ABSTRACT
Rainbow was revealingly explicit about his historical beliefs in a paper entitled ‘That Great Dust-Heap Called “History”’ (1993). He allied himself with G.M. Trevelyan’s romantic view of the poetry of history, and of history as a form of literature. The two key words which he used in opposition were ‘civilisation’ and ‘liberalism’. What he termed our ‘maladroit attempts at liberalisation’ (ibid., 15) he appeared to connect in an earlier paper (Rainbow, 1985) with the development of popular music in the curriculum, the rise of creative music making in the classroom, the all-ability comprehensive school, and progressive methods of primary school teaching. In many ways the work of Kenneth Simpson, in his popular edited collection Some Great Music Educators (1976) reflected similar ways of writing history.
