Professor Anthony Rooley is a lutenist and the founding director of the world-leading early music ensemble, the Consort of Musicke. The Consort has made over 120 recordings with renowned core musicians including Isle of Wight soprano Evelyn Tubb, Dame Emma Kirkby, Andrew King and Simon Grant. He writes in relation to the future of the Isle of Wight Music Service and makes the case for the need for quality peripatetic music teachers. Ed
The very best way of awaking and engaging young people’s interest, and then developing their individual skills in music-making (and indeed in other performing arts) is for their curiosity to be alerted so they desire to study and practice assiduously out of their own volition.
It has been amply proven over the last 40 years that regular visits from ‘peripatetics’, who are themselves skilled to a professional level, know their instrument, know the attitudes needed to engage children is the very best and most cost-efficient way of our school-system functioning with regard to the performing arts.
Emerging talent where there’s support
Up and down the country the figures speak for themselves: areas where properly qualified peripatetic teaching has been encouraged over these last decades are precisely the areas from which talented young people are emerging and showing the fruit of the endeavours.
This is an uncontestable proof of the value of this approach.
Removal of peripatetic system will have detrimental impact
Any tampering, down-grading, or replacing of the peripatetic system will undoubtedly remove opportunities from future generations of young people. How can this seriously be proposed and implemented by current political administrative/financial forces?
We cannot, seriously, consider such action – which might be described (without too much exaggeration at all) as utterly barbaric and a backward step for our society.
The cost of ‘Olympic dreaming’
The fact that in the UK the arts programmes of many kinds are being compromised at this time specifically because of budgetary constraints caused by ‘Olympic Dreaming’ (as a perceived ‘thumbs-up’ for our politicians!) should not allow a facile imitation of this down-grading throughout our educational levels.
Twenty-five years of future barrenness is the direct fruit of such action. This is barbarity in action, on such a level one might expect to find in the ‘Dark Ages’. We all must wake up now to the tremendously profound, deleterious effect such actions will have on our children’s children. Please wake up to the seriousness of this!
Prof. Anthony Rooley, LRAM FRAM
Image: © Hanya Chlala
