Ian on Music Education
Is my generation allowed to be nostalgic, to reminisce about free music education way back?
Ok, I went to a Scottish Grammar School in Coatbridge (like Baroness Ayesha Hazarika, the Labour peer – who’s twenty years younger, but who also had music lessons while a child in Coatbridge). For a kid like me, the learning opportunities and the encouragement of the arts was game changing. On the first day a girl asked me in the playground: “What university are you going to, Ian?”
“What’s a university?”, I thought….
But, on the second day, there was a whole-class music lesson!
A young teacher played my class a Schubert Song, Heidenröslein (or “Little rose on the Heath”). A boy wants to pick the rose but she warns him that, if he does, she will prick him and he’ll bleed…
I was that little boy.
I loved the noise that Schubert created and I’ve been happily bleeding ever since – from my love of music; its power, its ability to heal us and make us feel the whole gamut of human emotions: its limitless technical subtlety.
At Coatbridge High School, competitiveness seethed. Upward mobility, for those who passed their 11-plus exam, was like being stuck in a whirlpool: you swam or you sank. I loved it but some kids floundered…
Anyway, the young teacher started recruiting and informed us we could have free lessons and borrow an instrument for the duration of our time there. So began my journey with the trumpet.
For a little boy from the sticks of Glasgow this was the opening of a magic casement indeed!
Concentration; listening; group coordination; teamwork; aspiring to reach a common goal of perfection: all this is part of music-making! And leading it all, was this magical breed – composers!
Now, I am no great practitioner; no trumpet virtuoso, but my sitting in the local youth orchestra and later the orchestra of the Royal Conservatory of Scotland (junior division) has proved invaluable to my approach to writing for this big colourful beast! I’d recommend it to anyone.
I admire the gentle approach of that young teacher way back then. He reached us…
One of the ways I’ve tried to be gentle and encouraging is by introducing young people, professional performers and composers to each other. My work at the Spitalfields Festival, (based in the City and East London) in the early noughties, exemplified this.
Folk, Fiddle and Feeling involved students from schools in deprived Tower Hamlets, who collaborated with players from The Brunel Ensemble and their conductor, Chris Austin.
Tim Ashley wrote in The Guardian:
“… advised by Ian McQueen…The [students’] works have a timeless immediacy that combines ethnic music with the poise and structural astringency of Bach…It is such projects that encourage individual voices and assure we have a compositional future.”
Job done, but only for a time. We have to continue exploring musical roles anew, until everyone – every child can feel the healing power, as in Schubert’s song, of “du holde Kunst..” (you lovely art)