Julian Lloyd Webber is the latest to decry the decline of UK music education. Why won’t politicians put the money where the mouth is? Plus, ENO drops its ‘E’
It’s been a big month for young talent. Barely a week after the final of BBC Young Musician, the next generation of musicians were also celebrated in the annual Music for Youth Proms at the Royal Albert Hall on Monday and Tuesday, where more than 2,000 young people in choirs, jazz and pop groups, steelpan bands and orchestras performed music that included Charlotte Harding’s The Orchestra: A Young Person’s Guide, written for disabled and non-disabled musicians of the National Open Youth Orchestra.
But amid the celebrations, there have been words of caution – and despair – from long-term campaigners. The cellist Julian Lloyd Webber’s message to the prime minister couldn’t be starker: “[the UK] used to have a music education system that was the envy of the world. Now we don’t,” he said in an Instagram post. This is despite decades of his campaigning, alongside everyone from Elton John to Sheku Kanneh-Mason to Nicola Benedetti, and it’s despite Andy Burnham’s first-hand experience of the results of the In Harmony scheme in Liverpool, when he visited as culture secretary, in which he saw that having music in every pore of a school’s delivery of the curriculum – free to every pupil – brought positive outcomes across the board.