We often have conversations with members of the public who, on hearing that we’re musicians, say something along the lines of “oh, that’s cool… I was never any good at it at school, though, and don’t know anything about classical!”

In primary schools, ‘doing music’ tends to mean playing instruments or singing. And that participation is great and essential, but it doesn’t always come with a sense of why it’s worth doing. What’s actually the point of plucking strings, hitting percussion instruments, and making pitches with your voice?

Quieter kids (to whom the ‘doing’ bit doesn’t come so easily) can sometimes get left behind with those activity sessions. And if, for whatever reason, somebody doesn’t take to it straight away, they might start to believe that music only belongs to other, ‘musically talented’ people. From our conversations over the years, we’ve often found this idea about talent or aptitude taking root at an early age, and it has a really long-lasting effect on how people see their relationship with music.

But we don’t think you need to know things in order to access music’s rewards. This is as true for classical as anything else: it can be a real expertise, of course, but ultimately it’s an experience to be enjoyed by anybody. The problem is that if you didn’t get much into music at school, and so believe you weren’t any good at it, it’s easy to see how that might lead to the feeling that ‘classical music’, especially, doesn’t belong to you. Much more than knowledge, then, we think the biggest barrier is that lack of a feeling of ownership. So in this project we adopted a single-minded focus on that question of motivation, and exploring “why this is worth doing”. Happily, the irrepressible imagination of primary school kids is ideally suited to developing that deep sense of ownership of music.

In 2018-20 we brought this approach to East Cornwall, working with over 300 KS2 pupils in 10 different schools. We gave the children permission to let their imaginations go wild, when listening and responding to a live string quartet (us!) play pieces by Haydn and Janacek. We helped them find ways of expressing their feelings through images, characters, and narrative, and they came up with some *amazing* content. They did almost all of the work as a team, bouncing their ideas off each other, and negotiating their creativity to come up with stories as a class. These stories genuinely belong to all of them.

In the process, they also ended up with an intuitive understanding of lots of different aspects of music - including structure, gesture, dynamics, and much more - but without jargon or technical details. Judging by the amazing stories they came up with, the experience meant a lot to them. We hope they’ll remember their creations in the years to come!