How I Write
Below I have annotated an essay I wrote in December 2023. If you hover over words and they turn gray, you can click on them and an annotation explaining my thought process will pop up on the right. I do recommend reading the essay without annotations first, though! I wrote this essay because I was in the midst of a difficult college consulting season, and I wanted to see how my students felt. If for some silly reason I had been forced to once again undergo the American application process, this would have been my Common App. Enjoy! Why play music written by living friends rather than dead strangers? Well, you can cuss them out to their faces. Honestly, Holden deserved it all. His five-movement piano suite Poetry was twenty-three minutes of his various idiosyncrasies, which often bordered on insanity—and I was its first (and so far only!) victim. Triple-octave jumps at the tempo marking “≥176”; multiple lines notated in four staves (the standard being two); a five-minute postlude compri
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