🎹 sharon su
Classical pianist, recording artist, writer | she/her
Website: sharonsu.com
Biweekly newsletter: buttondown.com/doodlyroses
One of the “Three Musketeers of classical Bluesky”
— @violanorth.bsky.social
- A very, very good piece, written by one of the best
- The Washington Post has only a single arts critic left - everyone else got fired today, along with all three arts editors. (There are still a couple of excellent arts reporters.) I was so upset I dusted off my blog to have my say: annemidgette.com/blog/f/a-req...
- Arts writing may seem frivolous but good criticism teaches us how to use critical thinking in subjective art, how to contextualize it within history/politics, and how to model that kind of thinking to other things
- It also, and I consider this *hugely* important, keeps us aware of the artmaking going on around us that we might not otherwise know about, and keeps our horizons broad and our minds curious
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View full threadWhat’s your endgame having all the money in the world in a world where your money does no good??? Absolutely embarrassing levels of intellectual bankruptcy
- Was at a jazz gig and the pianist’s iPad the entire time was open to iMessages where the setlist had clearly been texted to him
- Classical and jazz pianists are really not the same
- Can barely wrap my mind around how insulting it is that Spotify made a "mental health hotline" for its artists to use instead of, idk, paying and supporting us and respecting us as people 🤷♀️
- Spotify making a mental health hotline for artists
- imho the “art made by bad person = bad art” attitude is just a repackaged version of the “beauty is a manifestation of moral goodness” fallacy
- First newsletter of 2026 is out—I somehow started with horses and ended on why Schubert used a six flat key signature in my favorite impromptu. Don't ask me how I got from point A to point B, it just happened like that buttondown.com/doodlyroses/...
- Sometimes I read back what I’ve written and genuinely can’t tell if it comes off smart or deranged and that’s when I hit send and walk away
- “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can” music.apple.com/us/album/one...
- Wasn’t sure how I felt about this album when it came out but I keep returning to it and going deeper and deeper and going oh, I see, I can’t live without this album now, that’s cool
- I only just remembered that it’s only been a year since the fires in LA, and I’m weirdly glad I recorded so many of my feelings about it in the moment because I reread this and realized so much of this, vivid as it was at the time, has since been repressed in my mind buttondown.com/doodlyroses/...
- I’ve been thinking on that unreal stretch of time while watching Minneapolis at a remove—it’s not the same thing, but the feeling of crisis and community dredges up a lot of buried memories and emotions (lotta heartbreak, love, and rage)
- Got a phishing email from a Van Cliburn finalist, that’s a new one
- I have never communicated with this pianist in my life and the email went to my personal, not professional email, which means either 1) I somehow ended up in this person’s address book for mystery reasons or 2) the scammers are specifically targeting pianists
