A note from a Tuesday night with the swans of Hyde Park Before I went, my musician friends tried to spare me: The technique might not be there. You know what Swan Lake demands. You love Tchaikovsky fine and don’t go and disappoint yourself. But I went anyway. Well I had to — I take ballet courses at the University — which is to say, badly and with great affection — half the swans on that stage were people I know. People I’ve stretched next to at the barre, people who borrowed me their bobby pins. They studied for midterms last week and then, somehow, also learned to be a corps. And I know was never going to be about technique. ...

Some says it’s attractive, other says it’s cringe. But anyhow, it’s certainly effective, looking more interesting next to the new Devil Wears Prada Judge yourself. The law-AI competition is getting more interesting. Stay tuned!

As of May 1 2026, Hugo deploy workflow failed at sudo snap install dart-sass with error: unable to contact snap store. Root cause is GitHub Actions runners intermittently (or permanently) cannot reach the Canonical snap store. This seems to be an infrastructure-level issue. Fix: Replaced snap install with a direct download from the Dart Sass GitHub releases. Pinned the version via an env var and extracted the binary to ${HOME}/.local: ...

The program The night felt young. I saw a lot of high school students in the concert hall, dressed up and fidgety, and that energy seeped into everything. It helped that the artists matched it — conductor Karina Canellakis and soloist Conrad Tao are both on the younger side of the musician spectrum: Tao has this rock star thing going on — chic, probably Balenciaga, the kind of outfit that says I know exactly what I’m doing. Canellakis has the quiet intensity of a more sensitive, more searching Lydia Tár. But once they start playing, what matters is that they’re serious musicians, and you can feel it immediately. ...

When a Sonata simply goes by COMPOSER-NAME-Sonata it signals something: The Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano by César Franck [or commonly just referred to as the Frank Sonata] is one of his best-known compositions, and is considered one of the finest sonatas for violin and piano ever written. It is an amalgam of his rich native harmonic language with the Classical traditions he valued highly, held together in a cyclic framework. Wikipedia ...

In 1877, Tchaikovsky married Antonina Milyukova. Two months later, the marriage turned out to be a disaster. Tchaikovsky fled from Moskow to his best (pen-)friend-slash-patron Madame Meck’s villa at Brailov: In the end, Antonina refused to sue for divorce, though she did agree to leave Moscow. (The unconsummated, much-regretted marriage endured legally for the rest of Tchaikovsky’s life.) Nonetheless, the weeks alone at Brailov were a welcome respite, and the estate became the titular “dear place” of the Souvenir d’un lieu cher, a suite of three short pieces for violin and piano. (LA Phil about the piece Souvenir d’un lieu cher) ...

Bazzini was a great violin virtuoso Born in Brescia, Italy in 1818, Bazzini fell under the spell of the great Niccolò Paganini, whom he met as a teenager. The renowned virtuoso encouraged the young violinist to begin concertizing, and he soon became one of the most highly regarded instrumentalists of the day. Schumann and Mendelssohn were among his fans. Itzhak Perlman remarked that that the composer hadn’t written anything else because he’d used up all the notes in La ronde. It has all the hallmarks of a violin showpiece: false harmonics, ricochet bowings, double-stop tremolos, left hand pizzicato – and indeed it has remained a “go-to” when a performer wants to pull out all the stops for an encore. ...

Very insightful article: Classical composers ignore amateur music making at their peril Edward Caine https://substack.com/home/post/p-195502594 Here are some quotes that I find contain profound and sharp diagnose of the industry. If you find it interesting, make sure to check out the OG article (link above). All rights belong to Mr Caine. As students, musicians often view amateur performance with a certain haughty scepticism and give it a wide berth, feeling that if they end up involved in amateur performance they are somehow “sliding backwards” from a position of a professional career. ...

The University of Chicago’s billenial concerto competition winner showcase took place today: here’s a recording of the performance: In particular, Anthony Yoon performs Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto In D Major, Op. 35 mvt I with the Symphony Orchestra, where he is also one of the 2nd violins. Both the orchestra and Anthony did a great job, I can guarantee you that we’re together (most of the times)

Professor Auster came to Chicago to give a talk in our theory seminar. Turns out for Pandora’s box, if boxes’ prior are ambiguous and decision maker seeks to minimize maximum regret against a clairvoyant oracle (an oracle who knows all the real reward of the boxes), the decision maker would exihbit choice overload (theoretically). Some additional notes on how to think about it using Yao’s (or Neumann’s) minmax lemma: Setup A decision maker face $n$ boxes. Search cost $c_i$ for each boxes. Each box’s reward is binary $v_i \in \{0, \bar v\}$. ...