We were lucky to catch up with Sharon Su recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sharon thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

In over two decades of classical musical training I had never been taught to play any music by women, so several years ago I started doing research on historical women composers, particularly virtuosos who wrote concertpieces for piano, and I began performing and recording these works as a sort of professional experiment to see how audiences and listeners would respond to more gender-balanced programs. (The answer is that people are overwhelmingly receptive to these pieces.)

Around 2019 I picked up a solo piano sonata by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel—her brother, Felix Mendelssohn, is more famous to us now although the two siblings were renowned back in their day—and while I was playing through it I was really struck by how much it didn’t seem purely like a solo piano work. Right from the start there are all these deliberate decisions to make the piano imitate an orchestra, and there are all these curious moments where there’s a kind of call-and-response between a fuller orchestra-like texture and a more solo-pianistic sound, which made me wonder if this piece had originated in Fanny’s mind as a concerto—a work for orchestra and piano. There are also a lot of similarities and what feel like references to Felix’s piano concerto in the same key, which also tipped me off that this sonata was more than it seemed. Because of societal expectations about class and gender in the nineteenth century, it would not have been acceptable or logistically sensible for Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel to write this large-scale orchestral work and publicly premiere it as a soloist, so my theory is that she took these big ideas and packed them into this rather remarkable work for solo piano, presenting it as a sonata.

I took this theory to Twitter on a lark, and immediately people started to collectively brainstorm. A composer friend, Patricia Wallinga, who’s a very gifted orchestrator, offered to arrange the sonata for full orchestra and piano if an organization was willing to back it; one ensemble volunteered to take on supporting and premiering the work, and other orchestras started jumping on board. I was honestly so floored that people believed in my wild idea so fully that they were willing to do the work to shepherd this work from imagination to reality.

We were discussing numbers and reaching out to music directors at the beginning of 2020, and then the pandemic hit. I don’t know if people outside of classical music realize how devastated the industry was, and how the repercussions are still hitting us now. When the lead on this project started picking the pieces back up and getting the ball rolling again, the landscape looked very different; a lot of the orchestras and organizations that had been interested had gutted budgets from several years of suspended or minimal ticket sales and fundraising and were being very cautious about commissions. I also spoke to music directors who said they now had a backlog of contracts they were legally obligated to work through: all the artists who’d been contracted for 2020-2021 for concerts that didn’t happen, plus the ones who’d been contracted out for future seasons, so fitting new things onto programs for the upcoming season would be difficult. There have been so many leadership changes at so many organizations that a lot of conversations we were having pre-pandemic have just dropped off because people are no longer working at the org we were speaking to.

Through all of this the core team of people working on this project have been continuing to believe in the concerto and working their butts off to make it happen even with these hurdles, and in fact more people have come on to support it, which absolutely floors me. The concerto is now scheduled to be premiered in Boston in June, and we’re having discussions with other ensembles interested in performing it. I think the thing keeping everyone going is the feeling that this project is bigger than all of us: even though women have been composing music since the beginning of time, the classical music canon is so male-dominated, and it’s a tragedy that gifted women like Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel didn’t get the same opportunities and legacies as their brothers and husbands. Turning this ambitious solo piano work into the big orchestral piece I suspect it wants to be is a small way to honor Fanny’s talent and to remind people that marginalized creators are not a new development: we have always been here.

Sharon, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a classical pianist and writer. Below are 1) the “short bio” from my website [https://www.sharonsu.com/press-kit/], and 2) the “about me” page from my Substack newsletter [https://doodlyroses.substack.com/about].

SHORT BIO

Sharon Su, noted for being “both personable and insanely talented,” is an acclaimed pianist and recording artist. In addition to performing a wide range of historical and contemporary composers as well as premiering new works, she has also received praise for her writing and lecturing on issues in music; in 2018 the Washington Post’s classical music critic Anne Midgette called her piece on the challenges of performing non-canonic composers “illuminating,” and her perspective on representation in the classical music world is frequently cited by other writers. She has been covered in publications like the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Time, the Huffington Post, the National Sawdust Log, and the San Francisco Classical Voice, and she has written articles published by VAN Magazine.

Ms. Su has been praised for the “breathtaking clarity and passion” of her 2019 recording of Clara Schumann’s Piano Sonata in G Minor; in 2020 she released recordings of études by Cécile Chaminade and Louise Farrenc, with the latter praised for its “compelling performance.” She is currently preparing for a tour next season premiering a piano concerto adapted from Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Sonata in G Minor with multiple American symphonies.

Ms. Su studied with Yoshikazu Nagai, Gideon Rubin, Frank Wiens, Rex Cooper, and Marina Grudskaya. She has also been advised by celebrated concert artists Joanne Polk, Ian Jones, Inna Faliks, Stephen Spooner, Chun-Chieh Yen, Hong Xu, Enrico Elisi, James Giles, and Luiz de Moura Castro. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she recently moved to Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and their cat.

ABOUT ME

I’m prone to fits of writing about the arts and telling Extremely Online versions of music history. Sometimes I get mildly famous for being moderately funny, which may not be a marker of my comic genius so much as it is a reflection of the low, low expectations that people have in terms of classical musicians having any sense of humor.

You may have seen me on Twitter or Instagram (@doodlyroses on both—I picked this dumb username as a teenager and I guess I’m stuck with it now). I’ve been featured/interviewed in publications like the LA Times, SF Chronicle, and VAN Magazine. As a pianist I’ve performed all over the world and can be heard on your streaming platform of choice. I’ve written some popular pieces here, on my blog, and for VAN Magazine. You may also have seen my social media posts in Time, BBC, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, etc. because I’ve gone viral for the weirdest things and I don’t know how to make it stop.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I’ve learned so much from the past couple years of working that I feel like I could write a whole book of unsolicited advice. I think the first concept that aspiring musicians absolutely need to know is that classical music is not a meritocracy. You are not necessarily going to get anywhere purely based on your talent or even your work ethic, because like any other industry, connections are everything and in a chaotic world, luck can be everything. And it’s really unfortunate, but first-generation musicians are always going to have a much harder time making it than people from families who know the unspoken institutional rules of classical music. The flip side of that is that if you recognize that talent isn’t the only thing that matters, you can leverage your other skills and qualities. You don’t have to be the most talented musician in the room to be successful—there will always be people who are better than you are, but that doesn’t mean there’s no hope for you. You just have to figure out what you have to offer the world.

I think it’s also really critical to get rid of this expectation that if you’re a musician, your whole personality has to revolve around music. I think that’s part of why some young musicians get prematurely burnt out and jaded—I know people who got disenchanted with music in their teens and early twenties and ended up without any other identity to cling to, which is just really tragic. I really do think you should be a whole person outside of music, and it’s okay to be into non-classical music and non-music media and pop culture and whatever else floats your boat. The world is full of so many fascinating things for your brain to chew on, you know?

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I read a lot of advice for “doing social media” if you’re a creator and artist and, to be very frank, I don’t follow much of it.

One thing that really bothers me is the approach you’re supposed to take to doing social media: you’re supposed to post regularly, identify what gets the most engagement, and spend your time crafting more posts with the elements that got you that engagement. I totally get how that’s a sure-fire way to grow your follower count and reach, but it also seems like a recipe for becoming a little dead inside. No offense if this is what you want to do and if it works for you, but it’s just not me. I like who I am as a person who, as they say, contains multitudes, and I have felt the siren song of letting yourself be shaped by what people want from you online. For a couple of years I got a lot of followers through doing funny relatable memes about classical music, and posting concise little hot takes with a little bit of moral outrage sprinkled in, and noticed that things like that do really well. Then I realized that I was getting into the habit of thinking in memes and hot takes and thought, oh my god, social media is actually reshaping the way I think, and I hate it. I could see the logical endpoint of all of this, which is that I would just become a one-dimensional soundbite of a person.

I’ve made a conscious decision not to pursue social media growth at all costs, and that means I’m okay with not having the enormous follower count that makes people take notice. I only post when I feel like posting, which means I could go days or weeks not posting anything. I don’t participate in discourse if I don’t feel like it’s worth my time or mental energy. I post random esoteric things that I personally find funny or interesting even if I know fully that it’s not going to get a lot of likes and shares. When the urge strikes me I also write long threads that are me just thinking out loud or working through something and they’re not necessarily packaged to be punchy or easily shareable.

The result of this approach means I have an audience I care about more that seems to care about me right back. I’ve had moments where stuff has gone viral and my mentions are full of strangers going lavishing hyperbolic praise on me, and that all feels very empty after a while. The people who have stuck around following me are invested in me as a person, they’re willing to explore tangents with me, and I end up having really thoughtful discussions and feedback about the things I post. It’s longer, slow growth, but it feels way more meaningful to me than having hundreds of thousands of followers who just want free relatable content from me but don’t really care about who I am as a person.

Social media is ultimately an environment where I am a product and someone is making advertising money off the free content I’m giving the platform, so it’s hard and maybe fully impossible to do it thoughtfully in a way that is fully true to yourself. I’d argue that taking a more thoughtful approach leads to more meaningful work; a couple of years ago, someone I look up to reached out to me to write professionally for a publication I respect, and just the little bit of writing I’ve done with them so far has done more for my career than what I would accomplish on social media alone. And as I encounter more people I respect and look up to in the industry, I keep finding that a lot of them have actually heard of me and remember specific things I’ve written—these are things that didn’t necessarily get a lot of engagement, but they reached a few people who mattered. My advice for anyone who doesn’t want to lose themselves in performing for the algorithm would be to know yourself and your values and constantly check in on yourself about whether what you’re doing is really true to you or not.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sharonsu.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doodlyroses/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/doodlyroses/
• Other: https://doodlyroses.substack.com

Image Credits
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