Music too great to be forgotten
Emergent Ventures & the beginning
The application
My friend Holden Mui and I won Emergent Ventures this July! You can find the application here.
Here’s our answer (written from my perspective) to the “How do you describe your idea in a tweet?” question:
Holden Mui, current MIT math & music major, lacks the connections young conservatory composers have. So I’m performing Holden’s music and sharing it with the world. Most music is lost to time—but music this great deserves to be played, listened to, and loved.
Here’s our answer to the “What is one mainstream or "consensus" view that you absolutely agree with?” question:
Holden and I agree with the mainstream view that it is hard to make it as a musician.
Most musicians will not achieve fame or recognition. Most musicians will not make much money. Most music is rarely heard or appreciated.
And all this is true even if the music is truly great. Where would the St. Matthew’s Passion be today without a teenage Mendelssohn to revive it: how close are we to a world with far less Bach? What about Scooter Braun’s miraculous accidental discovery of a thirteen-year-old Justin Bieber? When, if ever, would we have recognized Lang Lang’s talent, if Andre Watts hadn’t gotten sick and needed a replacement a quarter-century ago at the Ravinia Festival? So much in music—no matter the genre—depends on factors that do not necessarily indicate talent or ability: connections, family wealth, luck.
Yet now music is the most democratized it’s ever been. YouTube tutorials; Spotify playlists; MuseScore arrangements; cheap electronic keyboards. Technological advances beget increased accessibility. From elementary schools to retirement homes, there is music everywhere.
It is hard to make it as a musician—but it might be easier than before.
Here’s part of our answer to the “Convince us that this is a great idea worth investing in” question, where I talk about a piece Holden wrote:
I see Poetry as a spark manifesting in a barren wasteland. For a twenty-minute instant, the spark flickers.
Prelude, the first movement (0:03), begins with an unsettling ostinato chord—wasteland—and is interrupted by a bass note—spark (0:12). Then come fragmented visions of the spark’s possibilities (0:54, 1:43, 2:45), foreshadowing (in reverse order) moments from later movements (14:05, 9:09, 5:51), ending in a feral, unrestrained climax (3:54).
The inner movements—Lament, Nocturne, Scherzo—are just as evocative and well-constructed. In order, they’re meditations on one, two, and three visions. For Lament, each melody (5:50 and 6:21, for example) develops the opening theme (4:36); for Nocturne, the two themes (8:13, 9:10) complement each other; and for Scherzo, the three themes (12:07, 12:45, 14:05) tease each other (16:01, 17:19) and unite to form a triumphant finale—as far removed as possible from—
the Postlude. The spark dies. All good things must come to an end.
I wrote more about Poetry here. One day, I will publish a full analysis on this blog. (He has written other pieces, but none for solo piano that are nearly as worth gushing about.)
Holden will be hosting a recital at MIT mid-May this year, in which I plan to perform roughly forty-five minutes of his compositions. We project that I will play
His cover of Moon River,
Other non-piano compositions will also be featured afterward. I hope to see some of you there!
The beginning
I’ve had a lot of fun (and a lot of complaining) playing Holden’s music, but I haven’t told people how it all started.
The first time I played something Holden wrote was early 2021.
That was the height of my “I want to write piano covers” era, which is still an on-and-off thing—I’ve been obsessed with Liquid Smooth recently and want to cover it. That was also the height of my “left-hand music” era—I’d recently played Scriabin op. 9 and taught a class on left-hand music for MIT HSSP.
I wrote a mediocre left-hand cover of All is Found and showed it to Holden, and he bet me a boba (or five dollars, I don’t remember) that he could write a better one for me in one night. That seemed like a win-win—either I’d get a boba (or an equivalent) or some really good music.
I took the bet. We hopped on Zoom for three hours, and I on-and-off watched as Holden scrawled notes in his iPad. By the end, he had a functional draft. And it was much better than mine.
But it also looked unplayable. I wasn’t convinced. Those jumps, at that speed? Quarter equals 76? Nonsense.
So I made another bet: no way he could actually play the cover. He sent me a recording two days later. It was clean enough.
I ended up injuring myself soon after—slept wrong, woke up with my entire right side in pain and almost immobilized—which was weirdly convenient timing, given I’d just been gifted a left-hand arrangement to work on. It took me about two weeks to learn and record (honestly, I surprised myself.) This was the final product.
(By the end, my right side was functional again too!)
And three years later—earlier this year—I finally got around to re-recording the cover on a real piano. I think this is some of my best playing on a purely technical level.
composition concert hype!!