The hollowing-out of my life
Endnote, part I (words)
On May 14th, 2025, I performed four piano pieces in my friend Holden Mui’s composition recital. I consider playing Holden’s music to be the most important project of my life (so far.) For more information, refer to this essay and my blog post on our Emergent Ventures grant, or my program notes: Moon River, Serenade & Toccata, Poetry.
Parts II and III to come. Expect additional words and links to Spotify & YouTube recordings.
November 2024
I quit my job.
I’m unhappy. I dislike my work. It’s a customer-facing role in healthcare software, so it matters, and it can’t be automated, but a decent LLM could do much of the daily drudgery. I tell my coworkers I’m planning to pursue a “personal project”—Holden and I received a grant to perform and record his piano compositions.
I don’t tell them that I think some of Holden’s music compares to the masterworks of the greats. I don’t tell them that playing his music makes me feel like my two decades of classical piano training was worth it. I don’t tell them about Moon River’s sparkling octaves, Serenade’s stubborn I love you’s. I don’t tell them about Poetry—Poetry, which neatly compresses the universe into twenty-five minutes of ecstasy and emptiness and everything in between; Poetry, so special and singular; Poetry, which I love most.
Some truths—“personal project”—feel woefully inadequate, to the point of falsehood. The personal project I’m pursuing is my entire life.
December 2024
I finish my graduate school applications.
So it would be more accurate to say I want it to be my entire life. Having worked in healthcare software, and having earned a math degree, I plan to study a masters in biostatistics. I can never be just a musician.
I call Yan, the director of SPARC, and we discuss how I ought to spend my next few months. He recommends me a textbook: All of Statistics. He endorses my idea of locking away my phone when I’m working, either on music or on math. He makes me feel I’m not insane for wanting out of my job.
I draw up plans for the next half year. Travel from Wisconsin (where I worked, and where I still live) to Boston every few weeks, funded by Emergent Ventures, to work in-person with Holden, who’s a senior at MIT. Get through as much of All of Statistics (and some other math textbooks) as possible. Reach five consecutive pull-ups, then more. Read literature. Aim for a 1:40 half marathon. Set up coworking calls with friends. Set up non-coworking calls with friends.
January 2025
I stop coming to lessons with repertoire other than Holden’s music.
Every two weeks, I bring Professor Taylor a piece. Every two lessons—so once a month—I remind myself you should be a good pianist. Good pianists diversify. Good pianists learn Beethoven sonatas and Chopin etudes. Good pianists ask their teachers for repertoire recommendations. Good pianists follow through.
I cosplay as a good pianist, asking Professor Taylor whether he likes this Bach piece, what parts of my technique need the most targeted improvement. In October, I bring a Brahms intermezzo; in December, the prelude from Bach BWV 874. I know how it feels when music clings close to my heart, and chasms separate me and Brahms and Bach. Before those lessons, I cram notes and hope meaning will emerge from my fingers.
By January, I stop cosplaying. I alternate bringing Toccata and Scherzo to lessons. Professor Taylor says Scherzo’s structure—“A, B, C, A, C, A, C, B?”—scares him. (It’s more nuanced than that.) His uncertainty aside, he gives me invaluable fingering advice—including a horrid middle-finger-over-pinky crossover at breakneck speed that proves to be the only consistent option.
By April, he’s telling me the piece is wonderful. It grew on him, like it grew on me, and like it grew on my teacher at Yale, Professor Parisot, who confessed to singing the melody from “B” in the shower.
The world can decide whether I’m a good pianist. I’ve decided I’m a great obsessive.
February 2025
I don’t renew my gym membership.
I enjoy working out, but my apartment’s two-room fitness center will suffice. It has dumbbells and a cable station with a pull-up bar.
It’s strange, but I’m obsessed with pull-ups. I watch many, many, many YouTube videos. Too many. I do pull-ups so often I learn my resulting skin calluses by heart: a ridge under the middle finger and the pinky, two under the ring finger. Siva hears about my first pull-up ever, March 2024; Janet receives a clip every time I hit a personal record; the SPARC counselor group chat gets updates about the stiffness of my wrists and fingers.
I don’t need lots of gym equipment for fitness. Just a motivator—when my chin clears the bar, I feel strong—and by April 2025, having cast aside most of my workout routine, I reach nine consecutive pull-ups.
By then other obsessions take over. I don’t do another pull-up until after the recital.
March 2025
I resolve to say good-bye to SPARC.
At the end of SPARC 2024, I said I’d take a hiatus—that was my sixth SPARC-like camp in two years. This spring, I waver. I don’t have summer plans. Another staff member tells me about an incoming camper with a rare combination of depth and fluidity of thought. I dream about running barefoot through sprinklers in bouts of midnight madness, about harmonizing Moon River with Janet or Maria, about teaching another cohort the wonders of exercise, or anything else that might seem similarly out-of-place at a rationality program.
The camps FABRIC and SPARC took chances on me when very few others would. I applied to a FABRIC camp in 2022, didn’t solve the technical question, and arrived half an hour late for the half-hour interview; at camp, I walked out of a class spewing profanities about the discussion topic. (Why do we believe the sky is blue? Well, what is the sky? What do you mean by blue? What do you mean by “is”? Do we believe the sky is blue? Are we—God, shut up, the sky is blue because I fucking looked outside and saw that it was blue!)
One of the instructors, David—in a move I can describe only as so David—observed and thought Andrew is vocal, which is good for admissions decision-making, and chose me for the next SPARC camp’s admissions committee and junior counselor role. (David, thank you for believing in me in ways that no other adult ever has.) Five JC stints later, I attribute most of the blessings in my life to these organizations: half my closest friends, my renewed ambition, and more prosaically, my Emergent Ventures grant and my acceptance to Harvard’s biostatistics masters program—tuition-free! (Yan wrote me a recommendation letter.)
So why leave?
At the Emergent Ventures unconference, early March, I have long conversations with Lydia, in which I construct the narrative of my life. Teaching and mentorship weigh me down—suboptimally-spent summers at the Breakthrough Collaborative and Art of Problem Solving; college consulting clients who keep me up until dawn; camp alumni I care for in ways that take an emotional toll. I am still, in many ways, so, so young and inexperienced. I should be seeking advice, not dispensing it.
Camp gave me so much, and for now, I’ve given back what I’m capable of giving back. So it won’t be 2025, and 2026 seems unlikely, too. While visiting Chicago, I tell Carissa this: I need to learn more, see more of the world, pursue and complete more projects I can be proud of. Only then should I return.
David wrote me a sweet goodbye post almost a year ago:
I hope they can go on to pursue new and beautiful things that would delight and fulfill them. As an administrator of SPARC, an institution that cares about positive impact in the world, I don’t even have to question whether their work would be positively impactful. I have come to trust their values and discernment over the years of working with them.
New and beautiful things—music this beautiful, written within the past half-decade, fits this criterion. Delight and fulfill—understatements. Positively impactful—if I leave but one scratch in the record of history, let it be these forty-five minutes of music I loved and treasured above all else this year.
April 2025
I leave Wisconsin.
First goes my Steinway. My mom and dad sell our Virginia home’s baby grand, battered by decades of loving use topped off by a year of my teenage sibling’s ear-shattering, string-snapping Prokofiev. We hire Modern Piano Moving to take my piano from Wisconsin to Virginia: William, a much better pianist than me, deserves an upgrade. The movers, big men wielding black blankets and tarps and straps, flip my piano onto its side, remove the legs, and hoist it onto a dolly. I go with them through the long hallway, around the corner, past the floor-to-ceiling windows, into the elevator, down to the first floor, across the lobby’s mailboxes and couches, through the vestibule, out the front door, into daylight. I wave goodbye to them, the two men and the piano. When I return, I’m struck by a sense of vastness. An entire living room seems to have manifested in my apartment.
Then my furniture. I take nightstands and foldable wooden mini-tables and leave them outside my door. I put up a post-it note: Free to take! Excess cleaning equipment and nonperishable food goes outside, too. Four Ziploc bags filled with neatly folded napkins; a stuffed animal that’d been buried in the back of a drawer, so unloved that by the next day I forget its species. Half of it disappears over the course of three nights.
Finally, one of Carissa’s friends asks their family to help me clean up the rest. I give them binders, notebooks, plates, cups, clothes, pots, an ottoman, a desk, a rug, the plastic chairs and table on the deck outside, my mattress and bedframe. They help me dispose of everything else. I will always be grateful to them.
May 2025
I shed the rest of my life.
In December, I made plans—statistics, literature, math, exercise. But now there is the recital, May 14th, and there is what I need to do to prepare for it. Nothing else exists.
Having moved into Boston, I don’t buy sheets yet: I have a mattress protector and a sleeping bag, and I can’t be bothered until after the recital. I’m so wrapped up in music that I lose two beloved pieces of clothing—my red Oxford hoodie, picked up at my first FABRIC camp, and my WARP jacket, picked up at my last.
I settle into a routine.
I wake up close to noon and walk to Harvard or MIT, looping Moon River or listening to pianist Jeremy Denk’s memoir Every Good Boy Does Fine. I sneeze, a lot; it’s allergy season. Upon arrival I find my way to the piano practice rooms. I work for as long as I can concentrate, anywhere between three to five hours, sometimes broken into smaller chunks. I might or might not eat a meal. I text a friend and ask if they’d be willing to act as a performance guinea pig and listen to me run through the pieces.
I walk from Cambridge back to Boston, and on Harvard Bridge I make a joke to myself: the real moon river is when I cross the Charles under the light of the moon. At my apartment, I write about Holden’s music. I read through instructions on creating program notes and decide the instructions and resulting products are slop. I make plans to do things my own way. Dredge up painful memories of Irena for Lament. Set my alarm for five o’clock to study the sunrise for Nocturne. Watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s, then rewatch half the scenes. Listen to Audrey Hepburn sing Moon River a hundred times, and compare her with singers who ought to be her superiors—Streisand, Sinatra, Andy Williams. I get in bed and go to sleep.
I wake up and walk to Harvard or MIT, Hepburn or Denk in my ear. I sneeze, a lot. I practice piano, anywhere between three to five hours. I might or might not eat a meal. I play for Espen, or Lily, or Maria, or Holden.
I walk back to Boston, and I joke to myself the real moon river is when I cross the Charles under the light of the moon. I think about Irena, or look at the pictures I took at dawn, or transcribe dialogue from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I conclude that Henry Mancini was correct: Hepburn sings Moon River best. I write program notes. I fall asleep.
I wake up, walk, listen to Hepburn or Denk. I sneeze. I practice. I eat, or not. I mock-perform. I walk back. I repeat my shitty joke. I think, study, analyze, write. I sleep.
Wake up, listen, sneeze, practice, eat (maybe), mock-perform, walk, joke, write, sleep. Wake up, practice, write, sleep. Wake up, practice, write, sleep.
Practice, write. Practice, write. Practice, write […]
May 14th, 2025, ~8:05 PM
I’ve quit my job; completed my grad school applications; dropped music by non-Holden composers; let my gym membership expire; committed to leaving SPARC; moved out of my apartment and gave away half my belongings; stopped studying statistics, literature, math; set daily pilgrimages to Harvard and MIT as my exercise routine; published my program notes.
With nothing left but Holden’s music, I begin the recital.
May 14th, 2025, ~9 PM
I finish the hollowing-out of my life.
The previous night, I called Ava asking about beta-blockers. She said they might help with the physical manifestations of nervousness—twitching, shakiness. I didn’t take them. I claimed performing didn’t affect me like that.
My body rejected that claim. Moon River was by my standards sloppy, uneven. I rushed through Fugue. I stopped mid-phrase for a moment in Serenade; Toccata was a blur. I walked off to applause—next was a solo flute piece—feeling awful. In the back room, the other musicians, mostly performers for the piece written for chamber orchestra, told me I was doing great. It didn’t help.
Five minutes later I walked back onstage to play Poetry. I’ve spent more time playing Poetry than any other piece of music. I even performed it at my own senior recital two years ago. Poetry is home. Prelude, Lament, Nocturne, Scherzo—the movements felt fluid and familiar.
I reach the climax of the suite, those crashing chords at the end of Scherzo—
Modulations whizzing by, chords zigzagging from register to register, the finale, a climactic practical joke, crashes into—
—and drop to a sudden pianississimo.
—a distant
[ecstasy]
dissonance—
Postlude holds Poetry together. It consists of a single chord—the opening chord of Prelude—repeated seventy-five times, interrupted only by a few scattered upper-register notes from the endings of Scherzo, Nocturne, and Lament. It represents a bare, painful return to reality.
I begin playing Postlude. It poses no technical challenge beyond that of counting to seventy-five, so I have time to reflect.
I think, therefore, about the hollowing-out of my life. To my pile of discards I now add treasures: Moon River, Fugue, Serenade and Toccata, Prelude, Lament, Nocturne, performed, finished, set aside. In this moment, they exist as much as my statistics textbook or my apartment in Wisconsin do. With great reluctance, I let go of Scherzo, too; Scherzo, so brilliant and mercurial, which Holden told me was dedicated to me “because it’s a funny piece, and you’re funny”; Scherzo, which leads the listener to the edge of ecstatic resolution and rips it away.
The symmetry does not escape me. Postlude is a piece about a hollowed-out reality. An idealized version of Postlude is that chord repeated not seventy-five times but forever. Using bigger muscles increases your consistency, Professors Parisot and Taylor told me: I freeze my fingers in place, embrace the tension, attempt to play from my arms and shoulders and back. I drink in the harmony. I feel it resonate in my chest. I listen with intensity, as if I’ve been starved of sound for years and will be soon after, too.
On chord seventy-four, I slow my counting. There’s a fermata. Silently, I start to tear up.
I play chord seventy-five and listen to it die a slow, winding death, different frequencies dominating throughout the chord’s existence. I sit until I can no longer hear anything at all, then grasp the keys for another ten seconds. I never want to let go.
The audience gives me half a minute of applause. I retreat to the back room and find myself hunched over, gripping the staircase, too weak to stand.
It’s over, I tell myself. It’s done, it’s finished, you’re done, you’re finished. I repeat the words in my head until they lose all meaning. Anything to fill the emptiness.
Epilogue: Late May
I call Carissa. It’s a few hours past midnight. She asks me how the recital went. I tell her that there are two answers.
One of them: Moon River was pretty average, Fugue was terrible, Serenade and Toccata was not good, but Poetry went great. The other: as I played Postlude, I thought about the hollowing-out of my life—here I go on a long tangent, with plenty of stories and specifics—and how it mirrored the music I was playing.
She asks me how I could be so single-minded. I think, not to generate new thoughts, but rather to assemble old ones. If I think that Holden’s music compares to music from the past masters, I say, the only reasonable, rational way forward is for me to perform and record it as best I can. And I do think that Holden’s music is simply too great to be forgotten. I recognize in myself the same insanity that drives the most fervent evangelists and proselytizers: true belief.
I think I’m one of the luckiest people in the world. How many people ever have a chance to believe in something so strongly, then make it a reality?
This blog post is dedicated to Holden Mui.
I really liked the narrative structure of this post!
yay andrew :)