The follow up is also very good, and linked at the bottom of the blog post. The teacher also brings in "Roots", which if you've never seen is a great documentary. This is how you get kids to learn - Find a way to engage them, and give them the ability to relate themselves to the subjects of study, and to real life. My music history teacher always started talking about a new composer by going through their "life story" if you will. I learned about Vivaldi being a dirty ginger; Lully stamping his own foot with his conducting staff, getting gangrene and dying I learned about Bach going to jail, quitting jobs, taking way too much time off and having 20 kids; I learned about Brahms and Clara Schumann's star-crossed love, which never came to fruition. The very first lecture we ever had she played a bunch of music of varying genres, and related them all - from This to This (which have more musically in common than you would think). My teacher made those people come alive for me. They weren't just names on compositions, they were busts made flesh, with human emotions, wants, needs and desires, reaching out from 100 years and more to connect with me, the listener. Hopefully this teacher can inspire their students the way my teacher inspired me.
It's off topic, but can you elaborate a bit on what Passacaille in g-minor has in common with Crabbuckit?
A few things!! (Music nerdery ahead - fair warning to everyone else) The biggest one is that both of them are using "ground bass" lines i.e. bass lines that repeat over and over and over again, but they also both (originally) contain "blue" notes, or notes that don't fit into standard western harmony as we know it, usually 7ths that are flatter than they should be. In Crabbuckit, there's these sort of "cluster chord"-y piano shots that are pretty dissonant. It's a technique popularized by Thelonious Monk to try to imitate notes that can't be played on a piano. These same notes also appear on Harpsichords, or did. When harpsichords were in fashion, the tuning system we use today wasn't around. In our tuning system, 5ths are "squeezed", so that we can play all 12 keys on one keyboard. the fifths were more "pure" in their tuning system - but that also meant that when you started to go into keys with more sharps or more flats in the key signature, the notes start to get more and more squirrelly. Here's an example of a few different old school tunings. I know, I know, it's Pachabel's Canon, but the video illustrates what I'm talking about really well. Hear some of the "weird", "out of tune" notes? especially as it starts to add more accidentals? This stuff happens especially in minor keys, and often composers would use those notes on purpose, just to twist the knife a little bit. So both pieces are using different techniques to attain those "blue" notes, just as blues guitarists do when they bend notes. Here's more on Bach's tuning stuff. I could read this shit all day.