Stuff I did and more Brahms thoughts
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
Newsletter housekeeping:
I will be out of town next week, so the next new post will go out the week of the 17th.
When I logged into Substack this morning I saw this:
Apparently Substack had opted me into their new “Boost” feature which presumably harangues my readers to switch to paid subscriptions. I quickly went into my settings to turn it off, so if any of you get these upselling emails, please notify me.
My current approach to Substack is that it is an imperfect but functional medium for two things: 1) for people to get regular updates on what I do and am up to, and 2) for some people to voluntarily provide financial support for my recording lesser-known music, since this particular endeavor doesn’t pay for itself. I do not harbor dreams of living off this newsletter, and the idea of all of you getting upsold gives me hives.
Anyway, onto things I did this week.
Things I did this week
After obsessively rereading and rewriting and penning extremely long emails to one of my very patient mentors, I finally turned in a first polished draft of the book chapter to my editor. I have no idea what the feedback or edits will entail, but man did it feel good to get to that first finish line.
I booked two sessions—one this spring, and one in late summer—in the recording studio, so my pandemic-induced recording hiatus will soon come to an end! I’ll be recording music by Florence Price, Maria Szymanowska, and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.
I appreciate all of you who have been supporting me, first on Patreon, and now here, through the years, including through the aforementioned recording hiatus.This is not really a thing that affects anyone besides me, but! I’d sketched out a cadenza to the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel concerto and the most “am I secretly a Boomer” thing about me is that I can barely use music notation software*, so there was a stupidly huge hurdle keeping me from having a properly notated copy of music I’d composed myself. In an attempt to get over myself I bought a notation app and spent hours melting down in frustration (again: am I secretly a Boomer) because it turns out that if you do not know how to use music notation software, the first thing you do should not be to try to engrave highly complex piano writing that uses multiple voices and hand crossings, changes clefs multiple times each measure, requires very specific rule-breaking around stemming, and requires abandonment of the time signature.
A friend offered their music notation prowess at a very reasonable rate, I sent over my pencil sketches and a video of me playing the cadenza, and in about 48 hours they’d emailed me a very neatly notated PDF that was pretty much everything I’d ever wanted. I think I have learned a very important lesson here that rather than learn new skills relevant to your career, you should just pay your friends to do work for you.
*I got through music school almost never using music notation software, partially because I was too broke to get Sibelius, and mostly because I used to be able to write music by hand very quickly and neatly.I finally got around to posting my 2022 reading log on my personal blog. As you all know I read a fair amount and do a little write-up of some of the books I recommend here, but obviously not all the books I read make it into this newsletter. I also included, this year, a little FAQ because people tend to ask me the same questions about reading.
I can fix him
I talk a lot about Brahms for someone who doesn’t actually love all his music, and you would think that because I am obsessed with Clara Schumann that I would naturally know a lot about Johannes Brahms. I actually don’t know much about Brahms as a person (obviously I studied Brahms as Composer in music school), so William Dougherty’s 2016 article “Free But Alone” was a really elucidating read for me this week.
I gotta say, Brahms sounds like a piece of work, like in this anecdote about him completely killing the vibe at a party:
After multiple glasses of champagne, the conversation turned to an admired woman known to everyone at the gathering. When Brahms was asked what he thought of her, he “broke out into a horrible, coarse tirade against this lady, broadening out to include women in general, and actually ended by applying to them all an incredible, unspeakable epithet.” (You may only guess.) The party quickly broke up after this sobering outburst and Friedlaender was tasked with walking the now heavily intoxicated Brahms back home. In their conversation, Brahms broke out in another rant: “You tell me I should have the same respect, the same exalted homage for women that you have! …You expect that of a man cursed with a childhood like mine!”
Oh, Johannes.
Feeling dejected and embarrassed, Brahms hastily broke off the engagement with Agathe. He wrote to her, “I love you! I must see you again! But bound, I cannot be!” As a composer who was already deeply insecure about his music and his place in history, Brahms couldn’t stomach displaying his inadequacies to someone he loved. Brahms was unable to look into his fiancée’s eyes after such a harrowing experience, admit failure, and accept her pity—and this, he claimed later in life, not his independence, was the real reason for the break. At the core of Brahms’ reasoning for the break was deep-seated insecurity that spanned many aspects of his life—from his music, to his humble beginnings, to his own manhood.
The article does a good job giving you an overview of Brahms’ trauma and insecurities and how they shaped some, ah, problematic views of women. And then it reminds you what young Johannes Brahms looked like.
A very, very stupid part of me looks at that, thinks about the fact that this is a man who was only ever able to form one “meaningful long-term connection with a woman” and goes…I can fix him.
Young Brahms! He was hot! But also problematic! Ah well, carry on.
This tweet is perfect
That’s about it for this week—I am super wiped out from doing a lot of different things this week, and I am ready to sleep for twenty years like Rip Van Winkle.