Is the recorder really a threat to our health?
Children wanting to learn certain instruments are being told that the virus poses too great a risk. By James Hall
If music teachers go back, they will need larger rooms and Perspex screens
The effects of the pandemic on the UK’S classical music industry is well known, with concert halls remaining empty and musicians (many of whom are freelance) losing their livelihoods. Now, Covid-19 is claiming another victim – school orchestras.
Recent Department for Education guidelines have urged schools to consider the “additional risk of infection” potentially posed by woodwind or brass instruments when played. The DFE states that orchestras and music groups should be limited to a maximum of 15 people, while pupils should play outside where possible, sit back-toback or side-to-side (rather than face-to-face) and never share instruments.
The guidelines, coupled with general fear over the extent to which airborne particles from wind instruments can spread the Covid-19 virus, have left piccolo players in a pickle. Some schools are responding by bulk-buying ukuleles to replace the bassoons, flutes, clarinets, trombones and recorders in their orchestras or music groups.
Young musicians will be particularly affected: the recorder remains the fourth-most-popular instrument taught to whole classes, according to research by Music Mark, the UK association for music education. Other schools have banned the in-person teaching of wind instruments until October at the earliest. Meanwhile, the Oxford Flute Summer School, which caters for people over 16, was forced to cancel its course – due to start this week – for the first time in its 34-year history.
And yet the science prompting these changes is unclear. It seems that the nanny state is on shaky ground in extending its tentacles into schools’ music rooms. Of course, precautions have to be taken. People’s health must remain the prime concern. But in watering down orchestras on unproven science, the richness and fun of music is diminished at a stroke. With no woodwind or brass, there’d be no hen, fish or cuckoo in Saint-saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals. With no flute, Debussy’s faun wouldn’t play in the woods. With no clarinet, Gershwin’s rhapsody wouldn’t be in blue or any other colour. Removing woodwind and brass from our children’s orchestras bleaches our musical rainbow beyond recognition.
Experiments suggest there is no problem. Back in May, an expert called Fritz Sterz at the Vienna Medical University carried out an experiment on his city’s world-famous Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. His study required orchestra members to have a mixture of oxygen and saline solution pumped up their nostrils through a tube. This was to increase the visibility of the particles they’d emit for the cameras with which they were surrounded. The footage that Sterz captured concluded there was no enhanced risk for musicians playing together in an orchestra, so long as players were distanced at least a metre apart from each other. “Lo and behold,” Sterz said, “we saw that not much was coming out at all. In fact, it was close to nothing.”
His study found that droplets spread about 50 centimetres around the mouth and nose of musicians, but almost none blasted through the end of the trumpet, oboe or clarinet (the flute had a range of about 75 centimetres). With adequate distancing in place, the orchestra was deemed safe enough for the Austrian government to allow them and other groups to play from June, although only to audiences of 100 people.
Still, schools in the UK are adhering to the guidelines they’ve been given. Dr Joanna Allsop, the director of music at Cargilfield School in Edinburgh, told this newspaper at the weekend that she’d ordered and tuned 37 ukuleles to replace the wind instruments in school ensembles.
“They are something we can play, and can be cleaned and used in ensembles across the different years,” she said.
Katie Alcock is a flute teacher who also runs the Oxford Flute Summer School. She describes the present situation as a “big mess”, but she believes the Government is doing its best. “They are waiting for the science but scientific results take a long time. I would love them, obviously, to say: ‘Well, look, in playing an instrument the balance of particles from aerosol droplets is no more dangerous than speaking, so off you go.’ But that’s not the answer they can produce now.”
But while air droplets and particles are a concern, Alcock says that a bigger problem for music teachers is actually the ventilation of the rooms they teach in. “Peripatetic music teachers go into schools and they teach in various little odd corners that often have no windows, let alone ventilation,” she says. Presuming they are allowed to return in September, these teachers will need larger rooms, ideally with a Perspex screen between teacher and child. There’s also the danger that they will be seen as superspreaders due to their travelling from school to school – another factor that is unlikely to lead to the speedy return of musical normality.
As with many things in this pandemic, music lessons have moved online. But this has its own knock-on effects. Group lessons in-the-flesh in schools are being replaced by individual one-on-one tuition, an option that is only open to those who can afford it.
The Department for Education says that it will publish more detailed guidance on woodwind and brass instruments “shortly”. Facts are needed, and soon. It will be hard to imagine the forthcoming Christmas carol concert season without the usual bank of spirited young recorder players blasting out Little Donkey. And we need answers before Britain becomes overrun by ukulele players. George Formby is fine in small doses, but there is something undeniably twee about the instrument; the thought of mass ukuleles in school halls brings to mind a particularly winsome John Lewis advert or the climax of a Richard Curtis film.
So let’s huff and puff to get our wind instruments back in schools. The noise may sometimes be hard to endure, but some return to business as usual would be music to many children’s ears.