Emmanuel Pahud, in my eyes, is the greatest flutist in the world. He’s the principal flute of the Berlin Philharmonic — a position that speaks volumes — and this summer, he’s on tour in China. Two concerts and one workshop. I’m attending all three. As a flutist, I can’t help but reflect a little on his influence on me. I started listening to Pahud’s recordings back in high school, during the pandemic. I was bored, like most people, but suddenly, even Bach and Beethoven didn’t sound boring anymore. His recording of Beethoven’s Sonata for Flute in B-flat Major (Anh. 4) and Bach’s Partita in A minor (BWV 1013) completely captivated 17-year-old me — his tone sounded otherworldly, like the flute had become something transcendent. ...

My Shostakovich-fan friend got really excited recently cause, the composer is about to enter public domain — 50 years after he passed away (August 9 1975). He was like “all his scores are going public, and I can’t wait to see the original manuscript of his Waltz No. 2”. Huh? Well not exactly. Cause first, in most countries, copyright protection lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. Second, most jurisdictions apply public domain changes on January 1st of the year following the 70th anniversary of the death. So even though enter died in August 1975, his works won’t become public domain earliest until January 1, 2026. Lastly, when we say Shostakovich’s works enter the public domain, that means his OG composition (eg. melody, harmonies, structure) are no longer protected. Yet special editions of his scores might still be under copyright — eg. B & H publishes a special 50-anniversary version has editorial rights. ...

Recently I noticed a weirdly popular TikTok trend: It’s gone viral internationally The original choreography is by 不齐舞团: Watch on YouTube, based on a Chinese-Cantonese rap song: Its rise to fame isn’t just algorithmic luck. The song taps into the mindset of a generation of young people in China today — caught in between. They’re not fully grounded in traditional culture, yet feel unable to move upward either. There’s a great article that explores this cultural moment: ...

Tchaikovsky wrote music for Eugene Onegin opera. But the Onegin ballet’s music is adapted from various other Tchaikovsky pieces (Breakdown of Eugene Onegin’s Different Versions) One of the ballet’s highlight, the Tatiana solo in Act II. It is melodic, expressive, and perhaps the most heartbreakingly vulnerable part of the whole story. When Tatiana fall in love with Onegin, at Tatiana’s birthday Onegin danced and flirt with Tatiana’s sister and leaves Tatiana hurt in the crowd: ...

This archive Blog Posts About Classical Music Collection started as a way just to keep track of blogs — but it has slowly become a personal map of musical obsessions and opinions. It kinda traces how I’ve moved through time in my life. Technically, I should have relied on tags instead of manually collecting every post, but revisiting my six‑month music library while copy‑and‑pasting turned out to be surprisingly enjoyable. Seems like, I’ve been obsessed with Tchaikovsky and Chopin lately, and that passion naturally spilled over into other Romantic-era composers—hence the flood of piano and ballet works. ...

My hometown has a genuinely strong orchestra — the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra. It doesn’t have an all-star woodwind section like the Berliner Philharmonic, but having played in its affiliated Youth Orchestra during high school, I know the musicians are well-trained professionals. Plus, our artistic directors and conductor are not only well-connected but are themselves part of the core of China’s elite classical music scene. Oh, and fun fact: Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra often don’t give encores. ...

Tmux is powerful for parallelization but can be frustrating for monitoring experiments at scales. Like, you can run multiple parallel projects in different sessions but it’s hard to monitor each session — because you will have to manually ‘attach’ to a session to see outputs, and tmux has limited scrollback history and clunky scrolling interaction (you’ll have to Ctrl-v [ into copy mode to scroll). And once a tmux session dies — all terminal outputs are lost. ...

Came across a paper that proposed an interesting mechanism to improve rating systems. This is a very very good idea. RewardRating: A Mechanism Design Approach to Improve Rating Systems Vakilinia, Faizian, Khalili. Games (2022) https://doi.org/10.3390/g13040052 “To improve rating systems, in this paper, we take a novel mechanism-design approach to increase the cost of fake ratings while providing incentives for honest ratings.” … “Our proposed mechanism RewardRating is inspired by the stock market model in which users can invest in their ratings for services and receive a reward on the basis of future ratings.” ...

I was surprised to discover a lovely — and fairly well-loved — harp-flute duet that had somehow escaped my notice: The Fog is Lifting, Op. 41, by Carl Nielsen. It’s always a joy to stumble across a hidden gem in the repertoire. This piece isn’t about flashy technique or dense chromatic harmonies. What it does offer is space — space for the performers to shape tone, color, and atmosphere. It’s all about timbre. ...

Our Beyond-Bayesian-Bandits reading group covered this paper today: Multitasking: Efficient Optimal Planning for Bandit Superprocesses Dylan Hadfield-Menell and Stuart Russell. [Link](https://people.csail.mit.edu/dhm/files/bsp_bbvi.pdf to paper) and its supplementary materials. A bandit superprocess is a decision problem composed from multiple independent Markov decision processes (MDPs), coupled only by the constraint that, at each time step, the agent may act in only one of the MDPs. Multitasking problems of this kind are ubiquitous in the real world, yet very little is known about them from a computational viewpoint, beyond the observation that optimal policies for the superprocess may prescribe actions that would be suboptimal for an MDP considered in isolation. (This observation implies that many applications of sequential decision analysis in practice are technically incorrect, since the decision problem being solved is often part of a larger, unstated bandit superprocess.) The paper summarizes the state-of-the art in the theory of bandit superprocesses and contributes a novel upper bound on the global value function of a bandit superprocess, defined in terms of a direct relaxation of the arms. The bound is equivalent to an existing bound (the Whittle integral), but is defined constructively, as the value of a related multi-armed bandit. We provide a new method to compute this bound and derive the first practical algorithm to select optimal actions in bandit superprocesses. The algorithm operates by repeatedly establishing dominance relations between actions using upper and lower bounds on action values. Experiments indicate that the algorithm’s run-time compares very favorably to other possible algorithms designed for more general factored MDPs. ...