🎹 sharon su

@doodlyroses

Classical pianist, recording artist, writer | she/her Website: sharonsu.com Biweekly newsletter: One of the “Three Musketeers of classical Bluesky” @violanorth.bsky.social

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🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· 22d

Zoom has informed me that it orchestrates now, big if true

Screenshot with text reading "Meet ZoomMate, Your AI teammate that searches, orchestrates, and completes work on your behalf"

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· 28d

I did not know that my life was missing a Fanny Hensel composer bust and then @henselpushers.bsky.social gave me one and now I can’t live without her

Photo of a miniature white bust of composer Fanny Hensel

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Jun 22

Amazing discussions happening in the classical radio chat

Screenshot of a comment in radio station Classical California's live chat, in which a user named RevSteve says "As a person with little musical ability and training, I do not pay attention to key. I will let the musicians deal with it."

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Jun 16

I found some info about the Armed Services edition, and this image which clearly states “This is the complete book—not a digest” but idk if “complete book” precludes it from having been edited Source: blogs.lib.unc.edu/ncm/2017/03/...

Image showing the armed services edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, where text along the bottom says “this is the complete book—not a digest”

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Jun 16

The way the bar of the “e” lines up perfectly with the color break, absolutely sublime

Closeup of the “e” on the cover, in which the horizontal bar of the e lies right on the border between purple and white.

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Jun 16

The semi-retired graphic designer in me is melting over how good this cover design is

Photo of my hand holding sheet music for Grazyna Bacewicz’ Sonata No. 2 for piano. The cover is full bleed purple with a wide white margin at the top, the name “bacewicz” in lower case is typeset in a gorgeous rounded serif typeface across the purple-white border, and text with the name of the piece in multiple languages is set in a clean sans-serif whose rounded ends echo the serif composer name, separated by clean repeated lines.

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Jun 14

I’m just super relieved that they didn’t have to make further revisions to this chalkboard

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Jun 5

This entire article is kind of amazing

Pretty soon it seemed Vanilla Ice was the only one left.
He said in an interview with The New York Times this week it was a shame everyone couldn't stop, collaborate and listen.

He lamented the whipsaw state of politics in 2026. "It's like everybody's got a fishing pole with a carrot, and you're the rabbit, and they're pulling it right, and pulling it left,' he said. "This country is not what it was in the 90s, man."
He added, "I don't vote, OK?"

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· May 28

Also someone replied to the video of me playing Florence Price here and I have been puzzling over it for way too long wondering if I’ve just suddenly become illiterate

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· May 21

This is so relatable. The quintessential Asian woman experience 😭

Chan said she has often faced resistance from orchestral musicians when they first meet her. She stands just over 5-foot-1, by her own account, and looks younger than her age, so musicians have a tendency not to take her completely seriously on first encounter.
"But then I say, 'OK, let's go, and the whispers stop," she said, with a smile. "They start to say, 'Oh, my God, she's serious."

[Photo of Elim Chan in action, in which, I’m not gonna lie, she totally looks like a high schooler]

Conductor Elim Chan, 39, has been named the new music director of the San Francisco Symphony, replacing Esa-Pekka Salonen after a two-year search.

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· May 8

The OG Jean Valjean really only had one name, Jean, but people would say “It’s Jean!” when they saw him and over time a mangled version of “It’s Jean!” became his surname hence “Jean Valjean” and I cannot believe Hugo created this level of lore for this name

Jean Valjean's father, Hugo explains, was also named Jean Valjean, and the "Valjean" likely came from people saying "Voila Jean!" ("There's Jean!") when they saw him, which got shortened over time into
"Valjean," meaning that Valjean's dad's name was basically French "John There's
John."

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· May 8

Jean Valjean was named for his father Jean and by an unnecessary coincidence his mother was named Jeanne and then they named their daughter Jeanne so everyone in the family was named Jean(ne) Valjean for no discernible reason lesmis.doodlyroses.com/2025/12/23/1...

So to recap, this is the Valjean family:
Dad: Jean Valjean
Mom: Jeanne Valjean
Daughter: Jeanne Valjean
Son: Jean Valjean
How is this considered a serious book.

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· May 8

Yeah because once you’ve practiced your little heart out and shown up to a gig with two people total in the audience, nothing can possibly hurt you

Headline that says “Study Reveals Musicians Don’t Experience Pain Like the Rest of Us”

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· May 2

Couldn’t make this up

What happened there is disputed.
Quasha told me the orchestra's players committee, an administrative body representing the musicians, invited her to work with them. The orchestra denies this, saying she asked if she could observe rehearsals. "It is a common practice that, upon request, conducting students are permitted to observe the orchestra's rehearsals from time to time," a representative for the Berlin Philharmonic said. Quasha appeared to be under the impression that she was being groomed for the Berlin
Philharmonic music directorship-a post that has eluded some of the world's best conductors. "I presume that they want to find someone to replace their chief conductor when he leaves in about ten years and wanted to shape the person themselves versus having to find someone," she told me. "And they wanted someone that had a business background, not a music background

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Apr 15

Not to be That Person, but in this caption did you mean Orion Miller? I went running off to Google to see if Orion Weiss did a heel turn and took up playing bass

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Apr 15

Goddammit now the Steinway Society is using AI to write their concert promo emails

Screenshot of an email from the Steinway Society in which the standard copy touting an artist’s credentials has been replaced with a list of bullet points headed with emoji in the exact style and format that ChatGPT typically uses.

What sets her apart:
3 An internationally celebrated career
• First Prize winner at the Concours
Géza Anda
• Performances at major venues including Berlin Philharmonie, Carnegie Hall, and Suntory Hall
Ip. A fearless and imaginative programmer
• Known for pairing beloved masterworks with rarely heard gems, creating recitals that feel both familiar and newly discovered
• Brings elegance, insight, and vivid storytelling to repertoire spanning Mozart to Gershwin
Virtuosity with depth and
connection
• Praised for her expressive sensitivity, tonal color, and dynamic stage presence
• Connects deeply with audiences, whether in intimate recitals or on the world's largest stages

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Apr 14

Wow first time I’ve seen a 0 used for fingering

Photo showing bars 63 and 64 of Brahms 118 2, in which, because a C# is being claimed by both hands, the right hand fingering suggests that the pianist play with finger number zero

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Apr 14

Hate to hand it to this man but “You merely Othered us Normies” is an incredible sentence

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Apr 14

Finally did the sensible thing and nuclear blocked but this was the original post

Post by mrtoads.bsky.social

I'm a "normie".
' I mean, I live with being like
all other Whiteys and Males and whatever label lazy thinkers want to use to create an Other category to hate, but "Normie"?
Really?
You can do better than that.

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Apr 9

This is so correct

Why is it that women have been composing music for centuries and yet we hear practically none of it in the ordinary rounds of modern-day concert life? People, by which I mean men, offer up various different answers to this question, and nearly all of them are bad-faith bullshit. One that I find especially galling is the argument that the music can't be all that good, because if it were it would already be in the canon. This is not only empirically false (the wisdom of canon formation is instantly disproven by Gounod's continued presence in our concert halls and opera houses) but a classic example of begging the question.

The truth is that the works of Clara Schumann and Louise Farrenc and Florence Price have always been judged — more or less a priori — to be Not Up To Male Standards. Over the years, that judgment rarely gets revisited because we don't hear the music enough, and we don't hear the music enough because the judgment of history assures us it's not worth revisiting. As Yossarian says, "That's some catch, that Catch-22." And in the meantime, there are reams of exciting music gathering dust while contemporary listeners, which is to say all of us, wind up the losers.

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Apr 3

How does Clara Schumann keep being the most relatable person ever. The struggle of not having a piano while traveling, the multiple explanation marks when you message your friend because you’re so excited to finally have a piano again

For part of her summer travels, Clara Schumann had not had a piano at her disposal; on 23 August she was finally able to inform her friend Brahms: "Now you can send more things again!!!",

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Apr 1

Anyway I have said this before and I’ll say it again, any competent wedding planner could have blown this farce out of the water www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/s...

Photo from the NYT article linked in post showing a big gray warehouse with a few sad Barbie props (flat pink house, patch of Astroturf, empty pink picnic blanket plopped on ground) as a photo backdrop

The event marketing had led Ms. Kerr to believe that the activities would be appropriate for adults, so she was surprised to find that the bike course consisted of "cones on the floor tied together" and a few children's bicycles with training wheels, she said.

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Apr 1

Enough of these events have happened (e.g. Wonka and Bridgerton events, Dash Con, obviously the OG Fyre Fest) that I think this entire genre of event failures is ripe for analysis

Screenshot of a photo taken from the article, showing a bunch of sad cheap plastic shelves and tables with various Barbie merch, labeled with signs printed on 8.5x11 printer paper, all in a gray concrete warehouse

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Mar 30

“Sharon what’s the best decision you’ve ever made with your newsletter, was it removing the paywall and making it pay-what-you-want or taking it off Substack” no it was hard-coding the font so I could have this

A super zoomed in screenshot showing a gorgeous uppercase Q in a serif typeface where the tail of the Q is so long that it’s lined up with the base of the cup of the o in the word “Quote”

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Mar 28

Even Mozart tried the subscriber-only content creator model and it didn’t work

Of the seventeen piano concertos Mozart composed in Vienna during his last decade, most were written for public performance, rather than publica-tion, though five would also appear in print during his lifetime. In 1783 Mozart set out to sell three piano concertos-K. 413, 414, and 415-directly to subscribers in handwritten copies but had only limited success. A few months later, he offered them to the music publisher Sieber in Paris, who apparently declined. The three concertos were finally published in Vienna by Artaria in March 1785. Artaria reprinted them periodically over the next several years.

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Mar 28

Guys I think this “Mozart” guy isn’t actually that good at music, he doesn’t even know which side of the notes the stems are supposed to go on

Photo I took of a fragment of Mozart’s original manuscript for his piano concerto no. 21. All the half notes above the middle line have stems on the right side instead of the left.

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Mar 28

Someone on here posted about the Mozart exhibit at the Morgan Library & Museum the other day and I would like to thank you for doing so

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Mar 25

Did you know there was a French military figure named Louis Bro

Colonel Louis Bros, Colonel of the 4th Lancers who led a famous charge at Waterloo

Portrait of a pretty dashing guy with an extremely rocking mustache

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Mar 25

Me: that doesn’t sound right Wikipedia:

After the Battle of Vitoria, Beethoven's friend Johann Nepomuk Maelzel talked him into writing a composition commemorating this battle that he could notate on his 'mechanical
orchestra', the panharmonicon, a contraption that was able to play many of the military band instruments of the day.

🎹 sharon su@doodlyroses· Mar 11

We’ve now moved on to Book 8, where Chapter 1 opens with more proof for my “Valjean is a cat” theory as well as a new unhinged way for me to analyze literature lesmis.doodlyroses.com/2026/03/11/6...