Cutbacks and the day the music died in schools

DO you have a nephew or niece, a grandchild or a godchild? Are you stuck for ideas for what to buy them? This may be the year to treat them to a musical instrument.

Perhaps a swanee whistle, or a drum, ukulele or xylophone. Anything, in fact, which is guaranteed to create a piercing, repetitive sound for hours on end.

Don’t hang around for the words of thanks from the ashen-faced parents – they can write you a note instead, when they return from an emergency shopping run for Anadin and gin. Your work is done.

Like everyone else of my generation who went to a bog-standard comprehensive, I can play one instrument: the descant recorder.

These were popular because they made a noise immediately and they were cheap.

They were not, however, cool. No one ever said to me: ‘Siobhan, we’re having a beach party. Bring your recorder.’

Still, learning the recorder taught me to read music, so after flirtations with the glockenspiel and that wooden scrapey thing that looks like a marrow, I went to a jumble sale, bought a guitar and taught myself to play.

Or, at least, I taught myself to play Kinks songs. Early Kinks songs are largely built of three or four strummable chords.

For that alone Ray Davies deserves his knighthood, despite my homemade version of Waterloo Sunset, which causes dogs to wince from three streets away.

The most notable thing about an instrument in the house is that if you can actually play something, people drift over as though it’s a campfire, or a recent kill.

It reminds us how much music is a sociable thing. Birthdays, Christmas, football matches, hennight karaoke, the terrible Abbabased musical Mamma Mia... they all involve the companionable warmth of singing familiar songs together.

There’s something of that shared spirit in acting, too; the business of watching someone unselfconsciously transform strikes a powerful chord.

It’s all the more personal and resonant if it’s someone you know. Onstage, a young speaker – perhaps shy, like many Scots – suddenly has a platform and something to say.

That’s one reason why so many of us have been dismayed by the collapse of the Scottish Youth Theatre (SYT), which failed to secure funding from Creative Scotland and announced that it will have to close.

All that ails the SYT cannot be sorted with one wave of the wand.

Some say that charging fees put participation beyond the reach of working-class youngsters.

The SYT could argue that fees are also a way of making sure their courses attract the motivated, but certainly suggests a look at bursaries and grants.

YET First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has told MSPs that her Government cannot intervene with Creative Scotland’s decision, despite her predecessor Alex Salmond doing exactly that in 2014, by giving SYT a bailout.

Education Secretary John Swinney has previously spoken about the importance of musical tuition in schools.

But now cutbacks mean that music faces extinction in many Scottish schools, despite its links to achievement and other disciplines such as maths.

The Scottish Government seems to view essential arts in the Year of Young People in the same way I looked at learning the violin – a great thing to pose with, yet failed to get to grips with, because making it work was a bit... fiddly.