A smothering, suffocating month

An Artistic Score Engraving update from May 2026

Dear all,

Welcome back to a new instalment of the ASE newsletter.

April has been a truly tough month for me, as health decided to knock on my door to remind me to pay it more respect. Basically non-stop from the beginning of the month I have had some sort of respiratory troubles: from pharyngitis to a badly developed cold, it was all very boring. It was not one of those easy-to-spot infections where the doctor gives you antibiotics and you will be better than new in less than a week. There was no fever, no lung inflammation—which is very good—, but I could barely speak for whole days and as soon as I tried to for more than five minutes, I would cough for the next ten. The only real cure for this, besides drinking whole rivers of warm water, was patience and resting. While I had no problem putting the first on the table, the second was not going to be, since I had to work at night to complete certain assignments about which I will be able to talk in one of the next instalments. With the gift of hindsight, I now know that it was not worth it, and I will think very carefully in the future before accepting anything that puts my health at risk.

Customer support extinction event

Something else kept my nerves on edge, and that is customer support. With the Middle East crisis going on, couriers decided to increase their fares even if most governments have done something to contain fuel prices. To give you context, they just raised prices by +30% while, even without said measures, fuel gas would not have raised that much (more like 15–17%). This prompted me to try a slightly cheaper courier than the one I usually use for a shipment, which I now know I will never trust again. The parcel apparently got lost between my home and their depot, just to resurface two weeks later near Venice (?!). In the meantime, customer support would reply from impossible countries, dropping the line as soon as the call would last more than 10 minutes, tracking would not update, a true nightmare…

In the end, it was a clear software issue, but they will never admit that. Imagine that a personal parcel I ordered from Rome came to the closest depot and then, for unknown reason, instead of being delivered it went back to Rome. The courier tried to blame the sender’s way of printing the label. If it were so, how did the parcel come so close to me? Everything ended well—with a two weeks delay, however—but the amount of time and nerve-wracking was impossible to believe.

I think this is all a consequence of companies not investing in customer support and in their technological infrastructure. They try to implement AI agents and this is just becoming a widespread disaster. I have not yet found a single AI agent able to truly help with customer support. Their task is only to make you go in circles around the issue, and never reach a human. Then, often and sadly, if you ever get to a human, they are either poorly trained or trained to get rid of you. This is absolutely not the right way forward, I am afraid. And be mindful: this doesn’t only happen with small companies who may have a lesser budget to invest in customer support, but with huge companies too!

How to tomato your way through!

I believe that the health issues I had during April could not heal properly and in an ordinary timeframe because of the amount of work I had to do during the same period. You know I already tend to spend a moderately high amount of time working every day; if I start at 9 AM as I usually do, I very seldom manage to punch the clock before 9 PM. For the entire month of April, however, while I still began my working day at around 9 AM, I would not be able to detach from the desk before 2 or 3 AM. Five to six hours of often troubled sleep would follow, and I would start again. A few nights I even had to proceed up to 5.30 AM and, let me tell you, it was not nice.

The first lesson I learned from this is quite straightforward: never again! There is nothing on this world that will be able to convince me to do this again or, to put it plainly, my health shall no longer be for sale.

As with all negative experiences, there is always something positive to balance them up, and that is how I managed to fight through this and emerge victorious (or, well, a survivor) on the other side. The main risks of working long in front of a computer are: losing your eyesight and compromising your spine. Having already been quite shortsighted for most of my life, I can tell you that, during this month, I have clearly felt that an extra 0.10 to 0.25 dioptres have abandoned my eyes. I usually upgrade my lenses every two years but this experience will most probably shorten the interval. Still, I managed to survive thanks to the Pomodoro Technique (hence the ‘tomatoing’ reference above). This is nothing new but, for those who don’t know it, it consists of leveraging the concentration capacity of a standard human being (around 20 to 25 minutes). You work for 25 minutes (with a timer), then you take a 5-minute break. We shall call this process (work + break) A. You repeat A three times, then, after the fourth round of work, you take a longer, 15-minute break (B). Basically you get an AAAB form! Once this longer break is over, you can resume with three As and one B, for as long as you can manage. My personal record—and, also, my melting point—is five stages, or 20 total rounds of work in a given day. It is more usual that I stop anywhere between 12 and 16. What you do during the break is also important, and here are a few examples:

1. Stand up and look far away, outside of the window
2. Lay down and close your eyes, focusing on your breath. It is not fundamental that you fall asleep, but it is not a problem if you do.
3. Do some physical exercise
4. Do not look at any screen, for no reason whatsoever!

For point three, and connecting to my attempts at saving my spine, I alternate two working rounds sit at the desk, and two rounds standing—I have a standing desk. Every morning, then, I do about 20 minutes of Tai Chi practice. This has literally saved my life!

A wonderful concert!

On April 20th, 2026, in Shanghai, China, an entire concert has been dedicated to Carlo Alfredo Piatti, featuring my editions throughout the program. The soloist was Yan Pan and here is the program they played, with links to where to find the digital scores (remember you can always contact me for the physical copies). Many of these were world premiere performances, at least outside of Piatti’s lifetime, and I am incredibly proud of what Yan managed to do to make this possible.

• La Corsa (The Race) for cello and piano (pianist for all pieces: Wenqi Li);
• Capriccio sopra un tema della Niobe di Pacini, Op. 22 for cello solo;
• A Farewell for voice, cello, and piano (voice: Liga Yi);
• In Vacanza for cello quartet — physical copy direct link — 2nd to 4th cellos: Dandi Wang, Yuqi Zeng, Peiyao Guo.
• Pioggia d’Aprile for cello and piano;
• Elegia sulla morte di Antonio Rubinstein for two cellos (second cello: Yuki Zeng);
• Prelude from Suite I in G major by J. S. Bach with piano accompaniment by Piatti;
• Prelude, Sarabande, Gigue from Suite IV in Eb major by J. S. Bach with piano accompaniment by Piatti;
• Canto sopra uno studio di Duport for voice, cello, and piano.

Videos from the concert are being prepared and will be available on YouTube soon. Having already been able to watch the masters for these videos, I was deeply moved to see the pieces I spent so much time and effort working on being finally being released to the public.

My deepest thanks go to Yan Pan for organising all this and for practicing this fiendishly difficult program; to all the musicians involved; to the institutions and to the audio/video technicians that made this possible. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

NEW EDITION!

Even through all hardships I managed to publish one new score this month, and it is a new, great publication around Carlo Alfredo Piatti’s Twelve Caprices, Op. 25. One of ASE’s first edition has been Piatti’s own piano accompaniment to Caprice No. 7 (ASE 0003 – physical copy). This new edition, the first of two volumes, contains the accompaniment to Caprices 1, 6, 9, 10, and 12, composed by Maestro Yuriy Leonovich, alongside Piatti’s own No. 7. The Critical Notes section includes several corrections that had escaped most published editions so far. The second volume, containing Caprices 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 11 is already being prepared and will be released during Summer 2026.

You can find the digital edition here, while the printed copy will be announced soon during this month.

Listen to how they sound: No. 1, No. 12.

Bottom Line

That’s it for today! Thank you for reading this up to the end and, please, share with me what you think, especially about how you manage personal stress and heavy workloads. I read everything and try my best to reply as swiftly as I can.

You can join my mailing list to get weekly gifts and promotions; browse my editions and contact me directly for printed titles. My YouTube channel, finally, contains video renditions of most editions.

See you next month for the next ASE update. Please let me know what you are doing and where your musical adventures are bringing you.

Yours,

Michele