Rants By Topic

I Will Try You – Snippet The Boats

04.16.2018

A snippet from the new opera, The Boats: I Will Try You. Dogs that won’t behave and hand clapping skills. The Smiths and How Soon Is Now. Emergency couples therapy, The Marriage Of Figaro and fishing boat captains. The inner voice revisited. La Boheme revisited. Bring on the soaring guitars.

Roger CortonPower chords.

I Will Try You

JC Harris

RCIt starts out with the hand clapping.

JCHSo it’s breakfast and Móirín and Ciarán are doing what lots of households do, having a fight whilst taking care of chores. In this case she’s calling in one of the dogs.

RCFrom the farm.

RCWell, it’s not really a farm. But yeah, the property where sheep graze. Sheep dogs. And the dog isn’t minding and it’s exasperating. So she’s clapping that pattern over and over. And that blends in with her telling off Ciarán. But his mind is off somewhere else. It’s just this background noise.

[…]

Set And Forget Learning

04.6.2018

Culture, Teaching

A Letter To The Editor, Tape-Op Magazine #122

A great end rant.

It dawned on me as I read your editorial that it’s probably no coincidence that the breakdown of this ‘system’ would occur just as Youtube makes available so much task based learning that I would have killed for back in the day.

I have several concerns about the prevalence of videos now on the web.

1. Call it sour grapes, but as a some-time music teacher, I regularly see how students see no reason to pay me for lessons. In fact, I often fall into this trap myself–deciding that I can do things myself that actually could be handled easier by paying a professional. For some reason, we can’t see the abstract value we bring to the table as ‘pros’.

2. Today there are precious few kids who even want to learn to play an instrument or learn to record properly. I don’t mean this to be snarky, but there is a general expectation that music production will be a one-button […]