back to that innocent state where it was just a pretty piece that made you feel feelings. This is why classical music aficionados who don’t ever learn how to play an instrument might be the smartest people in the world. (This does not keep them from being incredibly annoying.)

I’m being a little dramatic. Ripping open the pretty casing of a great work of music and crawling headlong into its carcass (I can’t turn this off, it’s all horrifying metaphors now) is one of the most wonderful experiences I’m lucky to have over and over again. I love making a piece my own, I love making those little discoveries of a composer’s genius that you simply don’t experience by only listening, I love how the process creates this mystical alignment of body and mind that breaks down the barriers of physical space and time and no amount of writing or explaining can make another person understand this private, magical joy.

In the end, though, there’s no getting around the fact that once I’ve played a piece of music, it’s unbelievably hard for me to enjoy it as a casual listener. People often seem surprised that I’m always putting on pop music, hip-hop, musical theater, anything but classical—but when you’ve gluttonously eaten your way through the canon like a worm in a presidential candidate’s brain, there’s a lot of calcified baggage around that repertoire that makes it impossible to simply enjoy. I’m like a jealous, possessive lover with music I’ve played—hearing a recording of a Chopin scherzo in a coffee shop might fill me with despair that this performer is playing it way better than I did, or frustration that their interpretation is totally different from mine, or anxiety at the memory of unproductive lessons and disobedient fingers and memory slips in performance, or…

I wonder if that’s why there often seems to be a disconnect between the performers I know and follow who are ravenous for new-to-us music and the particular demographic of audiences who never tire of hearing Debussy’s Clair de Lune or Beethoven’s 9th. (Happy birthday!)

Anyway. The radio story that aired the other week now has its own page; you can play the segment as a standalone thing and read the accompanying write-up about it. Revisiting the story that is myself talking about how it felt to fall in love with Price’s Fantasie Nègre, I found myself weirdly nostalgic for the period of time when the only way for me to experience the piece was listening to it—which I did, on repeat, obsessively. There was something kind of pure about that! By learning it—and especially through the whole process of having to edit it—I replaced those feelings with new, more complicated ones, and at some point crossed that invisible threshold where I can no longer listen to it and enjoy it.

There’s something bittersweet about that trade. I wanted so badly to play that piece and be able to share it with other people and make them love it like I did that I gave up my own ability to enjoy it in the same way ever again. I realize I am totally positioning the work that performers do as some kind of selfless sacrifice, but…it kind of is, isn’t it?

[smugness intensifies]

In other news, last week I accidentally destroyed my website. I’m not going to go into the technical explanation (I thought about it, and then decided that trying to make a funny narrative out of old plug-ins and out-of-date php was beyond my writing abilities) but it did remind me of this evergreen XKCD comic.

Without meaning to, I basically upended this tower like an angry toddler.

So all you have to know is that I took down my website so catastrophically (not hyperbole; for about 10 minutes last Thursday if you went to www.sharonsu.com you’d see a message with the words “catastrophic error”) that there was no undoing it. I’d also happened to send some emails that week that significantly raised the likelihood that people would be looking at my website to see how legit I am. So I did the only thing that could be done: I did a speedrun build on a live site. I totally should have streamed it on Twitch.

This is not what I looked like frantically assembling a new website from scratch.

The new and improved sharonsu.com is up—there are little things I plan on tweaking and improving, but at least it’s functional. One of the new additions to my site is the existence of a projects page, where I can tie material together that otherwise would have been scattered across the press, writing, and recordings/concert pages. (It’s all about the narrative, baby!)

A lil practice video

I haven’t posted a practice video in…well, let’s not get into that. In preparation for a house concert I’m playing in a couple weeks (some of you who get this newsletter will be attending! Hi, see you soon!) I’ve started recording little videos to 1) see what holds when I ramp up the pressure and 2) check how things actually sound.

One passage that’s started to gel is this bit from Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre, which is a bit of a [bleep] because it’s got three things going on and, last I checked, I only have two hands. The left hand is kept rather busy with timpani-like octaves, leaving the right hand to manage both the main theme in the soprano and a relentless chromatic pattern in the alto.

This is why I roll my eyes at musicians who only ever have to deal with one note at a time.

The reading section

Longtime readers of this newsletter may recall that I used to do a “book of the week” section, and fell off of it—not because I stopped reading (so far in 2024 I’ve read 27 new books) but because I’m no literary critic and writing about books is kind of hard! However, I had strong thoughts about two books this week and thought I would share here.

This week the Pulitzer Prize winners were announced and I was heartened to see that Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama was one of them. I read Thrall’s book earlier this year and found it a genuinely moving and elucidating read that provided a lot of historical, social, and political context I personally hadn’t learned about Israel and Palestine.

There are simultaneous truths that I think we collectively get pretty bad at holding in times of conflict and atrocities: it is true that the history and politics that breed conflict are often incredibly complex and no solution can be summed up by way of a catchy slogan; however, that doesn’t mean that moral issues can’t also be simple (people being killed en masse is bad, it’s always been bad, full stop, it’s not actually complicated!). It’s true that there is nothing like social media for bearing witness and elevating voices outside of traditional informational institutions, or for calling attention to avenues for change; I also don’t think that it’s healthy to learn about anything purely through social media and the news. (I struggle, always, with my relationship to social media around any kind of social issue; I personally don’t think resharing things is productive activism, but then again that is how many people are roused to action, so what is my ethical responsibility, etc. etc.)

In times when I feel helpless about my inability to solve the world’s problems I fall back on my usual method: stop scrolling, read a book (or two, or five) to educate myself about the situation as best I can, do something small and concrete about the problem, and do something kind for someone I encounter to make the world a slightly less cruel and shitty place for someone, because why magnify the shittiness? It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I can do.

Anyway! I realize that it is unrealistic of me to expect society to Do the Reading (and even if people did, for them to draw the same conclusions I’d come to, and also I might be the one who’s wrong, and yes I am basically Chidi from The Good Place) but if you are a person who believes in Doing the Reading, this is a good place to start. The conflict in Gaza is especially revealing of the many, many blindspots and biases that we Americans have about a lot of things as well as the unholy alliances and fault lines of policy and belief, yet here I am still holding out hope that productive discussions can still be had.

More recently, I finally read Jeremy Denk’s memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine, which I quoted in the last newsletter, and holy crap did this book do things to me. I’ve been telling people the last two weeks about how much this book unblocked so much for me, and resonated so deeply, and each time they say something like “Wow, how wonderful that it came out and that you heard about it just in time for you to experience this catharsis,” and then I have to explain that actually, this book has been out for more than a year, and has gotten a lot of publicity, and that I even attended a concert where Denk was signing his book, but that I didn’t read it because it felt like homework.

I know! I’m terrible!

It’s hard to describe the many emotions the book brought up. One, actually, is a silly sort of anger: Denk states ideas I’ve had and describes specific experiences I’ve also had (“I’d already written some of those things down in notes somewhere!” I howled to one friend) in such a way that I couldn’t help but feel a little robbed that he got there before I could. (I felt repeatedly though the book like Captain Scott being beaten to the South Pole, which is hilarious given that I am not remotely near the same level as Jeremy Denk. He’s one of the finest pianists alive and a MacArthur genius, and I’m a little nobody who posts on the internet way too much.)

More overwhelmingly, though, the book made me feel gratified and validated—there are so many things I’ve experienced on my journey as a pianist that I was absolutely convinced I was alone in feeling, and reading Denk describe these very feelings so eloquently made me feel as if the isolation were being stripped away. He writes so damn well (about music, about life—one little shift near the end was absolutely astonishing) that there’s just no room in me for resentment. Some of his wistful, quietly heartbreaking writing was downright therapeutic and this may be the book that’s come the closest to fixing me.

What am I even doing, still writing? Just read the book.

Now this is journalism

A friend sent me this Washington Post article by Andrea Sachs about a beloved community cat and I am not being hyperbolic when I say this is fantastic writing and journalism. The entire piece is a delight from start to finish.

Did Kitty Snows find her new life to be “rich and fulfilling?” It’s hard to know, because Kitty Snows is a cat and cannot speak. But her humans were fulfilled. […]

A few days later, on Feb. 27, the Kitty Snows case came up at the monthly gathering of the Foggy Bottom Association at the West End public library. Sadie Cornelius, who lives around the corner from Snows Court, stood before roughly 30 attendees and declared: “We have a hostage situation. We just want to make sure she’s safe.”

Current earworms

Every once in a while I tire of all the music I already know and am simply dying to have something new to obsessively listen to. It was fabulous timing, then, when my best friend mentioned offhandedly in a conversation that she was enjoying Chappell Roan.

I didn’t know at first if Chappell Roan was a book or a horse or what. Turns out Chappell Roan is the artist I ended up playing on repeat for two weeks.

Roan’s album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is one of the best things I’ve heard lately; my absolute favorite track is “After Midnight,” which spiritually has so much Carly Rae Jepsen energy that it fills my little heart with so much joy.

(Obsessive listening: check! Thanks, A!)

Miscellany

Something for the string players who always looked at their rosin and thought it looked like forbidden candy:

Link

Also, I am so inspired by Kendrick Lamar:

Link

Thanks for reading, folks! 🎹