In my compulsion to do extra Les Misérables research I discovered that someone else on the internet decided this year to read the novel and blog one chapter per day, and they're CHARGING MONEY for it I'm over here doing this all for free like a chump

Available to my angel tier patrons!! www.patreon.com/cw/HenselPus...

I did not know that my life was missing a Fanny Hensel composer bust and then @henselpushers.bsky.social gave me one and now I can’t live without her

Why do non-musicians fetishize perfect pitch to such an absurd degree when it is honestly one of the most inconsequential traits a musician can have

Book 5 of Part II begins: Valjean loses out on 6 months’ rent and a chase that was not mentioned at all in the musical begins, and I just want this poor girl dad to catch a break lesmis.doodlyroses.com/2026/07/06/1...

Singlehandedly addressing the literacy problem by continuing to read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables

It’s very sweet when I’m rehearsing or warming up at a venue and my handler is like “everyone SHHH she needs quiet to focus! where’s that sound coming from??” as if every day I’m not practicing with the washer and dryer going and my husband vacuuming or making dinner and my cat yelling for attention

It’s amazing how you can be the quintessential jie jie with off-the-charts jie jie energy but the moment you are with someone else who not only has jie jie energy but is actually older than you, you immediately transform into a little mei mei like in a fantasy movie where the hero loses their powers

Mmm just dropping this always-relevant piece here hypatia.ca/2017/07/18/t...

Ran into some guy who was like "classical music is more classy than some rap stuff about guys banging lots of [women]" and it's like buddy have you ever heard a single opera

haha, thats a great post. unfortunately you phrased it in a way that allowed me, a moron, to misunderstand it

I wrote about how algorithmic recommendations just don’t have taste Also a July concert update for Bay Area folks buttondown.com/doodlyroses/...

Do people not know that there are at least ten musicologists on here who want to explain the answer to your music question to you so badly that they will drop everything to do it?

Multiple people have told me they can’t watch The Bear because it’s too stressful and I feel like a total weirdo because I find it oddly soothing to see that Musician Life exists in completely different fields, that my problems aren’t special and neither am I

We're onto Book 4 of Part II! We begin with a description of a bad vibes house in a bad vibes neighborhood! lesmis.doodlyroses.com/2026/06/23/1...

Sometimes Brahms has these yearning surges of pure want that I find almost embarrassing, like dude chill on the feelings! then I remember a colleague who would send me texts out of the blue like “ugh why are you so CHARMING, I can’t bear it” and I realize some guys have just always been Like That

The Les Misérables musical is a good start but what they really should do is adapt Hugo’s novel into 5 musicals and the whole thing should be as long as the Ring cycle

This is actually great for me, I’ll just send my weirdo reply guys her way

Every once in a while I run out of a pantry/fridge staple before I can get my ass to an Asian grocery so I buy the closest thing I can find in mainstream supermarkets. Right now I am experiencing Kimchi For Americans and I cannot believe you people live like this

Amazing discussions happening in the classical radio chat

Found myself admiring the lovely inner voice countermelodies in Brahms without someone exasperatedly telling me to. Is this it for me, do I need to schedule a colonoscopy and send for my AARP card now

Didn’t they already turn the “I raised my adopted child Chinese” TIFU post into a movie (Joy Ride, 2023)

Okay, here’s something I’ve wondered about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (one of my favorite books of all time) for a long while

The semi-retired graphic designer in me is melting over how good this cover design is

(Not so fun fact) living in constant fear of losing your livelihood, does not, in fact, result in great or meaningful art.

Oh man I am actually so upset that I left New York City right before the Knicks won 😭

Costa Rica might win at breakfast for me personally, but the array of amazing breakfast options in basically every Asian country puts the rest of the world to shame imho

our neighbours are getting solar panels so the scaffolders showed up last week, and proceeded to install the scaffolding on the wrong house, so they came back today and dismantled it and are now reinstalling it on a different wrong house

Me: right Autocorrect: you mean “rig ho” Me: now Autocorrect: you mean “joe” Me: teeeible Autocorrect: yep that looks fine

This entire article is kind of amazing

I was sitting in the studio with the engineer who said “I’m just going to bounce this track” and I went “uh…did you just say ‘bounce’”

Me every time I hear a great pianist make a tiny mistake: wow, imperfections don’t make the performance any less great Me practicing: if I don’t lift the una corda pedal the millisecond the pp turns into a p then everyone in the audience will know I’m a fraud and I might as well quit on the spot

this is my kind of company motto right here

If you’re a California voter and you’re not reading the voter guide with all the candidate statements of everyone running for governor that got mailed to you, you are missing out on the year’s most entertaining and yet terrifying read

Weirdly obsessed with how people can ask questions with specific parameters on here and get a ton of replies that completely ignore those parameters

Generally when someone says they hated LA and you drill down it turns out they only saw like 0.001% of LA and extrapolated Vibes, people, even the weather is wildly different based on where you go (the microclimate situation is wild)

Gentle PSA to my friends who use Substack: if you forward me a Substack newsletter from your email, and I click through to the post in browser, Substack auto-logs me in to YOUR account and gives me the power to muck about in your settings

Omg, I now have people in my mentions posting in other languages who didn’t get that the post was satirical, this is EXACTLY like Peak Twitter Bluesky has the juice

Classical music has gotten too far from its roots. We need to bring back traditional practices like: - performers cutting passages they don’t feel like playing - putting random pieces of unrelated music in between movements of a multi-movement work - hiring audience members to faint

By simultaneously reading Les Misérables and Vanity Fair I have unintentionally signed myself up for the abject hilarity that is reading literary depictions of the battle of Waterloo from opposing sides

Every once in a while a classical musician signs up for my newsletter and follows me on all available platforms and I never know if they’re genuinely interested in me and what I’m doing or if (and I know this happens) someone told them to check me out as an internet-era career model to emulate

Saw The Mandalorian and Grogu and I couldn’t tell you if the movie was any good or not but the soundtrack was all glorious synths and percussion so I had a great time

This is so relatable. The quintessential Asian woman experience 😭

I used to avoid telling people I’m a musician because they’d ask me weird questions like “have you heard of Bach” and now I avoid telling people I’m a musician because they all want to talk to me about vibrational frequencies

So I keep a mental log of Yelp reviews by people who are outraged at the existence of any kind of authentic cuisine because that is a reasonable thing for me to dedicate brain space to

TIL I cannot meditate to calming piano music

I saw this movie solely because of this post and left the theater dabbing tears from my eyes going “did I just get wrecked by a movie called The Sheep Detectives”

been a difficult week for Classics nerds who aren't chuds

This work by Fanny Hensel, which was falsely attributed to her brother Felix Mendelssohn, used to be available online for free thanks to Angela Mace, the musicologist who made the discovery as a grad student. For Reasons it stopped being free this year, but @henselpushers.bsky.social has fixed that

I don’t think this is a new phenomenon, but I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with people who experience a book/movie/article/event only through social media discourse and then talk about it like they actually directly experienced it themselves