POTE in French = “buddy”, “pal”

(This is part 5 of a five-part series on my journey that led me to create a new music festival in Besançon, France.)

I don’t know my true self or my true identity. It changes in life with different periods. Am I the same person when I was a scholarship student in the US or a young, jobless mother in France?

There are certain essential things that you carry all your life.

Circumstances and age make me change.

Today I feel like a teenager, but more urgent than ever - no time for pettiness, for intolerance.

Today, I have a very simple life: no car, no house. Having been displaced and lost so much, I’ve had to realize that things don’t matter. When I was a child in Taiwan, we moved literally every year. In America, in Europe, the story of packing, storage, and shipping across continents is a saga in itself. Today, I keep virtually nothing as in physical objects. What matters is people, the joy of being together, what we create with our minds, and the indelible memories we share:

With musicians of wide-ranging ages, nationalities, backgrounds, we shared not only breakfast, lunch, dinner, rehearsals, lessons, games, but also the fun of discovering simultaneously the beauty and surprises in a piece of music together,

the fun of making mistakes and having a good laugh together,

the fun of helping one another grow and thrive,

the fun of pushing the boundaries together, playing with the weird stuff at the margin,

the fun of sharing our living musical heritage and emotions with anyone and everyone.

A few days ago, I announced that I’ve created a new music festival, Playing On The Edge, POTE. The first edition will take place in Besançon from October 23 to 25.

French for “buddy”, “pal”, POTE is engaged to create an inclusive, artistic community where each person has an expressive, creative voice.

I’m thrilled to invite you – amateur or professional musicians, students, amateurs, dancers, performing artists - to come play with us at the POTE Festival.

As an individual artist or as an ensemble, you can apply before September 15 by proposing your dream project or participating in ensemble pieces such as Terry Riley’s “In C”.

For a taste of how the piece begins and how everyone can join in, here’s a collaborative recorded by:

Gaël Rabbe in Autrans

Yasmina Spiegelberg

in Vermont (The Yellow Barn)

Thomas Nicol

in Besançon Opasso

Hortense Airault

in Genève

Alfred Massaï

in Ville de Besançon

Lee Yi Wei Angus

in Hong Kong

Big thanks to these awesome musicians!

The manual on how prepare for the flashmob is here https://www.festivalpote.com/fr/flashmob

For more information about the festival, please visit festivalpote.com

To participate https://www.festivalpote.com/fr/sessions-participatives

To support us https://www.festivalpote.com/fr/nous-soutenir

(The website is currently in French only. If you need help, please hit reply and write to us!)

Dreams from my mother

(This is part 4 of a five-part series on my journey that led me to create a new music festival in Besançon, France.)


I would not be a musician today if it weren’t for my mother or for the experience of exile.

My mother - a small, slight woman of piercing beauty and intelligence - was born of refugee parents who fled China during the civil war in 1949. Growing up impoverished, with little opportunity for education or professional prospect for herself, she spared no energy or money to provide her three children with the best and most open education with our meager resources.

I began learning piano at age 3 in group lessons.
I began learning violin at age 5 with Yo-Yo Ma’s father, Dr. Hsiao-Tsiun Ma.
I danced and performed in theatre from age 8, then starred in a television series for three years.
I learned and read ferociously, fascinated by distant epochs and lands, stories from the Western literary canon.

At age 12, it seemed clear that we needed to leave Taiwan in order to pursue a better education. I started learning English and auditioned successfully for The Juilliard School. My mother packed up large luggages and moved us to the US.

Having to leave everything behind and start in another place made me very aware of everything that I had lost, of all the people who have disappeared from my life. The things that made me a person were no longer there. I had to re-invent myself, to recover all the losses.

This time, it was through the liberal arts curricula in school. I’ll never forget the joy of receiving the first term-paper assignment in middle school: we could literally choose any subject of any interest, do the research, and present our thoughts. What is the “Renaissance”? What is “Christianity”? I could read and research every which way and find my own connection to the unknown!

Studying at public schools and The Juilliard Pre-College at the same time, then pursuing dual degrees at Columbia-Juilliard, Harvard-Juilliard, I continued to re-invent my understanding of music and literature.

A few days ago, I announced that I have created a new music festival, Playing On The Edge. Celebrating musical creativity and the humanities, the festival aims to encourage the public to explore the arts, literature, and the humanities. Please come join us in the concerts and jam sessions - there’s something for everyone!

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For more information about the festival, click here
For information about participating in the festival, click here
For information about supporting the festival, click here
(The website is currently French only. If you need help, please hit reply and write to us!)

You play contemporary music? I think all new music sounds ugly

(This is part 3 of a five-part series on my journey that led me to create a new music festival in Besançon, France.

As a student at Juilliard, I was thrilled by the offer of elective classes: chamber chorus, film scoring, Beethoven Piano Sonatas, MaxMSP, The Modernist Era, contemporary music ensemble… I wanted a taste of the unknown and in-depth knowledge on subjects that long fascinated me, the whole wide world and history of classical music were my oyster!

Signing up for Composition lessons, I aspired to fully give voice to my teenage creativity and compose heartbreaking, sublime music like my favorite composer at that time, Brahms. My sympathetic, compassionate composition teacher to whom I’m forever grateful - Eric Ewazen - patiently listened and helped with my first opus, but also gave me new listening assignments and different modes and harmonies to try out.

Returning to my lesson the week after, I desperately told Mr. Ewazen that I couldn’t compose anything with the new modes and harmonies, “they just sound like noise to me.” He patiently sat me down to listen to different pieces together, making reference to some abstract paintings in his classroom by Jackson Pollock and the “rhythms” within the colors.

Week after week, I sat at the piano trying to combine the different modes and get into the pieces of the listening assignment only to return to Mr. Ewazen feeling completely defeated. Mr. Ewazen, in his usual warm-hearted and reassuring manner, said, “Don’t worry. One day, they won’t sound like noise anymore.”

Although my life as a composer didn’t last beyond the two years of composition lessons, this feeling of fascination and quiet possibility stayed with me and nurtured my continued exploration of new music.

Sure enough, without ever noticing when or how it happened, contemporary music stopped sounding like senseless, aggressive noises and I became actively involved in different new music ensembles in New York, Zurich, then in France.

By participating actively, meeting experienced performers, and working with composers, I have learned so much about how to embrace new music and actually learn to love it.

Do you feel alien to new music? Are you ever confused by it? Do you not like it? I get it. I've been there.

Here’s how I suggest you can “get it”:

Give yourself permission to be confused - it’s OK!

Play this music yourself, being guided by experienced performers,

Invest your imagination into the performance in whichever way that inspires you: stories, sounds, images, scents, grooves...

Learn more about the context of the piece - even the most revolutionary work was not created in a vacuum. Knowing about the historical context and human stories go a long way to humanize the scores.

A few days ago I announced that I’m launching a new festival, POTE, Playing On The Edge.

One of the central missions of the festival is to open the world of new music to all the audience by inviting everyone to participate.

Are you curious about new music? Do you have a creative musical project you’d like to present? Are you looking for partners with whom you can try things out? Write to me and let me know your thoughts!

For more information about the festival, click here
For information about participating in the festival, click here
For information about supporting the festival, click here
(The website is currently in French only. If you need help, please hit reply and let us know!)

My new mission

My NEW Mission: To bring musicians TOGETHER and CELEBRATE musical creativity across genres

(This is part 2 of a five-part series on my journey that led me to create a new music festival in Besançon, France.)

POTE: How do you relate to others?

Having been an immigrant and loner for most of my life, I had always struggled with how to overcome the language barrier, my timidity and confusion in each foreign culture.

POTE: Tell me about the most important experience you’ve had in ensemble playing?

The first time I went to a summer camp and played chamber music all day long with both young and experienced musicians, I was overwhelmed with joy by the collaborative spirit, the collegiality, the dedication to a common goal, and the resulting music-making that seemed like a utopia.

POTE: What were your first experiences like with musical creativity?

As a student at Juilliard, I signed up for composition lessons where I aspired to fully give voice to my teenage creativity and compose heartbreaking, sublime music like my favorite composer, Brahms. Little did I know at that time, I was about to embark on a totally different journey taking me from Brahms to Boulez - more on this later - becoming actively involved in different new music ensembles in New York, Zurich, then in France.

POTE : What is your musical life like today?

Today, as a classical music omnivore, I navigate constantly between my home orchestra, chamber music ensembles, new music and early music groups. With the musicians and audience of each group, I love geeking out about repertoire, technique, instruments, gears, the latest technological development in live interactive performance or early music treatises. I love digging deeply into each era, each composer’s world, and making fresh connections to our living, breathing emotions and experience.


POTE: Do these experiences complement each other?

However, with each specialized ensemble and social group, I also feel “incomplete,” unable to fully share my love and curiosity of the other genres and practices. When performing with contemporary ensembles, I miss the emotional openness, the vulnerability of listening to and being guided by historical forms of the instrument, and the subsequent finesse in the interpretation. With early music groups, I crave the penetrating relevance, radically novel sounds and forms, and urgent contemporaneity in new compositions.

POTE: Why contemporary music in Besançon?

Living and working in a city and Conservatory where there’s virtually no presence for contemporary music, two of my colleagues and I started a new music workshop with a structured, yet experimental curriculum five years ago. There was palpable excitement throughout the school year as we embarked on the journey with our 15 students. We had shared our personal stories of how we got hooked by new music and ensured that all our students (novice or experienced musicians) felt exhilarated in the discovery and collaborative space. In each of the classes, there was a symbiotic sense that the team of teachers and students were pioneers working and creating a whole-new course as a unit.

POTE: Why a festival?

After four very rich seasons of the Workshop with numerous new music projects, I wanted to expand upon this experience and launch a festival that brings together musicians together and celebrate musical creativity across genres.

A festival, a forum, an attitude - called Playing On The Edge (POTE) with the purpose of presenting curious musicians, artists, thinkers and an audience engaged in deep listening and ingenious collaborations. Through curated concerts, chamber music parties and participative jam sessions, POTE seeks to bring together friends and communities at the heart of new music and fascinating ideas.

The inaugural festival will take place October 23-25, 2020 in a series of four concerts at the FRAC, Maison Victor Hugo, Kursaal (Salle Proudhon), and the Auditorium of the Cité des arts.

We are launching an open call for participants to propose their creative projects!

More information can be found at festivalpote.com

I hope you’ll join me as I launch this new endeavor to bring joy and community to my home through music.

(The website is currently in French only. However, if you want to participate and need help, please write to us at festivalpote@gmail.com)

Learn more about the festival here
Play at the festival here

My big realization

Dear friends,

I had a big realisation about a year ago.

A longing, a thirst, an agitation was gnawing inside me.

I knew there was something I wasn’t finding.

I was in the middle of an amazing musical season and looking at an even more incredible lineup for 2019-2020. How could something still be missing?

My story was supposed to be about how my mother - daughter of refugee parents in Taiwan during a politically troubled period in Taiwan - defiantly broke all the rules, raised her three children alone, moved to the USA with them without knowing how to speak English, and succeeded in making them ALL Ivy-league-educated professionals with extraordinary careers.

Was it the “mercurial” quality, the excess of the “water” element that the Chinese fortune teller had seen in my astrological makeup disrupting my equilibrium? After all, my parents had chosen the character “Hwa” for my name. Meaning the "birch tree" and written with the grounding “wood” radical, "Hwa" is supposed to counteract the excessive “water” element. Okay, I did meet my husband over the Siberian sky in a Tokyo-Paris flight, but I have since settled down in my beloved home in Besançon, France, and living my dream life as a violinist:

- I was touring with fantastic musicians like the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Mischa Maisky and performing at prestigious places at Lucerne Festival, Elbphilharmonie, Paris Philharmonie…

- I was a proud member of Victor Hugo Orchestra under the fantastic artistic direction Jean-François Verdier and Ensemble Tetraktys, amazing ensembles based in in my home city Besançon, whose INCREDIBLE, award-winning work make Besançon one of the most musical cities in France

- I was living my dream career: associate concertmaster and tenured professor, but also the flexibility to tour as a soloist and chamber musician

- My international solo project, my experimental string quartet, Quatuor Impact, and the New Music Workshop I founded, were bustling with new prospects

- I am nurtured and supported by my beautiful family

- The amazing education I received from Juilliard, Columbia, Harvard, Conservatoire de Paris continue to nourish me.

It was so confusing to me, how could there still be a missing puzzle piece?

In the middle of an intensive creative residency, I finally stopped and reflected one night. Once I took the time, I began to write out what I longed for. Everything came together very quickly.

I knew what it was - as a creative, I realised - I hadn’t created the unique thing inside me that I knew was there all along. I realised I had a longing to put together all that I have learned to serve my local community:

My music-loving neighbors, my children’s wonderful teachers, my adorable students, my former students who are now awesome, budding professionals, my incredible colleagues at the conservatory, my doctors who are also amateur musicians, my long-time audience and supporters, my warm-hearted fellow Bisontins who have adopted me and nurtured me as an artist.

What I want to do is to bring together what I have learned, what I heard and performed around the world, and share with each and everyone of you.

Out of this realisation I am sharing with you that I’ve created a music festival:

The name is “Playing On The Edge - POTE.”
Why Playing On The Edge and what is POTE? That’s coming in the next newsletter!

Meanwhile, what are you longing for musically? Drop me a line if you want!

Warmly,
Szuhwa