The London International Music Show 2008

“Looking through the extraordinary variety of organisations that are represented at the LIMS from right across the musical landscape put me in mind of how far we have come in just a few years as a sector, particularly in the music education field. Once there were silos, now there are great gathering places of ideas, gear, software, strategies & aspirations.

When I first started to investigate the state of music education in the UK, in early 2004, it was before the Music Manifesto came into being and researching information about who did what, where, how and why was incredibly difficult: each organisation or institution did their own thing with their own clients, constituencies and traditions.

The only way I could find out how many young people took music exams in 2003 compared to 1963, for example, was to ask each examining board separately for their data on every single year, data they’d only give me if I promised not to tell their competitors what those numbers were. The only way I could even begin to compare the listening audience to classical music on the radio in 1964 and 2004 was to ring up Roger Wright, controller of Radio 3 and have a long, fascinating chat with him, then collate figures from several different sources, including Classic FM’s highly sophisticated data collected for their advertisers, to come up with approximate totals.

I wanted to know how many youth orchestras there were in the UK. Amazingly, the National Association of Youth Orchestras couldn’t tell me - all they could offer from their tiny part-time office was their own members’ list, which did not include most school orchestras, many music service orchestras, virtually all privately-run youth orchestras nor any independent school orchestras. To compound my problem, many county music services offered a range of orchestras, not just one symphony orchestra, and no-one had decided whether a wind orchestra or a large, multi-instrument South Asian ensemble would ‘count’ as an orchestra. What was undoubtedly true was that since the introduction of the Music Standards Fund in 1999, the number of youth orchestras had multiplied dramatically, and yet the public perception (reinforced by poor media reporting, now as then, unfortunately) was that engagement in practical music-making was ‘in decline’.

When I was a schoolboy at an Oxfordshire Comprehensive in the 1970s, me, my brothers and my cousins all participated in the Saturday morning music school and played in the County Youth Orchestra. Now Oxfordshire County Music Service has over 20 orchestras, added to which are school orchestras in the state and independent sectors and one or two other privately-run orchestras. A funny sort of decline!

The point, though, is not so much that things are getting better but that (a) they can get better still and (b) they will do so by vigorous, sustained, determined collaboration between all of us in music.

Yamaha, Roland, Korg, Apple, Sibelius and all the other major retailers are engaged in education like they have never been before, with real excitement and imagination, communicating with and collaborating with others in a way that was unthinkable even 5 years ago. We owe this new spirit of engagement to the Music Manifesto, which made collaboration its religion.

I am proud to be the Ambassador for the National Singing Programme, Sing Up, which is one of the Manifesto’s most visible ‘children’ and one thing I know is that the great strides we are already making in thousands of schools is made possible because virtually every organisation involved in the delivery of music in homes and schools is working with us on it. It is a superb example of what we can achieve together and is being noticed and admired around the world.

To some extent we have learnt from the success of our counterparts in sport: get together, make a clear case, earn government & cross-sector support, jointly seek funding, then collectively deliver the programme. It may sound glib but it is the new reality and a reality which we have to carry forward with the same energy that made the Music Manifesto. Onward!

Howard Goodall