Remember Recorder Lessons?

If you're over 30 you almost certainly had a recorder thrust in your hand at school.

Early this year I volunteered to teach recorders to my son’s Year 2 class.

It was a somewhat desperate attempt to contribute to the music education in a school that has so much good will around music provision, but beyond external visiting instrumental teachers (paid for by parents) very little continuing specialist input.

I am not a recorder teacher - I got grade 5 recorder twenty-five years ago - but I am a singer and music educator. So why recorders? The year 2 teacher had intimated to me that they had a set of recorders and they used to have someone come and teach the year 2 pre-pandemic (a familiar story of trimming round the edges of the so-called core curricula during the pandemic that has never been recovered). So, given that the will was clearly there on the school’s side and I had been suffering from that familiar parental underlying guilt (justified or otherwise) about not being a member of the PTA, I dashed off an email to the head and pressed send before I could change my mind!

Plastic recorders and their older bakelite cousins are very robust, don’t cost much to purchase (though musical quality varies hugely!) And crucially for the children, they can make a noise immediately. There is a direct correlation between effort input (breath) and noise output which can be fairly quickly adjusted with some gentle instruction. Visually too, there is a direct correlation between the position of the fingers and the pitch of the note that comes out - top hole covered is higher than top two holes covered is higher than top three etc.

My next port of call was the supportive and frankly invaluable Facebook community of Muso Mums: “Help! I appear to have volunteered to teach recorder to Year 2. Advice greatly appreciated!”

“Earplugs!” Came back more than one response.

But amongst the pledges of good luck and solidarity came some valuable reminders that this was an opportunity to introduce a first hand musical experience in all its glory to a group of kids whose exposure to high level classical music-making will range from zero to some, and whose presence in the class is not contingent on having parents who either have the knowledge/experience/will/financial advantages which, these days, access to classical music so often relies upon.

There was a time in our recent history that all primary age children had access to free or subsidised instrumental lessons and every primary school even had its own orchestra. Contrast that with today and for many primary schools music education has been pushed out completely. Where schools have managed to hold on to accessible music education for all children this has been down to individual teachers/senior management taking responsibility.

There seems to be a general consensus among leading music education experts that drastically narrowing accountability measures for schools has played the most significant role in this decline. A 2019 report entitled Music Education: State of the Nation¹ suggests that the introduction of the EBacc in secondary schools, which excluded the arts altogether from accountability measures, has been behind a squeeze on curriculum time in primary schools. Deborah Annetts - Chief Executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians - commented on the report’s data that “more than 50% of responding primary schools did not meet their [music] curriculum obligations to year 6, citing pressure of statutory tests as a significant reason for this.”²

In taking on these sessions on I hope to balance exploring playing a musical instrument (which will be a first for some and which I’ve never taught before) with making music in other ways: introducing ideas around rhythm, pulse and music notation using our bodies as instruments. For most children picking up a musical instrument for the first time will be very technically challenging,  and whilst I hope to help them meet that challenge, I also intend to highlight with them that learning, and learning to enjoy music is so much more than proficiency on an instrument but is  within us all and is inextricably linked to language, movement, listening, communication, emotional literacy… I could go on. Spreading the focus wider than just the recorders themselves will also have the added bonus of safeguarding both children and teachers against the potential trauma of a full half hour of high-pitched squeaking!

This is my documentation of my experience with this somewhat daunting undertaking and an exploration of the current landscape of early music education, its past and its future. Wish me luck!

1. All-Party Parliamentary Group for Music Education, the Incorporated Society of Musicians and the University of Sussex https://www.ism.org/images/images/FINAL-State-of-the-Nation-Music-Education-for-email-or-web-2.pdf

2. Deborah Annetts speech to the 11th Festival of Education. https://www.ism.org/features/the-telegraph-festival-of-education-deborah-annetts-speech