Scorpio season and other November things
Sharon's Monthly Roundup
(Yes, I know it is December now, but this counts as November’s monthly newsletter. My Substack, my rules.)
I am convinced—convinced—that I am partially ursine. Every year when the days get real short and darkness descends way too early, I find myself inexplicably 1) hungry all the time and 2) desperately wanting to sleep most of the day (and night). Clearly I yearn to be a competitive fat bear.
Projects have been trucking along and there are some cool developments in the works, but I will not have things to (hopefully) announce until later in December or in the new year (!!!) so for now, my greatest accomplishment this month is that I got through it.
On tweets and toots
If you are still on Twitter and follow me there, you may have noticed that I haven’t been super active on there; I haven’t left Twitter and plan on sticking around as long as the platform is 1) still up and 2) relatively tolerable for me to be on, but it’s been a weird month and for mental wellness and time management reasons I’ve been spending less time on social media in general.
That being said, I am not confident about the direction that Twitter is going in these days, so just in case I need to leave the platform, I have set up camp on Mastodon just in case. If you’re interested in following me there, my handle is @doodlyroses@space-pirates.org.
You’ve got mail
If you are a snail mail club subscriber, letters went out a few weeks ago! I was extremely charmed by this extremely adorable stationery and hope you are too.
Stuff I saw and heard
Price and Bonds aren’t just economic buzzwords
At the start of the month I went to a frankly awesome concert at the LA Phil that was pretty much a tasting menu of music by Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. I wrote a more detailed recap here, but some highlights:
I have yet to hear Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations in all its entirety in a live performance, but I appreciated the selection featured in this concert. It’s still grossly underplayed and last I checked there were no professional high-quality recordings on streaming, but the Minnesota Orchestra recently put up a full-length audio recording of the work on Youtube:
And one of my favorite works on the program was a new orchestration of Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 1 as a piano concerto. It’s one of my favorite pieces by Price and worked so well as a concerto, and I was delighted by the savvy orchestration choices. (It’s not like I’m particularly fixated on stuff like that at the moment because of a current project or anything.) My favorite recording of the original solo is by Samantha Ege and I hope the concerto version gets more outings.
I tweeted earlier that week about some of my thoughts about Florence Price in context of what I learned from this concert, and one of the surprising takeaways was how shamelessly funny Price could be.
Overall it was a great concert and I hope other orchestras follow suit with programming like this!
Tár and feather me
In other news, I saw Tár and may be low-key obsessed. Some non-spoilery thoughts:
My immediate reaction to any movie/TV show about classical music is deep, deep mistrust, because Hollywood almost always gets it way wrong.
I was extremely surprised by how right this movie got things, and how deep it got. There were so many references to classical music events and figures that the movie didn’t over-explain; the movie hired actual musicians as actors, rather than having actors badly fake instrument playing; and there were so many moments that they just nailed.
Cate Blanchett is absolutely magnificent. (She absolutely deserves a Best Actress nom for this, however! I am fully gunning for Michelle Yeoh to get that damn Oscar for her jaw-dropping performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and if someone else—even Cate—gets it, I will riot.)
There is a major character named Sharon. I realize this does not matter to anyone but me. (Sharons are very underrepresented in the world, okay?)
This movie so beautifully and so accurately depicts, above all things, power. (It is so hard not to say that without shouting it Jeremy Clarkson style.) One of the things I’ve been unpacking with friends is the degree to which dynamics of power play out, and how obsession and control are tools for maintaining—and abusing—power.
Random pop music connections
I went on a bit of a journey this week, and it all started because I thought, “Hmm, I feel like listening to Fall Out Boy.”
(I discovered, like, three of their songs in high school, and added them to multiple playlists that I listened to a lot, and I guess I was feeling both nostalgic and in the need for something heavier than the pop I’d been listening to recently.)
First things first: I have never understood the lyrics of a single Fall Out Boy song, because diction—already a loose concept in non-classical music—just…is not the leader singer’s strong point. I still have no idea what the lyrics are in the chorus of “Sugar, We’re Going Down,” which just sounds like French yaorting to me. “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s An Arms Race” is one of the three songs I loved in high school and I still hear one of the core lyrics as:
I’m a leading man / And the Lysol weevil also educates, also educates, ooh
(The actual lyrics, according to Genius, are “I’m a leading man / And the lies I weave are oh-so intricate, oh-so intricate” which my brain just refuses to accept. Lysol weevils ftw.)
Anyway, in my travels through the Essentials Playlist on Apple Music, I discovered the previously-unknown-to-me song “The Phoenix,” which is a banger:
…and while I was listening, I thought, huh, the opening riff sounds a lot like another thing I know, and then it hit me.
The section from roughly 0:20-0:33 in the video below, from Fall Out Boy’s “The Phoenix”…
…sounds a lot like K-Pop group Brown Eyed Girls’ “Sixth Sense,” in the bit from 0:42-0:58:
Brown Eyed Girls’ song came out in 2011, and Fall Out Boy’s in 2013; the string riff isn’t exactly the same, and I’m not trying to claim musical plagiarism here or anything, but it’s just super interesting—I don’t know if this is one of those things where there’s a direct link (I know producers and writers have historically shopped demos to both K-Pop and American pop artists) or if the producers for the two songs independently came up with a similar idea. I’m not invested enough to do a deep dive on this.
Anyway, it reminded me of a couple of other random connections I’ve noticed in songs/videos across countries.
In another K-Pop/American pop coincidence, I recently heard “Naughty” by Red Velvet - Irene & Seulgi, and noticed that the melody heard here from 1:05-1:08:
…is pretty much identical to Camila Cabello’s “Cry For Me” from 0:24-0:29 here:
Which is just one of those funny little similarities! I don’t think there’s any plagiarism going on here fwiw, I think it’s just one of those things where there are only so many combinations of notes in a tonal harmonic system.
Aaaanyway all of that reminded me of when Dua Lipa came out with her video for “IDGAF” a few years ago, and pretty much every single aspect of it reminded me super strongly of Stromae’s “Tous Les Mêmes,” which is one of my all time favorite pop songs. There are so many similarities I could do a scholarly deep dive (the two videos playing with concepts of androgyny, the two-color dichotomy aesthetic, some of the specific dance moves, the doubled self which is depicted by having two Dua Lipas in her video but a female double for Stromae in his, the theme of romantic/sexual incompatibility), but you get a sense of it watching the 1:20-1:40 bit of this video:
…and 1:11-1:33 and 2:19-2:54 here:
(You do get a much stronger sense of the similarities watching both videos in their entirety, fyi.)
The cool thing is I am very pleased to report that the connection is not one I made up; it turns out that Stromae was artistic director for Dua Lipa’s video.
Thank you for going on this journey with me; I hope you found it pointlessly interesting. (I have no idea if I would have been like this if I hadn’t gone to music school—in any case, remembering elements and making connections across works is something I have been trained to do, and my brain does not know when the heck to shut off.)
Book of the Month
It feels so oddly fitting that my book of the month is Marie Le Conte’s Escape, which is a clear-eyed but affectionate accounting of the rise and fall of the internet culture that made Twitter such a cultural juggernaut. It’s an extremely insightful analysis for anyone with any interest in how social media got here, but it was especially relatable to me, as a terminally online Millennial who participated in a lot of the same internet developments that Le Conte describes. (I am super nostalgic for 2010s-era personal blog culture; Substack, as much as I appreciate it, just isn’t the same.)
Rather than treating weird and niche internet subcultures as being discretely separate from “real life,” Le Conte observes how online platforms and movements reflect what we get—and what we lack—in society at large. It’s also just a funny, enjoyable, bittersweetly relevant read.
A quick note that I don’t think Escape is currently available in the US; I had to order my copy from the UK.
Articles I Enjoyed
Jeffrey Arlo Brown: Requiem for a Tweet (VAN Magazine)
When I heard Yannick Nézet-Séguin lead the Philadelphia Orchestra in Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1 at the Philharmonie in Berlin this fall, I thought: Twitter did that. Well, not just Twitter—the offline work was at least as essential—but for years, musical pockets of the platform had used it as a grassroots tool. It was not unlike the early days of Black Lives Matter or any of the countless other social movements that relied (and rely) on the platform for organizing. Classical Music Twitter pushed for more programming diversity, and orchestras and other institutions began to listen.
As the future of Twitter as a place for pockets of productive discourse for marginalized folks looks increasingly uncertain, I find myself wondering what the future of Classical Music Twitter is, and feeling like a certain era is already over—even if the platform survives, enough has already changed that our little community will never quite be the same. I appreciated this heartfelt (and clear-eyed—no nostalgic falsehoods about the downsides of Twitter) paean to what we had.
John Paul Brammer: The Unbearable Mundanity of the Very Rich Man’s Mind (¡Hola Papi! on Substack)
These past few years, especially, have felt like being locked in a theater where the only actor on stage is holding a gun and telling us to clap. Attention is being demanded, and the person demanding it doesn’t really think of any one of us as being on the same level of personhood as they. We have little choice but to suffer them, to some degree.
And so we analyze them. We dig deep into their personalities, their backstories, their psychology. It’s like doing a Rorschach test on a picture of a circle. There is, in truth, so little to consider, but the stakes have been inflated to such a degree that there is real incentive to try.
As you can probably imagine, I’ve read a lot—dozens!—of articles about the fast-moving trainwreck of Twitter. However, I found this piece about the psychology of ego and the helplessness we all face at the hands of great wealth to be the one that really stuck with me.
Sarah Fritz: Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Clara Schumann (Clara Schumann Channel)
In 1843, Hensel went with her family to newly married Clara Schumann’s house for an evening in Leipzig, though they don’t seem to have gotten to know each other. Clara was still young, only 24, and Hensel was 38. Robert’s diary notes, “Frau Hensel, whose mind and depth of feeling speak through her eyes,” and we can assume Clara felt the same. Hensel notes hearing Clara play some of her husband’s compositions, but that she did not like them very much.
Earlier this month was Scorpio queen Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s 217th birthday, and I thought this article was a great summary of the crossover of two legends in the Clara Schumann Cinematic Universe.
Andor and other conjunctions
To get it out of the way: I am not a Star Wars person. I did not see a single star war until 2016.
Andor is so good it’s shocking. Again, I am not the most invested in this universe, so what makes this a winner for me is how the show world-builds in a way that doesn’t seem scaffolded by fan service and is held down by aggressive realism. I am way more fascinated by the depiction of the fascist Empire’s power being perpetuated by ambitious middle-managers jockeying for visibility and promotions than I was by the imagery of evil magicians in capes. The insights into just how the Empire keeps people ground down in poverty and labor feels eerily relevant—later-season scenes depicting the mass production usually hidden from the glitz of industrialized society (or the thrill of battle) reminded me a lot of recent reads about the exploited workers who grow and harvest our food, sew our clothes, sort through our waste, etc.
This feels like the Star Wars we need; I think when we envision what evil is, we think about the dictators, the pundits, the stormtroopers—we so rarely examine all the ways in which evil is perpetuated at the level of the mundane and invisible, and how anyone with a smidge of privilege actually benefits. Good job, giant all-powerful corporation that wields way too much capitalistic power. 🐭