Everyone suddenly burst out singing...

[callmemadam]

...only it seems they don’t, any more. Education Secretary Alan Johnson, or Postman Pat as Simon Heffer always calls him so disparagingly, is to provide extra funding to promote singing in schools. Howard Goodall is to be the new Singing Tsar. Bolting horses and stable doors come to mind. This government has cut back on peripatetic music teachers and cluttered up the curriculum so that it’s hard for schools to find time for music. This applies to state schools rather than private ones and to some state schools more than others. Anyone who watched the recent reality TV show The Choir will have been shocked to see how unused the teenagers were to singing. I read an article recently by Julian Lloyd Webber in which he said that when he was at The Royal College of Music (1970s?) he was one of a tiny minority of students from public schools. Now, he says, the proportions are exactly reversed. This is disgraceful; a great loss of talent and yet more evidence of working class children being let down by a system which is supposed to promote equality of opportunity. There is a bias against classical music because of a fear that children won’t like it: the usual and unnecessary low expectations. I’m reminded of a calypso which appeared, I think in Private Eye, at a time when it was reported that some Afro-Caribbean families were sending their children to school back in the West Indies. Part of it went:
‘English education is crap,
All we learn is calypso and rap.’


When I was little our mother sang to us and we heard nursery rhymes on Listen with Mother. We sang at Infant School and at Junior School we joined in with the BBC’s Singing Together and Rhythm and Melody programmes. As a result of those, my head is full of British folk songs, including a lot of seditious Jacobite songs which for some reason were favourites of the producers. At senior school the entire school had hymn practice once a week and we had a weekly music lesson even in the sixth form, whether we were taking music exams or not. All this as well as O and A- Level lessons. I don’t see why it will take £10m of taxpayers’ money to get people to sing in schools unless teachers have forgotten how to sing. Just shows how hard it is to get something back once you’ve let it go slip sliding away.

Comments

[land-girl.livejournal.com]

This is oh so true. For a while now I have been pondering over how children don't listen to classical music any more, how they can't name a tune or a composer, how they choose not to listen because nobody has played them something which sets their souls on fire. When I was in school we had marvellous music teachers who took us to real concerts and played us real music and gave us some ownership on the music which is our heritage.

Gosh, I sound pompous, don't I? But like singing in schools, I mourn the loss of classical music as something which was part of children's lives ...

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Damn, LJ swallowed my comment. I don't think you sound pompous at all and your own children are lucky that they have a musical family to encourage them. Children should at least be given the chance to hear good music. Who knows what will blow them away? And it doesn't have to be instead of rock; both can be great.

[land-girl.livejournal.com]

Both can be great. I've been discussing this at some length with cravatman, who loves all kinds of music, and when he listens to it and analyses it, he treats each piece of music in the same way. I grew up thinking that rock and roll was fun, and The Beatles were great, but actually modern music didn't have a patch on classical and jazz. There was a real difference in the way we listened to music and when ... now I've realized that I am trying to change it ... to listen to rock more seriously and classical with more of a sense of fun : )

[cybersofa.livejournal.com]

We practised singing in other lessons than music, too, e.g. Fr. But thirty adolescent males' deranged rendition of Chevaliers de la table ronde isn't going to do much for a school's League Table position.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Ah, but it makes for so much amusement in later life...We had to sing charming ditties like J’ai lié ma botte.

[minniemoll.livejournal.com]

I was lucky, I went to very musical primary and high schools, at primary school (1974-81) we had assembly with hymns every morning, all learnt the recorder, listened to the schools music programmes on the radio (the ones with a booklet), had clarinet and guitar lessons (the latter after school, in the class teacher's spare time), and generally sang a lot.

We had a brilliant music teacher at high school (1981-86), there was no singing in assembly, it not being a church school, but there was a large and enthusiastic choir, and interesting music lessons. I joined in with more enthusiasm than talent, but I really enjoyed it. We even went on a choir trip to Bury's twin town in France, along with choirs from all over Europe - that was a great week.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Exactly what so many children are missing out on now! I was so disappointed not to get into the school choir, sob. I can sing in tune OK, just haven't got any voice. Singing is fun: look how people enjoy carol concerts.

[minniemoll.livejournal.com]

Thankfully all you had to do to be in our school choir was turn up on a reasonably regular basis - I don't think I'd have got in any other way :) But I loved it, and can still remember many of the songs we sang now, twenty years on. And a lot of them weren't well known songs, so it's not that I've heard them since.

I've just remembered - our music teacher was called Emyr Wynne Jones - with a name like that, he had to be enthusiastic about music!

[sloopjonb.livejournal.com]

We did singing at school. That was all it was, mind. People of a musical bent did get proper music lessons (well, knowing our school, extremely crap music lessons, probably) if they chose it as a specialised subject, but for the rest of us, the tone-deaf masses, it was just singing. Songs I have never heard anywhere else. There was one about Jesse James, and another about the ship Titanic that sailed the ocean blue, and one about one Santy Anno (a Mexican general, apparently).

We did have a school orchestra. They were bad. If you waiting outside the Boss's office for post-school punishment, the worst part was listening to the band practice in the hall next door. Compared to that, a slippering was nothing. (Part of the problem was that the music master only picked pretty boys. Whether they could play or not.)

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

I've certainly never heard of those songs!
You should write a school story, you know.

[sloopjonb.livejournal.com]

The school stories I'd like to write have already been written, 40 years ago: the now entirely forgotten Jim Starling series by E W Hildick. Not for Jim the boarding school, the midnight feast, the tuck shop, the ragging in the dorm or the fagging for the prefect. Jim attended Cement Street Secondary Modern in Smogbury, and for him the gang den under the railway arches, the trip to Wembley to see Burnley in the Cup Final, and the being suspected of nicking lead off of church roofs. Hildick was a teacher himself, at a Sec. Mod. in Leeds, and he gave Jim and The Last Apple Gang exciting, believable, shrewdly observed, funny and even educational adventures set in a landscape and a world I recognised and understood, whereas most school stories might as well have been set in Narnia for all the resonance they had with my own schooldays. (Molesworth always excepted, of course; true genius transcends all boundaries in the world in space).

You couldn't write a Jim Starling for today. It would be too depressing.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

I have heard of the Jim Starling books, so he's not completely forgotten. Never read them, though. Although I now have a collection of school stories I read very few when I was young. I'll save the rest for replying to your kidlit post when I get round to it.

I'd argue with you about how some school stories 'might as well have been set in Narnia'. So wot? Nothing I read was anything like my own life asnd that was rather the point. Didn't you ever meet Jennings, BTW?

[sloopjonb.livejournal.com]

So wot? you say ... well, yes, the well-written ones (like Jennings) I enjoyed very much, in a Narnian sort of way. (Most of them were not well written, however. In fact, thinking about it, I only ever liked Jennings in the traditional school story genre). I loved Arthur Ransome and still do, and none of his kids (not even the Death & Glories) had much in common with my life. But Jim Starling I enjoyed in a completely different way. It was like readng a story set in a place you know. And it stood out from the crowd; this was why Hildick wrote the books in the first place; he was worried that children's literature didn't reflect the lives of the kids he knew, and he decided to rectify the omission himself. There's nothing wrong with boarding-school stories, just as there's nothing wrong with fantasy (although in both genres you run the risk of by-the-numbers hackwork ... and Jo Rowling has made her pile combining the two). But it was good to have something real - real to me, that is. There wasn't much of that about, 35 years ago.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

'this was why Hildick wrote the books'

Geoffrey Trease had the same idea and a rotten old preacher he was, too. Some people love his books but I am not one of them. There were other writers trying to be realistic: John Rowe Townsend and Frederick Grice, for instance. But who reads them, compared with the people who read Ransome even as adults?

[sloopjonb.livejournal.com]

I vaguely remember reading something by Trease ... can't recall it at all. Never heard of the other two. And realism per se isn't the point of my discourse - Ramsome's books are (in the main) extremely realistic. But I couldn't and can't relate to them in terms of personal experience, my boating being largely limited to the Mersey Ferry. It was fun to read about kids like me, living in the same sort of place I did, doing some of the same things I did (have you ever noticed how rarely kids in stories play football, for instance?). It widened the canvas of children's books. That alone wouldn't have made the books worthwhile, of course; first and foremost they were well-written, and very well observed. And not preachy at all.

People can only read what is in print. What criteria publishers use for keeping books in print I do not know ... doesn't seem to be related to literary quality.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

'What criteria publishers use for keeping books in print I do not know ...'

Which explains the rise of new publishers like fidrabooks

[dovegreyreader.livejournal.com]

We were always singing especially hymns,
Now thank we all out God,
For pots and pans and voices
...and the rest.We also had a headmistress who loved Kathleen Ferrier so we used to do a lot of Blowing the Wind Southerly too.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

We were quite law abiding but used to get the giggles over Pray that Jerusalem may have Peace and Felicity because a girl in our form, named Felicity, was anything but peaceful. Small things please small minds...