Down with School Music!

Signs of the times: the Canterbury children’s operas of Alan Ridout

“…Where young performers are emerging today and will do so in the future capable of presenting these meaningful explorations of the human condition, boys and girls and their audiences stand to gain from the resurrection of these extraordinary creative and educational achievements. The operatic medium is often depicted as remote from children's experience, elitist and associated with adult voice types with which students do not identify (Bedford, 1964;Sargon, 1993). But scrutiny of the reception of works for young performers by Bedford, Maxwell Davies, Schafer, Ridout and their contemporaries, and recollections of their lasting effects on participants (Laycock, 2005), illustrates that children readily accept the medium of sung drama as a means of self-expression.…”

“…The operatic medium is often depicted as remote from children’s experience, elitist and associated with adult voice types with which students do not identify (Bedford, 1964; Sargon, 1993). But scrutiny of the reception of works for young performers by Bedford, Maxwell Davies, Schafer, Ridout and their contemporaries, and recollections of their lasting effects on participants (Laycock, 2005), illustrates that children readily accept the medium of sung drama as a means of self-expression.…”

“…Over the following decade, reports of similar practice defined a gathering momentum. Wilfrid Mellers (1964) placed student composition at the heart of the new curriculum for Music at the University of York from 1964, while composers George Self and Brian Dennis, David Bedford (1978), andTrevor Wishart (1977) made contributions to creative music education that complement the influential treatment of the topic in Paynter and Aston (1970). This intrinsically British achievement was investigated by R. Murray Schafer (1963), who went on to develop a version of it in his native Canada (1975) sensitive to local cultural traditions.…”