I am seeing a lot of SocMe posts saying how school music education was great n years ago, where n is often a number involving the author being at school themselves, and benefitting from free instrumental music tuition. I am now of an age where n for me is quite a large number, so I feel qualified by dint of longevity to be able to comment on this, and say not that it is wrong, but it is not right, at least not everywhere! As whoever it was said, “history is written by the victors”, so is what we are hearing in these cases, in other words of music education history being told by the successes, for obvious reasons we hear much less about the failures.
So, cards on the table, I am clearly one of the success stories. Free music lessons at comprehensive secondary school, very, very low cost Saturday morning music school, place in county youth orchestra, and so on. Then after qualifying I started teaching in a normal comprehensive school in Birmingham. So why aren’t I shouting about how good it was then? Simple. It wasn’t. Yes, I had free instrumental lessons at secondary school, but there were no peris in my second primary school. I moved from London, where I had violin and recorder lessons, to a primary school in Oxfordshire, where nothing happened. Not even my descant recorder was taken out of its box there. The school owned a radio, and we would occasionally sing along to a BBC programme. Why? Well, the school wasn’t on the radar of the county music service. And in those days whether a school got peri music staff or not was down to individual patronage and favouritism from the county music adviser that wouldn’t have been out of place in a renaissance court! For those in favoured places or schools, peri lessons were provided, for others, nothing.
These points are borne out in Cormac Loane’s book “Improvising on a theme: The story of the Birmingham Music Service”, where a former head of service is reported as saying: “As far as [LA music advisers] were concerned, the main purpose of the Music Service was to produce a symphony orchestra for them to conduct”. Loane goes on to observe “that instrumental teaching was mainly concentrated in the … grammar schools and schools in middle class areas of the city” (p34). Loane is writing about Birmingham, but such a pattern was repeated all over the country.
In my years as a music teacher, I had to fight tooth and nail for instrumental music teachers, in the days before the reforming into music hubs. Yes, OK, it was free at the point of delivery to the pupils, but let’s not kid ourselves it was universal. Go to a favoured school and it was there. Go to another and there would be nothing.
And let’s not even start on the classroom curriculum on offer back then.
So whilst us successes can look through the rear-view mirror with our rose-tinted specs, let’s not pretend our experiences were universal. They weren’t.
So those saying how great it was, and how we should return to a golden age, are actually saying how good it was for them, in their schools. The golden age wasn’t golden everywhere.
Now I know there will be some saying that although they agree with this, things were still better then for the privileged few. That’s a different story, and again I would suggest a reading of the book by Cormac Loane cited above, and then thinking about how far we have come since those days.
Reference:
Loane, C. (2020) Improvising on a theme – The story of Birmingham Music Service, London, UCL-IOE Press.
drfautley 
Completely agree. The Cumbrian peri service was also fantastic (in the 1980s). I had brilliant free lessons, played in all the available ensembles, loved every second of it and moved onto a career in music. But it was painfully exclusive, just for kids like me, whose parents could afford good instruments to take to the free lessons, and drive them to rehearsals in the evenings, and who had nice middle class ambitions and leant on me to practice, and who understood the value of learning music when the Daily Mail was going on about numeracy and literacy. There were two of us (both kids of school teachers) in a year group of 60. I would hope that these services would continue (tho I assume they don’t), but relevant and engaging classroom music for *all* children would have been much fairer.
Spot on. My Junior school (approx 220 pupils) was allocated 4 violins, 2 cellos, 2 flutes, 2 clarinets and 2 trumpets. I was lucky enough to get one of them, and tuition was free. Sheffield Music Service (late 60s, early 70s) had ‘Junior Music Makers’ on Monday evenings – if you played anything, you could go, and the staff worked with who was there, no auditions (and about 27 flutes). I wasn’t in the posh part of Sheffield, but then (as now!) was keenly aware that very few were getting the music education opportunity that I was.
With you all the way Martin. We
Hello Martin – yes my own experience mirrors yours. However, I am concerned that the media posts that you refer to (and focus on) assume music education to be synonymous with instrumental tuition. In many ways this reinforces your point about history being written by the victors. My music teacher education focused almost exclusively on classroom music as music education and that was what I was actually paid to do. Most of our best writers in the field have assumed the same – Swanwick, Paynter, Green and yourself!
Since you focus on it instrumental tuition in the 60s, 70s and 80s was blessed with some excellent free schemes but they were very patchy. In Kent the sec mods (which still exist other than in name) were barely engaged by the music service – I know because I went to one and then taught in one. The big free schemes apart my sense is that the quality and diversity of music education outside of the classroom outstrips that of 50 years ago. This is not to say that things are hunky dory on the inclusivity front.
As for classroom music (and this deserves more attention as THE core function) perhaps those who write nostalgic media posts are not disposed to think of this as music education at all. However, again while hugely patchy and notwithstanding the current assault of cognitive science, overall classroom music is now more ‘musical’ than it was in the 60s and 70s and much of this is down to the ongoing work of progressive practitioners, researchers and scholars.
Chris Philpott
Totally agree, Martin. My experiences replicate yours entirely. We had nothing in my rural primary school, but I had piano lessons and the piano teacher taught me to play recorder as well. There was a bit of instrumental teaching at the High School (not a lot) I remember, but I and my three siblings all had private lessons on piano and/or violin. My younger siblings were later able to join a local Saturday music school for ensemble work, and that was staffed by some of the Authority’s peripatetic teachers. My sister joined the County Youth Orchestra, but that was peopled mostly by students from independent schools!
Once qualified as a teacher, in Essex and Waltham Forest we struggled to make sure we had sufficient suitable instrumental input. In ILEA it was a bit different as HOMs could hire relevant suitable tutors, according to various criteria and the system was more equitable, I think. But overall, your points are correct it was a lottery.