Music education is powerful, yet its provision is frail | Letters

Further to Robert Ames’s article (I co-founded an orchestra 18 years ago. Since then, I’ve seen doors close for working-class musicians, 9 September), I have seen first-hand both the transformative power of music education and the fragility of its provision.

I am the chair of trustees of Making Music, Changing Lives (MMCL), a Cardiff-based charity established in 2009 to provide musical opportunities for children and young people in the low-income communities of Ely and Caerau. Around 40 young people are loaned instruments for free and they receive free or heavily subsidised weekly tuition from highly-qualified teachers, and the opportunity to play and perform in an orchestra. We also organise school holiday projects, concerts for local schools, and free tickets to professional concerts.

The educational and developmental benefits of learning an instrument are well documented. MMCL has now been running long enough for former participants to have progressed to university, studying subjects including medicine, computer science and mathematics. Even more importantly, we hope that our young people leave us with a lifelong joy of music-making.

However, despite its success, MMCL survives hand to mouth. We are fortunate to benefit from affordable premises provided by the diocese of Llandaff and from the dedication of staff and volunteers, yet we receive no regular support from either the Welsh government or the local authority. Our future depends on grants and donations that are never guaranteed.

Charities such as MMCL can make a difference in their local areas, but they cannot provide a consistent, nationwide solution. As music education continues to decline in many schools, we risk creating a future in which opportunities like those that enabled Ames’s own musical journey become increasingly unavailable to children from less affluent backgrounds.
Elizabeth Williams
Cardiff

Robert Ames is right that classical music’s economics, not just its outreach programmes, is the bigger barrier. I love composing music and am building a life doing it. I have a postgraduate degree in composition, which I obtained by commuting to London by coach, I’ve worked in theatre, had music on the radio, spoken at conferences and funded and directed my own learning, but it’s not close to being my main source of income. Without financial support, this is something you can only do because you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else.

To record a new solo piano project to a standard fit for licensing and broadcast, I recently applied to a funding body to cover the costs of a studio session and travel. This is a few hundred pounds in total for a big career step, but saving money from my admin and teaching work to fund it and mixing and mastering costs, as I’ve done previously, means the process takes longer. It is also money I can’t afford to waste. This is the same “margin for error” issue that Ames describes, just smaller and quieter. It shows up in whether a finished piece of music ever gets recorded at all, long before anyone judges it on its merits.

I suspect there are far more people than most realise simply getting on with this quietly, teaching, temping, assembling whatever patchwork of work lets them keep composing or performing, without much fuss made of it. I’m somebody who is irritated by “is classical music dying?” articles, but if the culture only hears the work of people who can absorb costs like these without a second thought, insularity is its endpoint.
Luke Madams
Canterbury