My own

To perform classical music is an act of courage. It says, whether the musician knows it or not, that the musician believes they can add something, anything, to the existing interpretations, recordings, performances, no matter how many there are, and no matter who they are—a woman learning her brother’s piano concerto, a Polish prisoner enduring Nazi Germany, a teenager playing for his peers at a piano camp. It says, I will contribute to this piece’s legacy. It screams, listen, for this is something only I can say.

(From Why music?, written July 2019.)

I think about Holden. I sometimes wonder whether we are friends, but I know we are collaborators. Friendship and collaboration are different paths to understanding, which I think of as the crown jewel of the trio. I can count the number of people I feel I understand on one hand. I see how Carissa gives such obvious, tangible love and care to her friends and family, how she wants so desperately to pursue literature and philosophy despite her other obligations, so when she asks me to describe her in three words, after a half-joking flighty, I tell her wholehearted and yearning. love you!!!, she texts. u get me. I don’t see Holden, but I’ve studied and engaged with his work. He is principled. He doesn’t play his pieces because he believes his recordings would become the reference recordings, which would limit future interpreters’ imaginations. He refuses to talk about the emotions his music is to evoke because he thinks it speaks for itself; he talks about it as if it were an intellectual exercise—with an air of detachment—despite how deeply it is to be felt. He prefers sound to language.

I understand Holden, I think.

(From Why music?, written November 2025.)

I so dearly wish I could staple these sounds, from the Prelude’s delirious dissonances to the Scherzo’s ecstatic climaxes, to my words. I’d tell you listen for how these melodic fragments appear in the bass or it’s crazy how Holden pulls off this transition. I’d gush about those whole-tone scales and thirteenth chords, about how the first movement is a microcosm of the last four in reverse. The right passages would fill your ears and you’d understand why I love Poetry so much—

(From Poetry, by Holden Mui, written December 2023.)

The first movement features a delicate, lyrical theme, patterned and predictable in a way that soothes and consoles: everything will be okay. The theme then crystallizes. The harmony, which once swayed gently, back and forth each beat or two, around the home key and in its orbit, finds itself now solid, hard-edged, far from home—diminished. The pianist pauses. The listener is led to luxuriate in this sudden stagnancy, which signals the start of an interlude. Slow, regal, chordal, the interlude soon expands into a series of keyboard-spanning arpeggios and, after a steep descending scale, contracts upward to a single note that heralds the return of the first theme. This back-and-forth of theme and interlude, both sweet but not sickly so, characterizes the first movement, which closes with a major chord under a fermata, an instruction for the pianist to hold tight, to prolong the comforting harmony—

(From Against vibes, written January 2026.)

Because the hand has little time for setup and little time to find the next position, the pianist must both attack and release these high notes with great speed and precision, which imposes upon these notes an elegant sparkle. That is to say, the technical difficulty forces the desired effect. Such is a beautiful marriage of form and content.

(From All is Found, for the left hand, written March 2026.)

Indeed, reading Worsted is, in the best way, like breathing fumes. The reader absorbs Lutz’s dreary disposition through the drabby miasma of her sentences. She doesn’t strip things of their color; rather, she draws out latent browns and grays, the world’s unseen muck and gunk, dried blood and rust and burnt cigarette butts, saying this is how everything looks through my eyes, and now yours too.

(From Displacement from the self, written June 2026.)

[Having] talked to many young people fueled by the sense that certain technology is just interesting, just fascinating, “technically sweet,” the sort of work that engrosses you for hours and years on end, I have an instinctive wariness of the attitude I associate with this word—the attitude that as technologists, we need only concern ourselves with the interesting technical specifics, and someone else will handle the rest. It is interesting, indeed, that safety regulations are written in blood, and it is interesting that we who develop technology must grapple with the idea that we can and often will have blood on our hands.

(From I really dislike Naomi Bashkansky’s blog post “Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy.”, written August 2026.)

Since September, the start of grad school, I’ve been lifting with friends, and Aanika, who swam in college, runs us through her five-minute ab routine at the end of each workout. “I did this all the time back then,” she says. Fifteen seconds into bicycle crunches or suitcases, I barely have the breath or brainpower to respond. I admire her as much as my midsection aches, which is to say, so much so that I can’t form the words to express the feeling.

(From How to enjoy a swimming pool, written December 2025.)

It’s strange to think that I spent those six weeks hearing about your life, drawing a mental picture of you, filling in the details, one by one by one, like one of the old masters, each night shading a hand or enhancing an eyebrow or adjusting the lips, here a joy and there a grief, and by the end I had a beautiful portrait—and as time passed the portrait, beautiful at any distance, fell further and further back, the details recessing into obscurity; but I knew the silhouette so well, knew it so well I could intuit any part of its source when given a single slit, a pixel—and that, I think, is the nature of a friendship that approaches a singularity so quickly and survives the ensuing separation, temporal, spatial, biographical.

(From One decade of Siva, written October 2026.)

To attempt to make sense of these contradictions, this overflow of information, is futile, and simultaneously, the only thing we can do and the only thing worth doing. Such is the labor of literature and of life. For to those who grow old, sense-making is a slow, arduous, yet rewarding process—a few meaningless encounters bloom, decades later, into a romance; a paragraph from a book read as a teenager resurfaces as one enters their fifties; the surely incompatible wisdoms of one’s father and mother unify themselves in adulthood; the tendrils of life, long as they are, have the chance to organize themselves neatly, to weave themselves into tapestries that proclaim to the world, this is who I am.

A premature, self-inflicted death, then, forces a sudden reckoning. Those meaningless encounters will never bloom. That paragraph will never resurface. One’s parents will be locked in eternal conflict. The tendrils of life, cut short, are interpreted not as curving here and there, seemingly at random, so that they might eventually come together in some beautiful form, but rather as pointing—all of them, in some way or another, forever and ever—toward suicide.

(From The tendrils of life, written March 2026.)

I’ve crossed the Charles at midnight many times, imagining myself a stargazer as I admire the waning city lights, imagining myself a musician, just a musician, as I admire the moon. Now I imagine myself just a statistician, and by instinct, stepping on the bridge, I look up and right, to where my mind says the moon should hang. It’s migrated, of course, in the months since I moved to Boston. Today, it lies to my left, low and pale and lost.

(From Why music?, written October 2025.)

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 plan to do things my way. Dredge up painful memories from the aftermath of Irena’s passing 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 […]

(From Why music?, written November 2025.)

Nocturne opens monochromatically—the first phrase, built entirely from the white keys, comprises notes from a single Lydian scale.

In capturing beauty, the snapshot-aesthetic of dawn—kaleidoscopic, the sun bisected by the horizon—neglects its essence. Beauty is not from moments but from processes. What is a gorgeous harmonic resolution without the preceding tension? So Nocturne is dawn, and in reality dawn begins not with crimson or magenta, but with deep blue.

(From Nocturne, written April 2025.)

My own

Some fragments