Education Showing my work I actually recorded this on Friday, but you get it today. ❤️ First is Bach Invention in C Major plus the first chunk of the Sinfonia (which represents about 30 minutes of work): And here is "Soon," from A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC. I recommend watching this one to the
Cognition How to solve problems (how to learn) If you want to solve a problem, it has to be your problem to solve. This is almost a tautology. However, we are literally taught to figuratively participate in the solving of other people's problems. Take the piano student. In most cases it is the parent who takes
Theater I might as well fix RIDE THE CYCLONE while I'm at it First of all, I did in fact memorize that Bach invention, I'll do another showing-my-work post this Friday, and I may be developing a theory of how one learns that is 95 percent stolen from Lewis Carroll but whatever. Second of all, learning a Bach invention did in
Education Showing my work It would be silly for me to be telling you any of this if I weren't able to demonstrate at least some ability in the disciplines I am currently learning, which is to say that I ought to show you what I can do right now, if only
Cognition Bach (still Bach) and Henle I don't even know how to tell you that it seems like if you are going to learn a thing, the best way to do it may in fact be to plunge in and see how much you can get on the first go, and then start asking
Education Bach (again) and Plato "Two things," I told Larry, last night. (You have figured out that we tend to think in lists, separately and together.) "First, the thing we were talking about, one-on-one teaching-and-learning, it has a name. Dialectics. Which means I need to read Plato." "I've
Theater More thoughts on SIX, including how to fix it So if you think about SIX at all seriously you have to ask yourself if these women know they're dead and if they know themselves to be in some kind of afterlife, and if they know that the conditions of this afterlife require them to enact the same
Cognition A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total There's a problem, if you can call it that – because its function is not to be solved, but missolved – which runs as follows: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Education I want to be a functional pianist (and other things I want) If you read this post all the way through I am going to both a) solve for education and b) analyze each of the Queens' songs in SIX, I hope at least one of those items interests you, so here we go: Larry and I spent much of the
Education It's all the same thing, though So I ended yesterday's post with "every time you interact with a Quality teacher, it 1) teaches you something new and 2) you do not forget what you learn," which meant I had to ask myself what it might mean to teach something to someone in
Education Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Handel The King's song is kinging along, I love when you go in after you've written something and find all of the little bits that can be rearranged into more cohesive and/or more communicative patterns, in fact I may just show you the first draft of
Education The informational quality of food The deal is that I can't finish the King's song until I take some time to work out the next bit of underscoring, what are each of the pianists saying in response to what the King is saying, how does that affect what I hope to
Education In which I develop a functional definition of "quality" So yesterday I did this post in which I argle bargled for 1,287 words on problems I was not prepared to solve, such as: * Whether children should be allowed to spend their money as they choose (yes, also this does come down on the side of private property, oh
Education Giving children purchasing power could rightsize college debt I mean, maybe it couldn't, but it's an idea I'm thinking about so I might as well think it all the way through. The flip side to giving children purchasing power is obviously giving them the opportunity to earn money, and as soon as
MELISANDE More thoughts on musicals, and a few thoughts on keeping an audience's attention MELISANDE update! The Queen's song is final-first-drafted, which is to say that all of the musical elements except the performers are in place, and I have begun the King's song, which is to say that I've figured out how to navigate the sixteen-year-time-jump in
MELISANDE "musical openings are like chess openings, they set the conditions of the board" Okay. So. You might ask, if you were of an inquisitive frame of mind, why theater gets nary a mention in WHAT IT IS and WHAT TO DO NEXT. If that book was all about biography and cognition and the process of problem-solving (problems are ultimately solved by love, they
MELISANDE Taking Yourself Seriously First of all, the Queen's song is scored. I need to go through it as a pianist and make sure each of the parts are functionally playable – I suspect they are, since I play them as I compose them, but every time I play through an entire accompaniment
Theater In which I get very critical about MUSICALS YOU MAY KNOW AND LOVE MELISANDE is going very well, thank you. Scoring the Queen's song; telling Larry that each note needs both a musical and a dramaturgical reason to exist. The example and/or standard is of course INTO THE WOODS, and if you don't believe me you can watch
MELISANDE I rewrote the song... It was actually very easy, once it came down to understanding what was wrong with it. Also, I talked to Larry about whether it would be better to have the play play as written, with Melisande realizing that her mother had been lying about the whole "hair isn'
MELISANDE "oh, I get it, it's the failure mode of humanism" The thing about writer's block is that it's a signal that something you've written is wrong. Or, maybe, that the writing you've done already hasn't effectively set you up for the writing you need to do next. Or, maybe maybe,
MELISANDE How I am adapting E. Nesbit's "Melisande" Now that I have written about what happens when adaptation goes wrong, I might as well start writing about how to get it right. Which means it is finally time to tell you about MELISANDE. I am turning E. Nesbit's short story "Melisande: or, Long and Short
Theater Why Tim Minchin's MATILDA makes Miss Trunchbull the hero I am going to write more about the process through which I am adapting E. Nesbit's short story "Melisande: or, Long and Short Division" into a musical, but before we get to that – well, first, I have to continue adapting it, and second, I want to
Education Starting conditions It seems as if one should not begin by announcing a project, in the sense that whenever a person announces that they are doing something they are proactively pressuring themselves to do whatever it is that they said they were going to do, and in many cases this pressure actively
WHAT IT IS and WHAT TO DO NEXT WHAT IT IS and WHAT TO DO NEXT, Volume 4: None of the Monitors Are Asleep I am writing this, at half past seven, in the breakfast nook that used to be a mudroom. I spent a day, when winter was at its darkest, clearing out the junk that had been allowed to accumulate when we had no specific purpose for this space. Cardboard boxes; glass
WHAT IT IS and WHAT TO DO NEXT WHAT IT IS and WHAT TO DO NEXT, Volume 3: D4, C4 I am writing this not precisely after dawn—it is the eve of the summer solstice, and although I woke with the sun I also went back to sleep—but early enough that the clock has not yet marked seven. This mantel clock has handled a weekly winding for well