Is New Labour's Music Manifesto Anything to Sing About?

A couple of months back, BBC1 brodacast The Brick In the Wall Kids a documentary on what happened to the kids who sang on Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ back in 1979. As reality documentaries go, it was fascinating in the same manner as the old 7-Up programmes were. And the programmes appeal lay in the evocation of all the real life dramas that most people go through: bad decisions and quiet regret, life-changing jobs and life-changing relationships. It was also fascinating for another reason, too: how music teaching has slid off the educational scales and how little enthusiasm there is for learning-for-learning’s sake.

The star of The Brick In the Wall Kids was a grizzled, bear-like music teacher called Alan Renshaw. Back in 1979, he managed to sneak his music students out to sing on ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. What was clear from the programme was how Renshaw’s passion for learning music inspired his students to value learning-for-learning’s more broadly, too. You can tell from his former pupil’s eulogies that Renshaw’s passion for music, rather than any vocational orientated pressures, had gripped them like nothing else. So much so, that one former student, a 42 year old married mother, was now doing her best to get her sons into a top-flight prep school.

The head teacher over Renshaw said that he probably wouldn’t fit into today’s education system, what with its emphasis on target sheets, quotas and yardstick to see how ‘economically viable’ it all is. Indeed, even the government recognises that music lessons have fallen by the wayside as instrumentalism has risen and learning instruments has fallen. To this end, New Labour has introduced a ‘Music Manifesto’ and the ‘Sing Up’ initiative to try and enthuse a new generation of school students into learning music. Will it hit all the right notes?

As you’d expect, the initiative is not really so much about learning scales, and it’s not about learning to sing either, but the educational equivalent of a communal hug. In ‘Sing Up’, the criteria will be that everyone must participate and no one is left out. It seems the hymn sheet put in front of the kids is the mantra of ‘participation is everything, learning is nothing’. It’s often said that music lessons were always a poor relation in comprehensive schools compared to ‘proper’ subjects. I’m not sure. I’m about the same age as the adults who sang on ‘Another Brick of the Wall’ some 27 years ago, and went to a similar comprehensive school. From my experience, the school made its best effort to pass on a passion for learning music, even if most of us were reduced to playing the triangle in the school orchestra. As the example of Renshaw shows, those running the education system back in the 1970s not only believed that music was worth passing on in comprehensives, but that we were deemed good enough to receive it, too. Is it the case today that New Labour believes that classical music and ordinary pupils deserve one another? The Music Manifesto suggests the opposite.

It is worth remembering that 4 years ago, the government apparently made the GCSE Music Exam more ‘relevant’ by introducing a section related to Britpop. Are we really training a future generation of world class musicians by getting them to recite such towering examples of music as, say, Shed Seven’s ‘On A Friday’ or Dodgy’s ‘Staying Out For The Summer’? Or do such measures speak decibels about this government’s crass populism? Unfortunately, the Music Manifesto and Sing Up are perhaps even worse than that. These measures take their cue from risible corners of X-Factor. Perhaps the government believes that memories of Darius Dinesh singing ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ is the kind of ‘shared experience’ the kids should be emulating?

In reality, learning scales and learning an instrument takes years of dedication and practise just to begin getting right. Not for nothing is classical music considered to be the highest art-form: it is the most demanding on those learning it and the most demanding on those listening to it. This is why, in the present climate, music lessons are as much out on a limb within education as studying, say, physics or pure maths. Learning the piano or violin or cello is no doubt viewed as too ‘difficult’, too ‘demanding’ and, potentially, too ‘damaging’ on an individual’s self-esteem - especially when they’ve hit a duff note.

So rather than investing more resources on proper music teaching, the Music Manifesto has all the gravitas and high expectation of singing in a local lock-in. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with singing lessons, or even learning lung-busting anthems of great repute, but this initiative has nothing to do with aspirations to be a great tenor, but a lowest common denominator that congratulates any kid who possesses a voice box. Learning music properly requires the kind of transformative development that this government seems inherently suspicious of. Rather than demand that pupils learn an instrument, Music Manifesto is all about relevance (i.e. children can speak and therefore, like can, sing) and bringing things to their ‘level’.

The only kind of instruments piloted in Music Manifesto is, predictably enough, of the instrumentalist kind. If you read much of the literature on Sing Up, the government are keen on it because they believe that an exposure to music at an early age improves ‘numeracy and literacy’ and therefore improves such quotas in education and probably the economy, too. This kind of spread sheet guff is hardly going to inspire anyone to study music-for-music’s sake, to become immersed in music’s power and beauty and aspire to become a leading player in a leading orchestra. All ‘Sing Up’ aspires to is that, whatever your background, you too can be part of an all singing, all participating community where you’re ‘free’ to express your ‘creativity’. But how can young people become creative when the learning of instruments and scales are not even on the agenda?

All in all, then, this half-baked initiative is just another brick in the socially inclusive wall. Is that really anything to sing about?

This is a transcript from the Battle of Ideas session ‘Teach the World to Sing?’