You’ll never guess what I’m practicing now … a piano version of “Let it go,” from the Disney movie, “Frozen”which I’m adapting to play on the harpsichord. It’s generally not the type of music I play, but it’s all to prepare for a school presentation for Early Music Hawaii in a couple of weeks.

The last time we did this was in May, and I wanted to show the kids that early instruments like the harpsichord can be used to play other types of music. At that time, I played the theme from Harry Potter, and when I got a bunch of blank looks, I realized that first graders may not know about Harry Potter! After all, the first movie, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” came out in 2001, more than 20 years ago! No wonder the children were unfamiliar with the music—these kids weren’t even born yet!

And the fastest way for me to learn the music is to hear a recording of it … which I’ve been listening to on my daily walks. My late husband, Carl Crosier, used this method to learn his scores for conducting Bach cantatas and the Passions, but frankly, it drove me crazy when he would listen to the music with headphones on, score in hand, and he’d be singing along with the alto part. Of course, I could only hear the part that he was singing, and it sounded pretty strange!

In the early days, before personal listening devices, he would play LPs. I may have written that we heard the St. Matthew Passion every night as dinner music for eight months! Even my son had the music memorized!

Later, he would frequently play recordings for the choir, saying “A picture is worth a thousand words!” and the choir did seem to learn the music faster after hearing a recording of the music.

Which brings to the next thing I’m practicing … the recorder! If you watch this short video, you’ll learn why many children in the United States learned to play the recorder as part of an elementary music curriculum.

However, I have no memories of learning the recorder as a child. I only remember that during graduate school, I bought a recorder and taught myself to play as a diversion from practicing the organ so intensively.

Basically, though, I have played it very little since 1973 (!) but when Ian Capps, president of Early Music Hawaii, asked if either Keane Ishii (who will be part of our school presentation) or I played the recorder, I foolishly (?) volunteered. A couple of days ago, I pulled out my recorder and found that I still remembered the fingerings after all these DECADES later!

It seems, though, that some people HATE the recorder, which led to one person’s rant I found on Reddit:

Plastic recorders are terrible, embarrassing instruments that should be phased out of children’s music programs, possibly melted and recycled, possibly redacted from historical records.

They’re like $5-10 but about as well built as a $0.50 bubble shooter from the huckster on the corner of 116th and Lexington.

They serve pretty much no practical purpose that could not be better filled by, just, voice lessons, lil toy synthesizers (maybe breath-powered lil toy synthesizers), lil xylophone things, video games (for hand eye coordination), etc.

They serve no aesthetic purpose, and the best recorder performance I’ve ever seen still sounded like a platypus rubbing its teeth on a wet chalkboard.

If a couple of kids here and there are interested in breathy instruments in the future like clarinets, and recorders will help them get there, fine, i guess, but by and large, fuck recorders and get them out of the hands of large groups before the cold breath of the cosmos punishes us for this behavior. It may be indifferent but it knows a true abomination when it sees one.

I even did a Google search on “I hate the recorder” which resulted in more than 5 million hits! Good thing that my recorder isn’t plastic, but is made out of wood.