ABSTRACT
Music teaching has often been characterised by a rather didactic teaching style: teacher as instructor. When music education was largely aimed at teaching children the skills of singing and playing so that they could perform and, hopefully, come to appreciate our musical ‘heritage’, there might have been some justification for this approach. Learning about the repertoire was also a feature: lives of the great composers, following a score, knowing the story of ‘Peter and the Wolf’ or identifying the animals in ‘Carnival of the Animals’. The principles of staff notation and Italian terms might also be introduced. Where there was no specialist the school radio broadcasts would replace the teacher: teaching songs by rote and playing pieces of music for listening. This is, of course, a somewhat exaggerated picture but I suspect that most readers will recognise some of it from their own schooling.
