On the cost of time
I’ve been getting back into structured, routine practicing after about a month (okay, more like a month and a half) of self-assigned No Practicing For Your Own Good. Last year I didn’t give myself a break and ended up giving myself burnout and bad feelings (a killer album name if there ever was one), so I took the concept of taking a break as seriously as I take actually practicing, and more or less banned myself from touching the piano. (I am, for better or for worse, an “all or nothing” kind of gal.)
In between sleeping, reading, and doing all the little chores and errands that pile up when one prioritizes creative work over the course of many hectic months, I found myself ruminating on how unstructured quiet time to tend to your own self is so necessary and yet so impossible if you aren’t a single man in possession of a great fortune. I needed this time for the sake of my well-being, but the nothingness also felt like an absurd luxury because existing and meeting the bottom half of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is not free.
It reminded me of my experience several years ago at a summer music festival. If you are young, broke, and self-funded doing any kind of summer program in Europe, you will experience what I personally call the “poor kid at a rich school” dynamic. (Or, if you were a fan of the OG Gossip Girl, the Jenny Humphrey phenomenon.)
Me at music camp, basically.
A lot of the other attendees there—and I say this without judgment or shade, because that’s just how the cookie crumbles for some people—were there on their parents’ dime, and didn’t have to worry about the costs associated with making it through the festival and having a good time. They ate all their meals at nice sit-down restaurants, shopped freely, and went on all the optional excursions and day trips. (On behalf of all broke students who’ve done Europe on a budget: big shout-out to one-euro slice pizza joints and shabby supermarkets selling sacks of day-old rolls and off-brand Nutella. You’re the real MVPs.)
Something about watching your peers move about with an ease that only money can buy, taking their adventures for granted with the confidence that there will be more opportunity in the future, sticks with you (and, if you’re not careful, foments the bitterness and resentment that turns normal privileged folks into angry grievance-filled windbags, outrage-peddling media personalities, or ill-advised vice presidential candidates).
Knowing I was lucky just to be there and not sure if I would get a chance like this again, I approached my time at the festival with a hunger bordering on desperation: I recorded every lesson and attended every single masterclass it was possible to attend, taking obsessive and copious notes from the front row for hours on end. I gave handwritten thank you cards to each teacher I worked with, explaining how grateful I was for the time and advice they gave me. I looked like a try-hard, a suck-up, a parody of a hardworking student, like someone who hadn’t been clued in that no one was grading me for any of this. In any environment like this certain students naturally rise to teachers’ attentions for their raw talent, impressive technical chops, or unimpeachable musicality; I became known to all the faculty as the excessively studious girl, which at a classical music festival is kind of like being crowned the Ur-Dork.
In any case, I made friends with another attendee who, like me, was also in their mid-20s and thus part of the “oldest students here” cohort, and partway through the festival we had a conversation that filled me with relief that I wasn’t (totally) out of place. Being at this festival, this fellow self-funded student commented, was actually a three-fold financial hit for us. There was, of course, the cost of the festival itself (several thousand dollars, not counting meals, travel, and incidentals). Then there was the fact that while we were there, we were losing income from not working. And on top of all that, we still had expenses (namely, rent) to pay back home while we were here. Having long multi-course lunches, skipping master classes to sunbathe on the beach, and taking guided day trips wasn’t an option for us, because we were losing money just being there.
(We somehow had enough money, though, to knock back countless cans of beer until 2 AM every night. Look, sometimes you can’t just explain how these things work.)
I’ve reflected back on that conversation so many times over the years. It’s an open secret that there’s an explicit pay-to-play dynamic in the industry that young classical musicians have to navigate, and that the barriers to “making it” in classical music are compounded if one doesn’t come from money. I’ve seen some peers pass up on opportunities because they can’t afford that 3x financial grenade and work on slower timelines than they’re capable of because they can’t spare the time to devote to their music on a day-to-day basis. (Meanwhile, I’ve seen other peers rack up dubious accolades from pay-to-play competitions and programs which they then use to burnish their bios.) And ever since I graduated from music school, I’ve been faced with the “make money or make music???” question so regularly it should be a recurring scheduled event on my calendar.
So this stretch of intentionally unstructured and unscheduled time I enjoyed was wonderful—I feel balanced and excited about working on music again—but it also wasn’t free, and not something I took for granted. Finding time to practice, rehearse, or compose is a struggle for musicians as it is, and to give myself time that I spent not playing music at all felt downright extravagant. It’s rare for me to have an extended stretch of time without travel, family/social obligations, or general time-consuming life miscellany, and there were moments I thought, “Should I be using this time to hunker down and grind away at some music? Am I wasting this?”
Those of you who know me irl know that I will make everything in my life about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and this was no exception. Thinking about the way I frittered my July away, I remembered this glorious passage from Betty Smith’s book:
Francie loved the smell of coffee and the way it was hot. As she ate her bread and meat, she kept one hand curved about the cup enjoying its warmth. From time to time, she’d smell the bitter sweetness of it. That was better than drinking it. At the end of the meal, it went down the sink.
Mama had two sisters, Sissy and Evy, who came to the flat often. Every time they saw the coffee thrown away, they gave Mama a lecture about wasting things.
Mama explained: “Francie is entitled to one cup each meal like the rest. If it makes her feel better to throw it away rather than to drink it, all right. I think it’s good that people like us can waste something once in a while and get the feeling of how it would be to have lots of money and not have to worry about scrounging.”
This queer point of view satisfied Mama and pleased Francie. It was one of the links between the ground-down poor and the wasteful rich. The girl felt that even if she had less than any body in Williamsburg, somehow she had more. She was richer because she had something to waste.
There’s nothing wrong, I realize, with a little conceptual waste here and there, whether it’s of coffee or time; in fact it’s one of the things that makes us human. As much as I wish (and have tried) to optimize my efficiency to be as machine-level productive as possible, it’s the breaks—whether they be an hour or a month—in between practicing where it feels like the art really gels.
(I write all this fully knowing that in a week or two I will be stressing out over not being able to cram more practice hours into the day, or feeling bad that I need to take breaks; not being able to absorb your own wisdom is also one of the things that makes us human.)
An embarrassment of listening riches
Hello there is SO MUCH good music to listen to!!! In no particular order, here’s what’s been lighting up my brain.
I. Primal Message by Nokuthula Ngwenyama, conducted by Xian Zhang with the Chicago Symphony
In December 2021 I heard Nokuthula Ngwenyama’s piece, Primal Message, at an LA Phil concert and I fell in LOVE. Admittedly I fall in love all the time at the concert hall—my heart is very easily won—but Primal Message kind of became “the one that got away” for me because it seemed like I would never hear it again. The closest I got was a video of the piece for chamber ensemble, which is still beautiful and charming, but lacked the gorgeous lushness of full orchestra that transfixed me in concert.
Then, the other week, I put on my local classical radio, and what did I hear but Primal Message PLAYED BY A FULL ORCHESTRA! I went frantically a-googlin’ and turned up, triumphant, with a full recording, courtesy of the Chicago Symphony and one of my favorite living conductors.
Primal Message, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I have such a soft spot for Romantic-style writing, so its lush lyricism, which fully crosses over into the realm of the cinematic, totally does it for me while still managing to feel fresh. The whole piece is suffused with a wistful yearning for the void that just aches so deliciously, and its whole transcendent-cosmic openness at the end reminds me of “Neptune” from Holst’s The Planets or, for a more recent comp, the "Paradiso" section of Thomas Adès’ Dante. Composers, I totally know what you’re doing when you make the strings play higher and higher quiet tremolos while the percussion section gently makes little magical tinkly sounds and guess what? I LOVE IT, don’t ever stop.
II. Femmes de légende by Mel Bonis
I have previously written of my discovery of Mel Bonis (and her bonkers life story) and I have simply fallen in love with her music all over again. I went on a listening spree of her piano music, intending to pick a piece to learn, and discovered that crap, I love all her music and it’s impossible to pick just one.
There are several albums of Bonis’ Femmes de légende—a collection of 7 pieces Bonis wrote inspired by mythical women—that I’m currently perusing, and I don’t currently have a favorite, but I’m just enjoying listening to these works over and over and over again. One piece that stands out to me personally is “Omphale”:
I am extremely here for all things Joe Hisaishi. Imagine my JOY when I saw DG’s new album featuring two of Hisaishi’s non-movie works: his Symphony No. 2 and Viola Saga. (I excitedly texted a violist friend something like “OMG VIOLA CONCERTO BY JOE HISAISHI” and they responded “he is a friend to violists! ❤️” which should be on a t-shirt.)
It is a delight to hear Hisaishi doing his own thing and to play the spot-the-musical-influence game. In these works I hear shades of Copland and smatterings of Debussy, and the second movement of Viola Saga has big Philip Glass energy.
IV. Revolución diamantina by Gabriela Ortiz
Just a couple of months ago I saw the premiere of the concert version of Gabriela Ortiz’ Revolución diamantina, and the LA Phil has already released a recording of it on streaming!
My little nitpick is that while I always expect recordings to not fully capture the magic of live performance, I feel like this disconnect is especially noticeable with this piece. YMMV, but I didn’t find the first three acts of the recording to be remotely as captivating as they were in person; for example, the first half of Act III, “Borders and bodies,” created a palpable tension in the concert hall that I don’t think fully translates to audio. The second half of the piece (Acts IV-VI) are much more successful as recorded tracks, imho, and are absolutely electrifying. (Best way to experience the recording, I think, is to turn it up as loud as you can stand to get all the layers.)
Ortiz is so good at fanning slow burns that erupt into flame, and I loved the way she straight up uses vocalists as percussion instruments. (Not, er, physically, John Eliot Gardiner style, but, you know, musically.)
Hensel fans, rejoice
Just a few years ago, when I was getting into the music of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, pickings were incredibly slim: despite most of Hensel’s 460+ work catalog being for piano, there wasn’t much for me to find in the way of sheet music. (I’ve written about the problems around sheet music for music for lesser-known works, so we don’t need to rehash all that.)
I tweeted a popular thread about Hensel’s life back in 2019 (!) and could not possibly have dreamed of the things it would inspire; one hero read the thread and started Hensel Pushers, an online catalog of free, cleanly notated and edited (!) music by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. As of last week, all of Hensel’s piano works are now edited and available online. FOR FREE.
Hensel Pushers is one of the coolest projects I’ve seen in music publishing, and I have been watching from afar in awe as it’s trucked along through the years into the behemoth of an archive it is now. It’s a freaking game-changer. Please, go forth and utilize this resource, and also consider donating to support this one-person labor of love.