Went to turn some leftover hot pot into tom yum soup tonight but didn’t have enough tom yum paste so I added Japanese chili-garlic oil, Korean gochujang, Chinese black vinegar, Vietnamese fish sauce, and an entire lime to make the most pan-Asian sweet and sour soup that has ever existed

Um does this tenor know what slavery is or

may i suggest

Fantastic as always from Sharon, and a beautiful piece you probably have never heard—check it out!

This is so exciting! Sharon is such a gift to us all!

Last newsletter post of the year, with a heartfelt thank you to everyone who makes my life in music possible buttondown.com/doodlyroses/...

One last music drop for 2025! Take a break from holiday music and enjoy this lovely nocturne by Maria Szymanowska. On all major streaming platforms and downloadable from iTunes. lnkfi.re/szymnocturne

You'll never guess which obscure composer it is referenced here that you're a hipster for listening to

One last music drop for 2025! Take a break from holiday music and enjoy this lovely nocturne by Maria Szymanowska. On all major streaming platforms and downloadable from iTunes. lnkfi.re/szymnocturne

aaargh the part of my brain that could listen to the Variations on a Theme of Corelli all day really loves this www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw65...

youtube just gave this to me, clearly to cleanse my brain from whatever it took in, so i am going to suggest you all do the same (performance by @doodlyroses.com) www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0uy...

What I loved about Twitter and now BlueSky is that for my whole life I had these pointless thoughts and dumb jokes popping into my head and bouncing around endlessly inside my skull with no escape. Now I can just post them and exorcise them from my thoughts. Now they're your problem. Sorry.

At long last I have gotten to Book 2, and Jean Valjean is finally here (🎶VALJEANNN, AT LAST🎶) 🎉 lesmis.doodlyroses.com/2025/12/17/1...

This is your semi-annual reminder that one does not “reach a crescendo.” One reaches a climax, an apotheosis, a blaring fortissimo *by way of* a crescendo. Thank you for attending my TED talk.

Me every single day for the last several years whenever I log onto my microblogging platform of choice and see what that day’s topics of discourse are

Serious question, did Schubert write a single stinker Like I can rattle off duds by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, etc. but I’m having a hard time thinking of any piece by Schubert that isn’t pretty great, but there’s got to be at least one

My grandfather is William Grant Still, the Dean of African-American composers and one of the most accomplished musicians the US has ever produced. He is arguably the best orchestral arranger of the 20th century.

Normally I am what some people call an annoyingly hypercompetent person but the number of ways in which I have messed up this month is truly astonishing

Me: dear lord this month is destroying me. what are we, three weeks into December? Narrator: it was, in fact, only 9 days into December

One of the many reasons AI can't produce good writing is it can't hate its own writing. It can't think to itself "Maybe I'm illiterate" during the writing process. And that's essential

waiting for both the Catholics and the sacred music people to yell at me

Fingers: [play a complicated passage pretty easily] Brain: hey how are we doing that Me: no brain, I beg of you, don’t— Brain: too late, we’re overthinking things now Fingers: yeah so we can’t play this passage anymore

I listen to pop music with as much of an analytical ear as I do classical music only I never learned any pop music terms, which is why I say things like “I really love the stretto in this Carly Rae Jepsen song”

More important than the appearance of the silver is the fact that I have proved the bishop is a Hot Priest I am a seriously scholarly person

the internet actually isn't about connecting us to one another, improving human communication, or enabling us to see and be seen. it's all about letting you get really esoteric with your hobbies

You should be able to get rich being silly online instead of being evil online, that would solve a lot of problems

Was fantasising about a brand new internet where I can go read things and it would have no AI or ads or influencers…and realised that is the library

This is too real and @oliviagiovetti.bsky.social really came for all of our throats Also I personally was not prepared for the jump scare of seeing myself linked in it www.criticaldrift.org/p/classical-...

We'll see how I keep this up, but I'm reading one chapter a day and quick-blogging my thoughts about it. Chapter 1 here: lesmis.doodlyroses.com/2025/12/03/p...

Apple Music: here are the albums you listened to most this year Me: yeah this sounds about right

This excellent essay gets at pretty much everything I love about these movies.

Watching the new Knives Out movie left me with a lot of questions, namely "why did the couple in front of me leave the house and buy tickets and sit in prime seats in this theater only to scroll social media on their phones for the entire runtime of this very good movie"

It’s the most wonderful time of the year (when holiday prep and the end-of-year scramble keep me from regular practicing and I fall into deep despair thinking I have lost all my skills and will never have a career again)

The stores in London are plastered with Black Friday sale signs right now and I have been furiously texting friends “how can you do Black Friday if you don’t have Thanksgiving???”

Equestrian sports is like the Freemasons in that you don’t realize how many people are in it until you’re in it yourself

Got a text from the LA Phil 45 minutes before concert start that Sheku Kanneh-Mason was injured this morning and the premiere of Finnis’ cello concerto would not be performed, so we just got a super short program today

Oh so when an owl only shows up sometimes it’s “irruptive” but when I do it I’m “unreliable.”

Apparently some of you are now reading Les Miserables because of me I am now feeling peer pressured into trying it again I have really played myself here

Anything by Patrick Radden Keefe or Erik Larson, those dudes write nonfiction that’s more I-can’t-put-this-down than some thrillers

So Victor Hugo def had ADHD right

This is the thing that drives me a little insane about people saying that slavery/racism/systemic inequality is “inappropriate” for children—young people are fully capable of understanding complexity, in some ways more so than adults www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

This is peak oboe (complimentary)

Truly could not dream of a better testimonial. I will be using this forever "a score that makes, imho, a tad more sense than the (not terrible!) score published elsewhere" -Sharon Su aka @doodlyroses.com

A little early (for me, I’m on Pacific time remember) Friday newsletter about today’s latest release

In my head, I hear the title of @doodlyroses.com's latest newsletter in the voice of Lucille Bluth as she delivers the line, "here's some money, go see a Star War"

It’s Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s 220th birthday! To celebrate, I have a new recording out of her Sonata in G Minor which you can now listen to on the streaming platform of your choice

Sometimes I think about this guy and I hope he's having a great life

There is no culture clash quite like that when an order muppet neurodivergent meets a chaos muppet neurodivergent

To the man who yelled “DON’T GIVE THEM ANY MONEY” at me while I gave cash to a lady on the sidewalk begging with her baby in her arms: respectfully, go jump up your own butt

the only good accent work on earth is old money transatlantic american to make fun of rich people accent