Issue 130: Welcome to the Jungle

Hello again – your three articles for the week have been posted!

This has been a rather more gentle weekend that usual. More and more, I find that I need the weekend to be a sort of reservoir, of peace and calm, after the bustle and activity and noise of the week.

Noise? That’s surely a harsh description of what happens in my music lessons?

Just, for a moment, consider the Junior Recorder Ensemble. They are all reasonably confident players, and can mostly read music fairly well. However it is going to be a long time before their efforts at Offenbach’s “Galop” (from “Romantic Recorder Stars”, A C Black) resolve themselves into anything like what their parents will hear eventually at the Summer Concert.

Or how about Samba Funk, with two separate classes of more than 40 players, in a small and acoustically challenged school hall (long, narrow, hard walls, ceiling and floor). The basic rhythm of “Fish and CHIPS, sau-sage and CHIPS” has yet to emerge as a consensus from the players. The only comfort is that sixteen of the children are playing almost inaudible ganzas (shakers) and boomwhackers (instead of claves).

Need I say more? Like four classes of beginner recorders?

Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE teaching them, each and every class, each and every piano lesson, each and every theory lesson.

But by Friday evening, it’s time for John Cage. 4′ 33”. Or maybe even 4 hours and 33 minutes?

birds on a branch divider

 

I think those are the loudest classes

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