Liner Notes #4: The Value of Revisiting Work
Hello and welcome back to a very belated Liner Notes. I am very late on this, and I'm sorry.
I had originally begun drafting this in late August, when I had a few days to think about things I wanted to put in this mailing letter/news list. I'd actually intended to draft this earlier than August, when I was fresh off watching the Van Cliburn competition finals, but I had gig after gig, and my life was a comedy of errors, and here we are in November. This edition is not all about revisiting work, but I decided to keep the title to remind me of my shame.
Oftentimes in music, you think you know a piece or a song inside and out. You've spent so many hours learning and honing and listening, mapping out your emotional choreography or getting the chord chart settled in your chest, next to your heart, where it can't leave. You perform your piece or your gig or your set of gigs, then put the piece down for a month, a year, a decade. And then suddenly, when you hear it again, you find something new. The piece becomes fresh and exciting. It's the joy of discovery and the hit of nostalgia. It's especially potent when the piece is something like the Rach 3, which millions of people the world over know and love.
I've listened to many, many recordings of this piece. When I was a teenager and dreaming of playing (and teaching) big rep, I spent a summer at piano camp with my Discman headphones on, falling asleep to the recording of Rachmaninoff playing his third concerto. I thought I knew this piece well enough for someone who's never managed to learn the entire thing.
And then along came this eighteen-year-old wunderkind from South Korea, Yunchan Lim, whose intense preparation but youthful approach breathed fresh life into this piece. On recommendation from a friend, I listened to the recording (https://youtu.be/DPJL488cfRw). Partway through, I texted him: "Holy fucking shit. I think he's playing from a different score than the rest of us." Even in this recording, which some commenters on YouTube have said is of fairly terrible quality, I heard a variety of colors and textures, new details I hadn't considered before, and an enjoyment of the things I find fun when playing Rachmaninoff (no one does descending chromatic lines the way Rachmaninoff does, and that's a fact). It engendered admiration in me and a renewed love of the piece after becoming disillusioned with it, having seen it on symphony schedules year after year.
These feelings are, we hope, what we get when we revisit books we love, but present too is the fear that the book won't live up to our expectations of it. Sometimes books do, and we find in them things we're shocked we never saw before. Er, and sometimes, in music, we find a wrong note we've been playing for two decades. I won't tell you what piece. This is what I hope I find each time I have to go back and reread words I wrote. I've had to read the manuscript of Bitter Medicine so many times; writers, you understand this pain. I actually just got an email back from an author who said she didn't even know, at this point, who was who anymore, she was that deep in the process, and as her editor, I really, really sympathized with her. It's my job to help her find her way out of the brambles and back onto the road so she can once again be surprised and pleased by something she wrote.
I laughed at a joke I forgot I wrote on my last pass through Bitter Medicine, so that's good news. There's a U-shaped curve when it comes to revisiting your own work (I certainly hope that one day I can listen to my graduate recital recording, which was well over a decade ago, but I doubt it). It feels pretty decent to be on the ascending slope of that curve.
In other news, Bitter Medicine garnered itself a Publisher's Weekly starred review (https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-61696-384-2), to my great shock, and has been picking up some very kind words from Sierra Simone, Annalee Newitz, and Rebecca Roanhorse. Yeah, I'm still waiting for that one to sink in. Not too shabby, eh?
What I've been listening to:
- The SPY X FAMILY opening and endings because I am obsessed with this anime
- Shubh Saran, "Postradition" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIlisBa8blA
- A bunch of French and Mandarin podcasts
Until next time.
I had originally begun drafting this in late August, when I had a few days to think about things I wanted to put in this mailing letter/news list. I'd actually intended to draft this earlier than August, when I was fresh off watching the Van Cliburn competition finals, but I had gig after gig, and my life was a comedy of errors, and here we are in November. This edition is not all about revisiting work, but I decided to keep the title to remind me of my shame.
Oftentimes in music, you think you know a piece or a song inside and out. You've spent so many hours learning and honing and listening, mapping out your emotional choreography or getting the chord chart settled in your chest, next to your heart, where it can't leave. You perform your piece or your gig or your set of gigs, then put the piece down for a month, a year, a decade. And then suddenly, when you hear it again, you find something new. The piece becomes fresh and exciting. It's the joy of discovery and the hit of nostalgia. It's especially potent when the piece is something like the Rach 3, which millions of people the world over know and love.
I've listened to many, many recordings of this piece. When I was a teenager and dreaming of playing (and teaching) big rep, I spent a summer at piano camp with my Discman headphones on, falling asleep to the recording of Rachmaninoff playing his third concerto. I thought I knew this piece well enough for someone who's never managed to learn the entire thing.
And then along came this eighteen-year-old wunderkind from South Korea, Yunchan Lim, whose intense preparation but youthful approach breathed fresh life into this piece. On recommendation from a friend, I listened to the recording (https://youtu.be/DPJL488cfRw). Partway through, I texted him: "Holy fucking shit. I think he's playing from a different score than the rest of us." Even in this recording, which some commenters on YouTube have said is of fairly terrible quality, I heard a variety of colors and textures, new details I hadn't considered before, and an enjoyment of the things I find fun when playing Rachmaninoff (no one does descending chromatic lines the way Rachmaninoff does, and that's a fact). It engendered admiration in me and a renewed love of the piece after becoming disillusioned with it, having seen it on symphony schedules year after year.
These feelings are, we hope, what we get when we revisit books we love, but present too is the fear that the book won't live up to our expectations of it. Sometimes books do, and we find in them things we're shocked we never saw before. Er, and sometimes, in music, we find a wrong note we've been playing for two decades. I won't tell you what piece. This is what I hope I find each time I have to go back and reread words I wrote. I've had to read the manuscript of Bitter Medicine so many times; writers, you understand this pain. I actually just got an email back from an author who said she didn't even know, at this point, who was who anymore, she was that deep in the process, and as her editor, I really, really sympathized with her. It's my job to help her find her way out of the brambles and back onto the road so she can once again be surprised and pleased by something she wrote.
I laughed at a joke I forgot I wrote on my last pass through Bitter Medicine, so that's good news. There's a U-shaped curve when it comes to revisiting your own work (I certainly hope that one day I can listen to my graduate recital recording, which was well over a decade ago, but I doubt it). It feels pretty decent to be on the ascending slope of that curve.
In other news, Bitter Medicine garnered itself a Publisher's Weekly starred review (https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-61696-384-2), to my great shock, and has been picking up some very kind words from Sierra Simone, Annalee Newitz, and Rebecca Roanhorse. Yeah, I'm still waiting for that one to sink in. Not too shabby, eh?
What I've been listening to:
- The SPY X FAMILY opening and endings because I am obsessed with this anime
- Shubh Saran, "Postradition" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIlisBa8blA
- A bunch of French and Mandarin podcasts
Until next time.
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