Letters – Instrumental agenda

From Kathryn Deane, Director, Sound Sense

Thanks for your piece ‘The merry violin’ (APe-mail, item 23, November 11). But you need to go further than The Independent’s piece on Susan Hallam’s research to find out the real facts about young people’s music making.

It may be true that “more children are now learning musical instruments”, though I don’t see the data for this in Hallam’s work. There’s certainly no sense in which “the favoured instrument [of children] is the violin”. The survey was a survey of what LEA music services teach to children, not what children learn by other routes, or want to learn through LEAs. In other words, instrumental music teaching in schools is supply-led, not demand-led. A system where the supply is “Overwhelmingly … within the western classical tradition (67%)”; where only 27% of schools have any access to rock and pop provision; and only 15% of LEAs provide tuition in music technology is quite likely to be pushing violins on kids. The Independent may well have interpreted the research as saying that the “favoured instrument” is the violin, but Hallam merely says that it is the “instrument most widely available”: A very different thing. About the only “wonderful news” Hallam reports is that things in some areas might be getting a little better. Compared with the last (and largely incomparable) survey of 1999, gamelan, tabla and music technology at least now appear on the radar. But even this helpful news is tempered by the fact that only 8% of the school population receives tuition from music services, and if you’re non-white you’re half as likely to receive tuition than if you’re white. Only around a third of music services even have the data on ethnicity to tell you this.