I'm a musician who writes controversial things about music - Howdy!

Oh, hi Mark!

I’m an Irish composer and I run the YouTube channel, Tantacrul. I regularly post videos on a wide range of musical topics, employing a video essay format similar to channels like Vox or Every Frame a Painting but with a critical and comedic vein.

This format is unusual for music philosophy. I’m a big fan of the 20th century music philosopher, Theodore Adorno, who wrote amusing and withering criticisms of the musical trends of his day. However, there’s a certain unwillingness to be critical about music on YouTube because the technology works in a way that punishes you for it. I recently did a video where I poked fun at the Eurovision Song Contest and ended up receiving a lot of incredibly nasty comments that continue to this day. The video indexes really well when you search for ‘Eurovision 2017’, meaning that the majority of my viewers are Eurovision fans – the worst possible audience. I’m hoping that if I keep up what I’m doing, I’ll eventually find my audience but YouTube isn’t making that easy.

My latest video takes aim at toys and TV shows that claim to provide musical education to young babies. In making my argument, I use a mixture of serious and facetious points: on the one hand, I discuss research concerning how babies learn spoken languages. On the other, I engage in a tonal dissection of the nursery rhyme ‘The Wheels on the Bus’. My most popular video to date is about Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, where I point out how the song is structured before measuring the quality of various covers of it, taking notable aim at my fellow countryman, Bono, in the process.