The Musical Priest

Thanks to the labors of Drew Marquard, SJ I believe this video to be of a MUCH higher quality that the first video. I post it here more because I'd love to solicit feeback from people as to what I might do to improve on it. Note: I just couldn't resist putting at least a little reference to St. Ignatius in the video!

I had two classes yesterday: my " Intro to the Irish Tin Whistle " and a course on St. Augustine. I was thrilled with the number of students who attended the whistle class - over forty - and I have high hopes for this semester. My philosophy course was very good, too, and I'm excited to be taking this class. Drew and I will be video taping two new segments for my course. I hope to have them edited and posted by this evening. At heart, this series is intended for anyone who is interested in learning to play the tin whistle and I'm trying to gear the videos to be as simple and straight forward as possible. If you're interested, please enroll in the YouTube group (following the link above) and let me know if I can be of help. I've been thinking a lot about how quickly this last year has gone by. Just one year ago, I baptized my first bab y. A year later, her family still grieves the loss and I study philosophy. There's a cruelty in that: I was, each night, ...

I can be candid in saying that this is one of the coolest tin whistle tricks I've seen. I mean, I'm lucky to be able to play with my own hands, but to switch hands? This is Michael and Brian, my two music students. Shot by Drew Marquard, SJ at the Duns Family St. Stephen's Day Extravaganza, this video is a quick testament to their talent. I uploaded another video to YouTube that shows us playing another jig together but, as this is by far the cooler of the two, I thought I'd post it here.

It's an odd phenomenon the Duns family faces: what to do with two Irish musicians in the house? Well, Brian Halloran and I are soon to be family: Brian is my sisters fiancee. Just before Christmas we recorded this little video (more out of silliness than anything else)!

I'm only going to post this first video on here (the rest will be stored on the YouTube group I've dedicated to the whistle) just to show the shape of the course I'm going to teach. I'm very excited about using the internet to teach Irish music and I think that this will open up a host of opportunities both for musical education and for evangelization (why should the two be separate?).