A week that moved between concert halls, historic houses, feminist thought, illness narratives, and Leonard Bernstein.
Sibelius live, and the peculiar tension of listening in person
On Thursday night I went to the BSO for a program that included one of my absolute favorites: the Sibelius Violin Concerto.
What struck me most this time was how different live listening feels from listening at home. A recording is easy to relax into because it arrives already polished; you know you are hearing something close to “perfect.” In a concert hall, though, I found myself getting genuinely nervous for the soloist. This concerto is just so hard. There are so many places where things could go wrong. It is a funny response, really—the violinist’s technique was obviously beyond question—but that sense of risk made me appreciate the performer’s effort even more.
The last open weekend of the season at Historic New England
This weekend was basically the final open weekend of the year for many Historic New England sites, so I went to two properties in South Berwick, Maine: the Sarah Orne Jewett House and Hamilton House.
Sarah Orne Jewett was a writer deeply associated with New England literary and cultural life, and much of her work drew on the landscape and everyday life of southern Maine. The Jewett House began as her grandparents’ home. Later, another house was built next door, and that was where she lived as a child. After her parents died, she and her older sister Mary inherited their grandparents’ house and moved in, so the interiors on view mainly reflect the period when the sisters lived there.
The most memorable detail was the placement of Sarah’s writing desk. She was known as a keen observer, and the house sits on the busiest street in South Berwick. Her desk was set in the second-floor hall, facing the lively scene below, with excellent light as well. It felt like exactly the sort of place where a writer might quietly watch the world and turn it into prose.
Hamilton House is also closely tied to Sarah Orne Jewett, though in a different way. It was originally built by a merchant named Hamilton as a display of wealth. The house stands by the river, and farther upstream was his factory in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. After changing hands several times, the property was at risk of being abandoned. Once Sarah learned of the situation, she used her New England connections to find new caretakers: a mother and daughter from the Tyson family.
Hamilton House is, in every sense, a mansion. The wallpapers and murals are astonishing, and the views are spectacular from every angle. The surrounding grounds are beautiful too.
Watching Ueno Chizuko’s Last Lecture
I finally got around to watching Ueno Chizuko’s Last Lecture, which had been widely discussed for a while.
Ueno Chizuko is often described as the scholar who brought women’s studies into Japan. Many people first encountered her through her 2019 University of Tokyo entrance ceremony speech—a speech that some found electrifying and clarifying, while others reacted to with complete disbelief.
This program belongs to NHK’s “last lecture” series, though it is not literally her final university lecture. One thing that worked especially well was the audience: it was more varied than a typical classroom, including young college students, full-time housewives, women balancing work and family, and men in dual-income households.
In the lecture, she touches on several key ideas from her work:
- The housewife problem: housework is both unpaid labor and coerced labor.
- What care really means: caregiving always contains a power imbalance between caregiver and recipient, which makes abuse of power easy. She argues that people can derive a kind of pleasure from exercising power, and that care therefore becomes a continual practice of restraining one’s own desire for power. In that sense, it is a nonviolent practice—and one that men should also participate in.
- What feminism aims for: rather than trying to elevate women into becoming more like men, she says, in effect, “We do not want to be like you.” For her, feminism is about building a society in which even the vulnerable are treated with dignity.
One woman in the audience spoke about exhaustion and powerlessness, and Ueno responded in a way that stayed with me. The world became what it is because people changed it, she said, and that means others also have the ability to change it. Women today have changed the world, and the women before them changed it too.
She also offered some practical advice that felt refreshingly grounded. A person can only do so much within the time they have, so priorities are necessary. Once priorities are clear, energy can go toward what matters most, and less important things can be set aside for the moment. Priorities also change, and that is fine. What matters is recognizing what is most important to your present self and giving it the time you can. She described herself as a realist who only does what she can do, and argued that what many women lack is a sense of self-efficacy built through setting small goals and accomplishing them one by one. Don’t try to do everything at once; do each thing well.
The program left me with the sense of someone deeply powerful, not in a theatrical way but in a clear, disciplined one. It also made me want to finally start reading her books properly.
A podcast on breast cancer, surgery, and who gets to decide
I had not shared a podcast in a while, but this week I listened to an episode of Random Waves about breast cancer and found it excellent.
The episode features two guests. One is the historian Lin Moxi, who underwent a double mastectomy this year and talks about the process from diagnosis to surgery. Parts of her account resonated with my own earlier experience. The second guest is Yu Xiaodan, a designer of post-surgery bras for breast cancer patients, who speaks about her work and what she has learned through it.
The conversation covers a lot of ground, but one recurring issue is especially striking: although this is an illness affecting women, men often end up making decisions for them. Male doctors may assume that reconstruction is the default choice and even presume what kind of reconstructed body a woman would want. Husbands may buy wigs or prosthetic breasts believing they are being considerate, when in fact many women do not want those things at all.
And yet many women are so used to thinking about other people’s comfort that they begin to treat their own appearance as something they must manage for others. The question of what they themselves want to wear can disappear in the process.
I came away especially admiring Yu Xiaodan. She says what she wants is to “return fashion to clothing itself.” A great deal of fashion, in her view, has little real meaning, and the speed of turnover wastes enormous resources. It is far more worthwhile to think about how clothing can solve concrete problems in people’s lives. One example she gives is her next design goal: after asking many post-operative patients what garment they most needed, she found that a lot of them said the same thing—a swimsuit that actually works for them. That answer is heartbreaking and moving at once.
At the end, the episode also questions the limitations of “fighting disease” narratives. They imply that every sick person must become a warrior, and that anything less is some kind of failure. For many patients, that demand is too much. They are already dealing with treatment, uncertainty, and sometimes the reality of death; on top of that, they are expected to be brave and uplifting.
But perhaps what has the most power is honesty. Feeling pessimistic, weak, or ready to give up is normal. Sharing those moments may offer others more strength than a polished story of heroic endurance ever could.
Two episodes of Young People’s Concerts
I also watched episodes 15 and 16 of Young People’s Concerts, both of which were wonderful.
Episode 15: Folk Music in the Concert Hall
This episode on folk music was especially engaging. Bernstein begins by talking about the relationship between folk music and language, arguing that the qualities of a people’s language—especially in poetry—are reflected in their folk traditions.
He gives several examples. In Hungarian, the stress falls on the first syllable of every word, and that same tendency appears in the music. French lacks strong stress accents, so French music often sounds smoother. Spanish gives prominence to consonants, and its music comes across as crisp and rhythmically vivid.
From there, Bernstein traces different ways folk music enters concert music. One is the creation of music that sounds folk-like without quoting actual folk material; he illustrates this with a passage from Mozart’s Symphony in E-flat. Another is the use of folk rhythms and notes by composers such as Carlos Chávez in Sinfonía India. A third is the collection and rearrangement of real folk songs, as in several songs by Canteloube. He closes with Charles Ives’s Second Symphony, a work that gathers together many of these approaches.
Folk music may seem more primitive next to symphonies and chamber works, but these large and intricate compositions clearly grow out of something simpler and earlier.
Episode 16: What Is Impressionism?
This episode focuses on Impressionist music. Bernstein opens with the idea that the essence of Impressionism is suggestion, and he gives a wonderfully vivid comparison: if the main theme of Beethoven’s Fifth is like a father firmly ordering a child to go to bed, then Impressionism is like a father describing the warmth of the blankets and the sweetness of dreams until bedtime becomes an implied desire.
He then connects Impressionist music to Impressionist painting, showing how Monet’s paintings differ from photographic reality. Music, of course, is more abstract than painting, but it too contains a kind of relative “reality”: clear harmony and melody on one side, and something more atmospheric and impressionistic on the other.
Bernstein goes on to outline some of the devices composers used to create this effect: the whole-tone scale, new harmonic language, bitonality, and evocations of distant places, among others. The episode uses Debussy’s La Mer as its central example and includes detailed musical analysis throughout. Near the end, Bernstein also briefly brings in Ravel, closing with an excerpt from Daphnis et Chloé.
Rethinking self-care
The last thing I watched this week was a video about rethinking self-care, and I found it genuinely thought-provoking.
In an increasingly stressful world, self-care has become a popular concept. Paying attention to your own condition and finding ways to relieve pressure clearly matters. But it is worth being cautious when businesses reduce self-care to consumption, or when the term gets flattened into a simple license to pursue personal comfort above all else.
What the video emphasizes is the origin of self-care as a practice rooted in the social movements of minority groups, including Black communities and women. Because broader society offered so little support, these groups had to build their own networks of care and mutual support. In that sense, self-care was never just an individual luxury; it was also collective survival.
Seen from that angle, self-care should involve thinking about the people around you. The best version of it may not be the image so often sold today—buying an expensive product and enjoying it alone—but caring for the small circles and communities that sustain you.
Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love. — Mother Teresa