Life on Great Blasket and incredible musical memories

These change every year and the 2022 incumbents are Brock Montgomery and Claire de Haas. He is a former hockey professional from Canada, she is a Dutch yoga teacher. They traveled the world together; for the next few months, they will welcome visitors.

“It sounds idyllic,” Miriam said. Brock replied, “It’s beautiful right now. The sun shines right through. The guests are outside, walking around. The beach is full of seals. He chuckled and added, “Yeah, pretty cool.”

Culture folder on Lorcan Murray’s Classic Walk (Lyric FM, Mon-Fri 4pm) explained the ’10/40/70′ phenomenon. It’s one of those cultural things that is, at the same time, laughable and rather brilliant. It was imagined by the American Nicholas Rombes “to escape tired ways of thinking about films”. You pause a movie after 10, 40, and 70 minutes and study the still image.

It can give a different path in the film, a different perspective or experience. Rombes (pronounced Room-bee, it seems) is an academic who teaches film studies. This alone should trigger the alarms marked ‘spoofery’ and ‘bulls***’. Yet despite all of that…it’s a cool idea, in its own way.

And many critics, on the radio at least, can be a boring bunch, with their pretentiousness, jargon, and grating Mid-Atlantic accents. Anything to shake up this little scene is welcome.
Of course, the critic can only criticize; the artist actually does. Anton Sauvage (Newstalk, Saturday 9am) spoke to Niamh Varian-Barry, one of those ridiculously accomplished people who make us feel inadequate, in the most beautiful way.

She is a singer, violinist, violist and leader of the Irish Memory Orchestra, which is truly unique. It’s the only ensemble of its kind in the world, and what they do is extraordinary: they remove the sheet music.

This means that players must memorize everything, no matter how long. Niamh said the longest track they did was around 40 minutes; the host guessed it would involve “thousands and thousands” of notes.

It’s not just done for fun – which, by the way, is reason enough anyway – it also means, Niamh said, that visually impaired musicians can play a role in their own right. Music, she pointed out, is a language that anyone can speak.

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