What's in my bag: recording edition
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
Okay, I’m going to need a lot of naps, because this past week I performed a new-ish solo piano program for a real live audience, and then I went into the recording studio and recorded works by Florence Price and Maria Szymanowska. In between I finalized stuff and signed a contract for the first performance of the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel concerto. Things are happening and it’s great but I’m also VERY TIRED.
First of all, some of you who get this newsletter were there at the private concert I gave in the Bay Area, and truly, I cannot express how much I appreciate all your support and feedback and amazing vibes. Thank you for being there for me, both from afar and in person.
Second of all, the more and more I work on the Florence Price piece—her Fantasie Nègre No. 2 in G Minor—the more I fall utterly in love with it. As with everything, it’s always entirely possible that I’m a weirdo who likes a thing way more than anyone else possibly does, so I was really blown away when everyone I talked to said the Price was their favorite.
Seriously—everyone from classical music connoisseurs to newbies loved the Price. I’m telling you, Florence Price is that girl.
What’s in my bag, recording studio edition
In the heyday of 2010s-era style blogging, I was obsessed with “What’s in my bag” posts, which is literally what it sounds like: bloggers (usually women) photographing flatlays of their designer bags and their contents. Even now, if a friend sends me, say, a highly produced Youtube video by a fashion magazine asking a celebrity to show the (aspirational, unrealistic) contents of their (likely sponsored) handbag, I will absolutely watch it.
It occurred to me, as I was packing my Marc Jacobs tote bag, that I could totally do a “What’s in my bag: recording studio edition” type post, because I’ve learned from experience that there are very specific things you absolutely need to have for the physical and emotional marathon that is a recording session.
Shown above:
Sheet music—critically, not just my own music for reference, but also clear photocopies with clearly marked measure numbers and stopping points for the recording engineer, all prepared in a binder with labels because I am all about making other people’s lives easier through organization.
Snacks for keeping my blood sugar and energy levels up—this week I brought Yun Hai dried guava, which is ideal as it’s not too sweet (I can’t handle excessive sweetness, especially if it’s the only thing I’m eating for a few hours).
A Zojirushi insulated bottle full of oolong tea brewed that morning—because I don’t drink coffee but need caffeine to get me through the session.
A water bottle (mine is a now-discontinued Takeya) for hydration—and I opted for a glass bottle with a silicone sleeve to minimize metallic vibration/buzzing.
My checkbook, because it would be tremendously terrible of me to not pay the recording studio.
Not shown, because I forgot to pull it out:
Lotion (I currently prefer Gold Bond) because dry hands on slippery piano keys = lots and lots of slips.
It did occur to me that preparing for a recording session is basically the same as preparing for a long-haul flight. For one, I straight up wore my go-to plane outfit for comfort:
The centerpiece of my plane/recording outfit is my trusty Rag&Bone Miramar Joggers, which are super-comfy sweatpants (with generously sized pockets!) that are printed to look like jeans. They’re brilliant, I live in them, and they constantly fool people in person.
Between my comfort-focused wardrobe choices and the fact that I came with snacks and hydration tucked away in my go-to personal bag for flights, I totally felt like I was getting ready to get on a plane. And a recording session really is like a flight, in a way: the moment I walked into the studio, tucked away from the outside world, I ceased to know what time it was. Time itself became meaningless. There were no hours or minutes or seconds: there were only takes, so many of them.
At one point the engineer asked if I needed a break, and I wasn’t sure why he was asking, as surely it had only been a few minutes? Then my husband came in and said it had been more than an hour.
Performing vs. recording
Even though recording and performing look totally the same (I sit down at the piano, I play something I’ve practiced to death, someone hears it in some fashion), they’re totally different endeavors. Not to sound like a vampire, but when I perform for an audience, I get to feed off their energy, so there’s something wonderfully regenerative-feeling about the process; it’s kind of like when you have a really, really good conversation with someone you get on a deep level, and you both leave feeling amped up and full of joy. Recording, on the other hand, involves giving and giving and giving to an empty room and getting absolutely nothing back in the moment—it’s physically, emotionally, and mentally draining.
And if performing is a sprint, recording is a marathon. There’s something deliciously risky and freeing about giving a performance—you only have one shot, so there’s little margin for error, but at the same time, everything you do is immediately lost to the ether, so a split note here, a fumbled run there, doesn’t matter because as long as you maintain the line and the illusion, everyone’s going to have a good time. Recording requires at least one clean take of every note in the music, which completely changes your priorities and approach. In this week’s recording session, I had to play big cathartic climaxes over and over and over again, finding the balance between getting as clean a take as possible while also replicating the “I’m giving it my all” intensity so that the engineer would have enough material to work with.
I was also reminded of how much on-the-spot adaption and awkwardness recording requires. I’ve been trained to pedal to the room, so that in a “dry” space without much reverb or echo, my right foot on the damper pedal strategically bleeds the sound to create the illusion of more resonance and linearity. The recording studio is a very dry room by design, but I had to change up my pedaling on the spot and play more drily than I’d practiced because in a recording situation, you don’t want that resonance or bleeding, because it makes it harder to do edits, and reverb can be added in post.
I found myself musing on how recording sort of tests skills that are the complete opposite of performance. When performing a work from beginning to end, there’s a natural ebb and flow, a clear narrative that sounds cohesive in the moment. When I was recording multiple takes of individual passages, I had to start at odd segments and hit the same peaks and valleys at the same pacing, slowing and speeding up in the same way, even though it made no sense out of context—all so that things could be stitched together and sound like one coherent flow. I was surprised at how reliably I was able to crank out takes, which kind of goes against a lot of romantic ideals about how art should be made.
One of the greatest dismissals anyone can make of a classical musician is that they’re “robotic” or an “automaton”—even though the art form requires performers to practice hours and hours on end and be able to churn out technically refined passagework and painstakingly sculpted phrases, we also demand “freshness,” that illusion that the performance you’re watching and hearing is happening spontaneously in the moment. Really great studio recordings sound almost improvisatory, but unless everyone else besides me is a one-take wonder, these recordings are a lie. The track that sounds like one effortless performance is actually a polished artifice, a skillfully pieced quilt with invisible stitches made from hours of repeated attempts.
I used to think that my inconsistency in performance/recording was a sort of point of pride: I’m an artist, I can’t just churn out solid performances like a one-person musical factory! I’ve gotten stronger at this kind of thing, though, and I think about how legendary artists like Clara Schumann survived the perils of flash-in-the-pan Wunderkindism by proving that, year after year, they could deliver and deliver and deliver. It’s made me realize that consistency is its own kind of brilliance.
Also
In between pieces, I chatted with the recording engineer (a very lovely guy who, crucially, makes me feel supported and heard the entire time—recording is vulnerable, people) who, I cannot emphasize enough, I have not talked to since February 2020, and who does not follow me on any social media platforms or know this newsletter exists.
I asked him what he’d been up to in the past couple of years, he told me about some of his projects, and then he said, “What have you been up to, other than writing about orgasms at the LA Phil?”
That damn story, man—it’s still making the rounds.
The Connies will make you cry
The absolute best thing I’ve read all week—and possibly all month—is this delightful, heartwarming, amazing NYT piece by Connie Wang called “Why Are There So Many Asian American Women Named Connie?”
Connie Chung was trusted and respected — qualities that my mother herself had enjoyed in China. So when I picked my name, my mom readily acceded. What more could she hope for from her own Connie?
What my family didn’t know was that a version of the same scenario was playing out in living rooms and hospitals across the country. Asian American families from the late 1970s through the mid-’90s — mostly Chinese, all new immigrants — had considered the futures of their newborn daughters and, inspired by one of the few familiar faces on their TVs, signed their own wishes, hopes and ambitions onto countless birth certificates in the form of a single name: Connie.
[…]
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I’m part of a phenomenon: Generation Connie. By now, I’ve talked to dozens of Connies within this sisterhood, and learned we have a remarkable amount in common — that it is not by chance that our families and, in particular, our mothers, all gravitated toward the same name. We all have our own stories about how our families came to the United States, and why they chose the name they did. But we’re also part of a larger story: about the patterns that form from specific immigration policies, and the ripple effects that one woman on TV prompted just by being there, doing her job.
Seriously, you gotta read the whole thing. It’s so lovely and, spoiler alert, it ends with a meeting of Connies (including the photographer!) with the OG Connie Chung at the center.
That’s all for now—“Founding Member” subscribers, there’s a video of one of the full takes from the recording session coming your way! Thanks for reading and supporting, and see you next week! 🎹