Klarinet Archive - Posting 000237.txt from 2001/11

From: Virginia Anderson <assembly1@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Re: clarinetist's block
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 09:04:36 -0500

on 5/11/01 9:15 pm, Roger Shilcock
<roger.shilcock@-----.uk> wrote:

> Dear Virginia,
> Oxfordshire Education Authority certainly has a "music programme" of some
> kind - I'm not involved in it as a teacher*, but I could find out more
> about it. In fact, they have now tentatively started wind ensemble sessions
> - clarinets, saxophones & flutes - for adults.
> Roger S.
> * because I don't teach....and it's just as well.

Hi Roger,

I don't teach clarinet much any more - just one adult student to keep my
hand in - but I am still registered with the Associated Boards. I did teach
for Leicestershire Arts; before that I talked to and observed teachers in
the old education authority programmes in Kent and Berkshire in the 1980s.

The quality of music education I observed then was amazing: subsidised
private lessons at all levels. There were weekly ensemble and band and
orchestra programmes as well. Students paid for half the price of the
lessons and got the rest of the music free; if they couldn't pay that, there
were subsidies available. Compare this to the 25 beginners in one of my
classes in California, where I was a peripatetic teacher for four years
though the early 1990s.

When I moved to Leicester in 1993, the area had a very good reputation for
music, through their Schools Symphony Orchestra and other programmes. The
programme had become privatised (as part of a nation-wide policy of
decentralising the local education authorities). Private lessons became
classes, as the students' parents were responsible for a larger percentage
of the fee (which had ballooned because the new company supplying teachers
took a surcharge of around 40%). Some schools set up their own programmes
to save money (one good one for which I taught had adult classes as well),
some opted out of instrumental music altogether, so there is no longer any
consistency of provision. I worked at two schools for the company when I
first got my work permit. I had and still have serious reservations about
the quality - even the safety - of their schools provisions (for further
reasons which I will not go into on-list) and left at the end of the year.

Other programmes may have been more successful; it's just that
Leicestershire was so good and now it isn't. I taught in very good
inner-city, multicultural schools: they felt the extra charges more and they
suffered more. It is such schools which can benefit the most by
suitably-funded provisions.

Cheers,

Virginia
--
Virginia Anderson
Leicester, UK
<vanderson@-----.uk>
Experimental Music Catalogue: <http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk>
...experimental music since 1969....

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