I WAS interested in Janet Hewison's article on ocarinas at Kingsway Junior School (March 3). I am involved in a project advising schools on a less formal introduction to very young children to the enjoyment of playing musical instruments. This is in the light of Education Secretary David Blunkett's promise to provide funds for music in primary schools.
For some time I have specialised in the use of improvised music with the spoken word, particularly poetry, and have learned that it is important to be free of the structured ideas that we have learned through Western music, and to accept that there are no right or wrong ways to create music.
I have recently found an instrument which can be relatively inexpensive. It is immediately playable and a melodious alternative to those twin, squeaking scourges of parents and children alike, the recorder and the flagolet.
The instrument is the Native American cedar flute and it is this, with my previous experience and the Blunkett initiative, that has led me to set up the project.
Its purpose is to show primary school teachers who are not trained musicians how they can introduce children to music in a simple and creative way. Hopefully, this will create the desire to go on to the more structured forms of music under the teaching of musicians trained in those forms.
Tony Morris,
Heworth Moor House,
Heworth Green, York.
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