Editorial

What a first month I’ve had at the helm of MT! As if to remind me that things would definitely not be winding down for the summer, I was bombarded with invitations to concerts, shows, festivals, seminars and conferences. No chance of a quiet first issue, then: I drew up an itinerary, purchased a bundle of train tickets and prepared to get some serious miles under my belt.

My first stop was Belfast, where I attended the annual conference of the Federation of Music Services. The warm atmosphere of celebration was inevitably permeated by a deep, shared anxiety about the future of music education funding, an issue tackled head on by the conference’s speakers (see News, p7).

A few days later I found myself at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire for Tech Music Schools’ graduation showcase, where I enjoyed a couple of hours of pounding but polished rock and pop (see Review, p28). Next it was to the theatre to see Shadowball, Hackney Music Development Trust’s latest youth opera project. The show, performed by a cast of children from the notoriously deprived London borough, told of the prejudice endured by black baseball players and their jazz musician counterparts in 1930s America. For me, the evening’s most remarkable feature was the ease with which the young cast negotiated the jazzy angularities of Julian Joseph’s score.

There was more, of course: Hear the Future at London’s Barbican, where I was blown away by the standard of Barbican-Guildhall Creative Learning ensembles including the Barbican Young Orchestra and crossover group Urban Sounds; and, unforgettably, the sight of 5,000 young musicians filling the stands of Birmingham City Football Club for Score!, a massed performance in honour of Music for Youth’s 40th birthday.
Score! was one of many events at this year’s National Festival of Music for Youth, now held annually in Birmingham. I have my own cherished memories of participating in the festival as a member of several Northamptonshire county youth groups; the excitement of performing on a national stage after months of preparation was always a personal highlight. With this in mind I was fascinated to revisit the festival, finding that, like so much else in music education, it had moved with the times. The session I sat in on included a samba band, two big bands, a choir, a string orchestra, an early music ensemble and a gamelan group – a glorious microcosm of the work being done by teachers across the country.

The focus of this issue is endangered species: those instruments which, if we are not careful, run the risk of vanishing from our youth orchestras and ensembles. With cuts looming, there are fears that music education itself might become an endangered species – a chilling thought indeed. But from an observer’s point of view, music education has never seemed so engaged with the community or so tuned in to the sorts of music that really get young people fired up. Whatever the outcome of the next spending review, it is this relevance to young people’s lives that will ensure music education’s survival. When it comes down to it, the barriers between different kinds of music are few – as they are between children, from whatever background, whose lives have been shaped by a musical education.

CHRISTOPHER WALTERS