I'm not quite sure why but I get an uncontrollable urge to slap Gareth Malone every time his smug smiling face appears on television, claiming to have introduced singing to Britain. Actually, I do know why. He didn't! He jumped on a bandwagon. People were already joining choirs, children were already singing in school (not least because the best way to deliver the Wider Ops programme was through singing, with the excellent and free, at the time, support of SingUp)
I think I get narky because programmes like this undermine all the great work that is being done all over the country.
This programme made lots of valuable points about music education in our country and I do agree with a lot of what was said but it's so much more complicated than a television programme can convey.
They are absolutely right in noting that music (and many other subjects) are squeezed by the pressure of every child now having to achieve an above average score on a maths and literacy test. And yes, that's exactly what I mean. Level 4 SAT was the average achievement when the exams were introduced. We all know that you can't make every child above average because that is statistically impossible but it doesn't stop primary school teachers nearly killing themselves in an attempt to do so. This has the effect that only maths and literacy are valued. Most people think this is right. Most people think that standards in maths and literacy have to be constantly driven up. I wonder where it will stop and worry about producing children who can't see the value of anything that isn't words or numbers. Even in a school that values other subjects children will still be taken out of their 40 minute music lesson to read to a TA because there isn't time in the other 25 hours and 50 minutes they are in school (not including lunch). We are also missing the point that a rounded education leads to rounded brain development, which aids learning. Just this week there was another study stating that learning music improved language acquisition http://www.classicfm.com/music-news/latest-news/studying-music-increases-blood-flow-brain/
The programme is also correct in pointing out that opportunities for poorer children in classical music are limited. The ignorance of James Rhodes to this fact made me laugh. I'm sure he's a very nice man with good intentions but when he snorted at a school budget of £400 a year for music he showed that he really had no idea. I believe schools get an average of £3200 per pupil per year, from which they have to buy everything (including teacher's salaries but excluding building work, which has to be applied for separately). It's not quite the £30,000 a year his parents would have paid for a prep school or the £69000 they would have paid for Eton. Oh, and music lessons at Eton would have cost them an extra £1572 to £4722 a year. He probably doesn't understand just how little money most families have to live on either. I know that when my daughter joined the Music Hub's (subsidised) youth orchestra the extra £1000 a year I had to find nearly broke us and we earn reasonably well. When I visited a local prep school I was so jealous of their resources but realistically with 40 minutes a week, punctuated with children dribbling in and out to read and class sizes double those they had and the fact there is only one of me and they have 5 full time music staff, what would be the point?
I love the idea of an instrument amnesty. I don't know why no one has thought of this before? Oh wait, they have. This is one of the ways we run our Youth Orchestra. We get instruments and loan them to children (for free!). Again though, I find myself seething with jealousy at the quality of instruments they are given. Most of the quality instruments we have, we have had to buy second hand and then have repaired. We are given the occasional flute, clarinet or violin that no one can sell on EBay. How useful a film crew would be to those of us trying to do this work permanently. It's the way I run my school band too and I was able to get the music hub to give me a selection of instruments, rather than a class set of the same for the Wider Ops programme that was dismissed so quickly on the telephone.
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| Quality of many donated instruments |
I love the idea of getting professional musicians in to play and inspire the children. I wonder why no one has thought of this? Wait. Don't all major orchestras have outreach programmes? And teachers are clever enough to beg musicians in their local area to come in and play (usually for nothing!)
I love the idea of getting pupils, no matter how bad they are, to play in front of the rest of the school. I wonder why no one has thought of that? I'm not the only primary school doing it, surely? Our weekly band practice, before school on a Friday, leads to an assembly where the band provide all the accompanying music. There are weird farting noises from the brass, squeaks from the woodwind and sounds like nails being scraped down the blackboard from the strings but the fact that children can see their peers; both boys and girls and not just the clever children with rich parents up there is an inspiration.
I love the idea of music teachers turning up on the doorstep of their pupils with a film crew to badger their parents into making their child practise. I can see that working well. I've never thought of that before. Where can I get my film crew?
I love the idea of every school having a free concert pianist to accompany in their music lessons. I'd quite like Lang Lang but if James Rhodes would like to come to our school instead we wouldn't turn him away.
I'm not so sure about children needing to know Mozart and Grieg. Why those two composers? There is such a danger that 'experts' think they know the best way of doing something. The new proposed GCSE music curriculum suggests that composers between the years 1700 and 1900 only should be studied. This proposal leaves me speechless (this doesn't happen often) and risks putting more people off music. People need to have access to as wide a range of music as possible.
The idea that it's not music unless it's played on conventional orchestral instruments and written by composers who died over 100 years ago is stupid. I was really upset that the programme filmed a teacher, obviously doing a great job and ridiculed her for using 'junk' instruments. This is such a valuable thing to do. Especially for poorer children. It teaches them that everyone can make music. Many years ago (before I was the music teacher) our school had a visit from the drummer of Status Quo (you see I don't know why no one has thought of getting professional musicians into schools!) and he told the children that they didn't need to buy a drum kit, they should just raid the kitchen cupboards for pots and pans because that was how he started. The world would be a poorer place without drummers who started on saucepans and without Stomp!
At the risk of being shot down by the naive people who think we can have a truly equal society there is absolutely no point in a child who comes to school on the bus because their parents can't afford a car in learning the classical harp but they could learn 3 chords on a guitar that and write the most amazing pop songs known to man, or invent a new instrument with plastic tubing and a margarine tub.
Music has always been unequal. Classical musicians have always been rich and folk musicians poor. Brass bands were for the working classes and symphony orchestras for the upper classes. The middle classes didn't have any music because they were working too hard to become the upper class. That's not true - they used to have the piano in the parlour and now they have Xfactor on the TV. Music is for everyone.
The subtle undermining of people who are trying their best in difficult circumstances in programmes like this upsets me. The problem with TV and 'experts' is that to make the expert right everyone else has to appear wrong. When James Rhodes nearly slammed the phone down on the lovely Janette from the Essex Music Hub, my heart nearly broke. What does he want? Should people work for no money to provide something? The only way the music hubs can offer more free services is if they get more money from the government. People like Janette and myself already do a lot of free work but we do need to eat and Channel 4 aren't paying us for our opinions. And the poor class teacher who ended up looking as though she was just a bad teacher. She had agreed to be filmed and had obviously been chosen because she doesn't enjoy music and didn't want to teach it. From the two minutes of her lesson that we saw, no one would deny that it was a terrible, uninspiring and had very little musical content but this isn't true for every primary teacher. In our school, where teachers do not have to teach music (because I do), I often walk into a classroom to find children singing a song to support a subject they are learning, making a beatbox backing to accompany their rap that they wrote in literacy, passing a clapped rhythm around a circle, responding to musical sounds (eg one shake of a tambourine for stop, two for tidy up etc), or singing a grace before lunch. I'm willing to bet that this is not that unusual.
Maybe I will be less narky after the second programme and will be grateful that it has raised the profile of music in education but for now, I and thousands of other music teachers will be doing our best for our pupils.
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