In the winter of 1955–56, Tempo magazine published a short polemic by secondary school music teacher Alan Fluck, which posed an “Invitation or Challenge?” to composers: to become more involved in school music making.¹ Fluck's grievance was the repertoire of school orchestras and choirs, whose focus on the classics—Haydn minuets, Handel gavottes, Bach, and Mozart—and folksong had led to a shortage of “real music” by “real modern composers.” The real modern composer, he explained, did not refer to “school music masters, church organists, or ‘educational’ composers who at this minute doubtless are turning out another uplifting song for massed unison voices,” but rather to “those who are sometimes in evidence on the Third Programme and at the Cheltenham Festival.” If the author's concern reflected a desire for a broader musical education, it was also founded on commercial pragmatism: young people were the audiences of the future, who would only pay for music they wanted to hear. As things stood, “modern” music's odds were not good: “A large-scale modern work,” he reminded readers, “will almost certainly be a guarantee of an empty hall while even a small one, slyly popped in, will reduce attendance.” In contrast, as was demonstrated yearly at the Proms, the classics attracted huge crowds. They did so, Fluck claimed, because the public's “enlightened musical education” had enabled them to appreciate this idiom: familiarity was the key to understanding. To strengthen this claim, the author recounted his personal experience of preparing various works by Benjamin Britten, including the Ceremony of Carols (1942) and Let's Make an Opera (1949), for performance at his secondary school. Pupils had come to love the music so much that they sang “whole chunks” of it on coach journeys to football matches, and sixth-formers could “listen to The Turn of the Screw without turning a hair.” Britten's music here served as an exemplar of how the barriers to writing music for schools might be overcome. Echoing a sentiment widely shared by contemporary critics, Fluck praised Britten for being “willing and able to adapt his technique to suit limited resources and ability” without having to “sacrifice his style.”

Fluck's desire to broaden access to elite culture was far from unique. Having gained force throughout the first decades of the twentieth century (of which more later), the idea of democratizing high art held a particular significance in postwar Britain, where the rise of the welfare state promised finally to undermine long-standing social and cultural divisions. Reformers—most of whom were drawn from the ranks of politicians, intellectuals, and philanthropists—sought to co-opt culture to help bring about the radical transformation of society they envisaged. From the outset, education was afforded a central position in their plans: it promised a means to correct the public's apparent inclination toward lowbrow culture, which presented an obstacle to reformers' ideals. The challenge was how to broaden access to elite culture without degrading it. At the heart of this concern was a pervasive uncertainty about what a democratized culture would look like in practice.

For some, the benchmark of democracy was amateur participation, a trend that had increased with the blossoming of the arts widely reported during the war.² At the same time, music's appropriation to discourses of citizenship fostered a new sensitivity to children's musical potential. In postwar Britain, these concerns converged in what education historian Stephanie Pitts describes as “a growing determination to include performance amongst school opportunities.”³ They were also reflected in the expansion of extracurricula music activities by pioneers such as Ruth Railton, who founded the National Youth Orchestra in 1948, and the trustees of the Schools Music Association (SMA), who organized the SMA's second national festival in the Albert Hall as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain.⁴ What is more, a heightened interest in music pedagogy encouraged composers, concert organizers, record producers, and broadcasters to view children as a distinctive subsection of the market—one with its own needs and preferences.⁵ So, although the composition of music for educational purposes was obviously not new to the twentieth century, the degree of interest in music specifically for children was. The emergence of this new consumer group brought with it creative and commercial opportunities; the foregrounding of music pedagogy increasingly attracted the attention of well-established composers: Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Aaron Copland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Britten are notable examples.

However, the “Invitation or Challenge” of increasing performance opportunities for young people could offer at best only a partial solution in the quest to broaden access to elite culture. If training young people to play an active role in cultural production suited democratic principles, it was unclear whether this approach could sustain Britain's elite musical culture. Not least was the question: would the experience of performing music draw audiences into the concert hall? To put it another way, reformers wanted to create a public that would consume as well as produce elite culture. It was with this in mind that in 1944, the Ministry of Education embarked on an unusual project: the production of Instruments of the Orchestra (1946), which to my knowledge was the first purpose-made music education film in Britain. A score for this film was commissioned from Britten, music that subsequently became better known in its concert version, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell. Britten's score has, for obvious reasons, often been counted among his music for young people—a categorization that obscures an important distinction: Instruments of the Orchestra featured music for children to appreciate, not perform. The slippage between these two categories was something that contemporary writers, not least Fluck, tended to reproduce in an attempt to resolve conflicting visions for postwar British culture.⁶ Teasing these agendas apart might offer an insight into why the democratization of high art proved so problematic for midcentury British intellectuals, especially for those involved in the creation and dissemination of art music. To this end, this article uses Instruments of the Orchestra to investigate the broader culture of music education in postwar Britain. In particular, it aims to reveal how intellectuals imagined that cultural participation might extend from practitioners to audiences, and on what this agenda revealed about music's place within emerging ideals for citizenship.

Film at School

In March 1944, representatives of the Ministry of Education (MoE) contacted the Ministry of Information's (MoI) Film Division with a proposition: the MoE wanted to commission a “series of experimental Visual Units.”⁷ Their initial plan was to make five films on subjects that did not have commercial appeal but would “have a direct bearing on the growth and development of present-day society”: Local Study, The House You Live In, Beginning of History, Water Supply, and Instruments of the Orchestra.⁸ By autumn, the MoE had decided that these films should be supplemented by “exhibitions, wall panels, film strips, and teachers' notes”; by August 1945, they had approached the Films Division with plans for an additional five visual units addressing the “History of Writing,” “Development of Printing,” “Ships and Seafaring,” “History of the English Wool Trade,” and “Science in the Orchestra,” the last of which would eventually include three films.⁹ The MoE initially planned to produce just twenty copies of each visual unit and then delegate responsibility for circulation and appraisal to Local Education Authorities (LEAs), which would work in partnership with Her Majesty's Inspectorate and the MoI.

On many levels, this was a remarkable venture. For one thing, the number of schools equipped with projection technology was prohibitively small, despite the fact that the use of film in schools had been possible since the 1920s when the 16 millimeter projector and noninflammable film were invented.¹⁰ A study by the British Film Institute revealed that by 1937 barely more than 2 percent of schools and colleges in Britain had projectors; of those that did, a minority had the facilities to play sound films.¹¹ At the same time, the decision to commission a series of films marked a change in attitude: throughout the 1930s, the Board of Education had maintained that the creation of education films should be the responsibility of private enterprise—an assertion that reflected a broader reluctance on the part of the British government to create a state-run cinema.¹² But the increased use of educational and instructional films during wartime made both producers and audiences more aware of the medium's potential. By the early 1940s, pressure on the government to sponsor the production of education films was mounting.¹³ Although the MoE would not develop its own policy of visual education until after the war, the Butler Education Act (1944) stipulated that schools must have “arrangements for film projection and the use of episcopes.”¹⁴ Technological advances and social change thus converged in the MoE's commitment to develop film's potential as an educational medium. The perceived importance of its Visual Units enterprise was reflected in the sizable budget that the Treasury made available, in spite of postwar austerity: the first five units alone cost more than £60,000.¹⁵

That a musical film was one of the first to be produced was probably thanks to Muir Mathieson, who was heavily involved with the Crown Film Unit (prior to 1941, known as the General Post Office Unit), which produced Instruments of the Orchestra.¹⁶ A group of documentary filmmakers, the Unit had put themselves in the service of the MoI following the outbreak of war and had consequently been established as the first port of call for government-sponsored films.¹⁷ One of Mathieson's declared aims in life was “to open the doors of music to children and to return to them some of the delight that it had brought to his own life.”¹⁸ He also believed that if “old-fashioned prejudices” could be overlooked, cinema was uniquely positioned to accomplish this because it promised access to an unprecedentedly large and diverse audience. A film exploring “how the orchestra works” also suited the MoE's desire not to replicate the work of commercial producers: to date, music had inspired almost no interest as a subject for education films, particularly in Britain.¹⁹ Where music films did exist, they were usually made by cutting and pasting together clips of musicians from recent feature films—a technique that invariably resulted in a disjointed visual narrative.²⁰ Redressing this imbalance, Instruments of the Orchestra would expound a foundational aspect of elite musical culture: “the character and purpose of the individual instruments of the orchestra, and of the way in which they can be combined to produce symphonic effects.”²¹

When it came to finding a composer, Britten was an obvious choice. First, he was well known to the Crown Film Unit. Initially employed in May 1935 to provide music for a documentary titled The King's Stamp, Britten by the end of the decade had composed music for nearly twenty of the Unit's films.²² During this time, he had come to share the broad political aspirations of the Unit's left-leaning members, who believed that documentary film could stimulate the public to play an active part in society.²³ Furthermore, he had recently embarked on what became a lifelong campaign to increase the provision of music for children—a mission that began in 1935 when he composed Friday Afternoons, the collection of songs written for the boys of Clive House, Prestatyn, where his brother was headmaster. Five years later, while in the United States, he published an article in Tempo exhorting American composers to write more music for schools.²⁴ Around this time, he himself also took up this challenge with W. H. Auden's assistance in Paul Bunyan (1941), a work that began as an experiment in opera for high school students.²⁵ Few composers, then, could have rivaled Britten's suitability to the MoE's film project.²⁶

A draft scenario in the Britten Pears Library suggests that Britten was involved in the planning from early on: the scenario shows that a basic outline of the film was in place as early as February 1945 and that Britten was planning to write a new theme on which to base his variations.²⁷ In the event, however, the score—which instead uses the Rondeau theme from Henry Purcell's Abdelazer (1695)—was not actually completed until New Year's Eve of that year; in the meantime, Britten had been preoccupied with, among other things, The Rape of Lucretia. The soundtrack was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra soon after the score's completion on 28 March 1946 in Watford Town Hall and the shooting scheduled for 14–17 May at Denham Studios.²⁸ It was probably between these two production sessions that the commentary for the film was finalized, although it remains unclear how this came about. It was agreed at a meeting in early March 1946 that Britten would provide Malcolm Sargent, who appears in the film as the conductor, with a draft script. The composer certainly had an opinion about what it should entail: “nice facts” about the instruments and how they are played, rather than the free-flowing discussion typical of the Brains Trust (a popular radio discussion program, in which intellectuals debated questions submitted by the audience).²⁹ The film, however, attributes the script to Montagu Slater. At the same time, a pamphlet of teachers' notes, along with a set of gramophone records, was prepared for distribution to schools; however, the original plans for film strips showing the strings, percussion, and wind, and for “twelve wall panels on the history of the instruments of the orchestra” appear not to have been pursued at this stage.³⁰

Although the idea of a music education film was relatively new to Britain, the film nonetheless owed a great deal to established pedagogy. Illustrating the instruments of the orchestra was an obvious route into art music—one of which music educators had long been making use.³¹ For example, the BBC's radio broadcasts of orchestral concerts for schools frequently included an introductory explanation, during which individual instruments played themes from the works about to be heard.³² Britten's choice of form was apt: a theme and variations allowed the music to be easily broken into short sections and interspersed with didactic narration—a technique similar to that used in Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf (1936) and George Pal's Puppetoon Tubby the Tuba (1947).³³ Moreover, it enabled Britten to provide varied repetitions of the same musical material, giving the uninitiated listener a chance to become familiar with the main subject. To this end, his score opens with six different statements of Purcell's theme, which also serve to highlight the sections of the orchestra: tutti, woodwind, brass, strings, percussion, tutti (ex. 1; see also title page in fig. 1). Next, thirteen variations enable the conductor to introduce each instrument individually, or, as in Variation A: flutes and piccolo; Variation L: trombones and tuba; and Variation M: percussion, similar instruments (exx. 2 and 3). In the film, these “aural close-ups” were complemented by visual close-ups: viewers could watch the leader “visibly tighten his mind (and bow),” the double basses “having fun” with their glissandi, and the “pantomimical comedietta” of the tuba trying “to be self-important.”³⁴ With the usual changes in mood, meter, tempo, and key, the form enabled Britten to characterize each instrument distinctively and, as far as one can tell from the teachers' notes, promised an easy way into discussions of the film for teachers and pupils alike—a facet of the piece that would have had added significance at a time when many, if not most, music teachers were nonmusic specialists.³⁵ The layout of the orchestra was also stylized for the film to add clarity: each section of the strings was placed on its own raised platform, and the elevated wind and brass sections were arranged in a long line, meaning that they could be clearly distinguished from one another during aerial shots (figs. 2 and 3).

If such traits drew on pedagogical techniques designed to maximize accessibility for young audiences, there was also scope for the film to “be used for more advanced music teaching through the study of the music itself.”³⁶ Here again, Britten's form proved apt, as it enabled him to introduce a variety of more complicated musical elements—such as chromaticism—in suitably small quantities as the piece progressed. Another point of potential interest for the musically proficient was the tonal structure of the work, which, having begun in D minor, ventured into a number of unexpected keys, including D-flat major (Variation I) and E major (Variation L). Aligning musical knowledge with maturity, one commentator also observed that “grown-up children who already know the difference between a violin and a trombone will enjoy it for the fugue” on a theme by Britten, during which Sargent puts “the great musical box” back together again. The piece's conclusion (ex. 4), in which a final statement of Purcell's theme in the brass is set poly-rhythmically against material from Britten's fugue, provided further opportunity for advanced analysis along the lines established by the pioneers of music appreciation.

The potential for teachers to engage with Britten's music on a variety of levels made it an ideal teaching resource. But the question remains: How could a film help to realize a democratic culture? Or, given the shortage of projection equipment in schools, what was it about this medium that appealed to education officials' agendas? To answer these questions, I turn now to the broader historical context in which the film was produced. In particular, I explore the significance of the film's original target audience: eleven- to fifteen-year-old pupils attending the new secondary modern schools.³⁷

“The Problem of Leisure”

The 3rd of August 1944 was widely lauded as a propitious day in British history. It marked the moment when the Butler Education Act was granted royal assent, inaugurating secondary modern schools. In doing so, the Act realized the expanded provision of state education that had previously been stalled by the outbreak of war.³⁸ In the past, secondary education had been a privilege of the elite; but now, for the first time in British history, every child was guaranteed a secondary school place funded by the state. Considered by many to be “the greatest single advancement in the development of English education,” the Act thus promised the increased access to education that intellectuals felt was fundamental to a fairer postwar Britain.³⁹ The secondary modern pupil, then, was an unprecedented phenomenon—one that required a reconceptualization of “secondary” education. Traditionally, this term had not just denoted education for older children, but also implied academic training that might lead to university, a trajectory considered superior to that promised by a more basic, “elementary” education.

Educators now faced the challenge of adapting traditional teaching methods to meet the perceived ability and needs of this new audience. Developing education films augured well: the medium's popularity with the general public was firmly established and promised to satisfy contemporary desires to align culture with entertainment as well as edification.⁴⁰ What is more, pioneering research on education films in the 1930s had suggested that film's didactic potential was particularly suited to less able students—precisely those to whom the secondary modern school was designed to cater.⁴¹

The potential of an expanded education system to encourage social mobility, in particular by sowing the seeds of healthy living during life's most impressionable years, had been recognized from early on in the reform process. In 1926, William Hadow's seminal report The Education of the Adolescent proposed that, in addition to offering vocational training, “modern” schools should also develop character, teaching boys and girls to delight in pursuits and rejoice in accomplishments—work in music and art; work in wood and metals; work in literature and the record of human history—which may become the recreations and the ornaments of leisure in maturer years.⁴²

Schools had been providing more than an academic training since the turn of the century. In 1906, the Education (Provision of Meals) Act had empowered LEAs to provide food for children whose education was being affected by inadequate nourishment; a year later another Act was passed to enable the provision of physical and health checks for children. The alliance between social welfare and education had quickly become “more or less synonymous.”⁴³ But, in the spirit of earlier reformers, Hadow's vision went beyond this. In a newly democratic Britain, education would furnish the public with a lifelong love of culture: even in leisure people would remain productive citizens.⁴⁴

The idea that education might inform leisure was, of course, far from new. It had its roots in the Victorian era, which had witnessed a growing concern in elite circles about poverty, especially in the evermore densely populated urban centers that industrialization had produced. In particular, high crime rates, poor health, and excessive alcohol consumption were seen as evidence of physical and moral depravity. For reformers, many of whom were inspired by Christian socialism, attempts to alleviate material problems were only worthwhile when accompanied by moral reform. One means of promoting this was self-improvement through “rational recreation,” an idea founded on the belief that “intellectual and artistic pursuits as well as ‘beauty and harmony’ were essential to maintain the physical improvements of the ‘mass of people’ and their surroundings.”⁴⁵ Leisure time well spent was indicative of a civilized society. The problem, as reformers saw it, was that the general public was not naturally drawn toward the right sorts of leisure pursuits: education was needed to transform their desire for superficial amusements into a love of high culture.⁴⁶ It is worth noting here that the education of children at school and the edification of public leisure were closely intertwined in reformers' aspirations. As the Hadow citation above implies, it was hoped that good schooling would foster an interest in learning and self-improvement, and that this in turn would have a lifelong impact on how the masses spent their free time. Based on strong ideological associations between social reform, education (both at school and beyond), productive leisure time, and the arts, this philosophy set the tone for subsequent developments.⁴⁷

From the outset, however, this reform agenda was complicated by the emergence of an alternative discourse that asserted an antithetical distinction between mass and elite culture—one defined by a series of unstable dualisms, such as low/high, popular/elite, political/apolitical, commercial/noncommercial.⁴⁸ This “Great Divide”—as Andreas Huyssen would have it—posed a problem for reformers because the process of making art accessible to the masses now threatened to undermine the very premises on which “art” was defined.⁴⁹ The situation was complicated by the expansion of radio and cinema during the interwar period. Intellectuals struggled to balance their desire to use these new media to disseminate high culture with their concerns about how this involvement might affect their art. For some, such as T. S. Eliot, the risk of contamination outweighed the possible benefits: the “headlong rush to educate everybody” would, he feared, lower standards, “destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.”⁵⁰ Others, including the producers of Instruments of the Orchestra, were more hopeful and continued to seek productive engagement with new technologies, despite their ever-present anxieties about complying with a system that rated popularity above aesthetic merit.

The problem with mass culture, however, was not just what the public consumed, but how they supposedly consumed it—in a mindless fashion. While this concern cut across the political spectrum, by the mid-1930s, the “problem of leisure” held a particular significance for the Left.⁵¹ As historian Jeff Hill explains, intellectuals feared that mind-numbing leisure activities instilled “‘capitalist values,’ not least among which was an inertia and indolence of mind on the part of the very workers whose support the socialist movement was seeking.”⁵² With its picture-perfect people, fantastical worlds, and darkened theaters, cinema seemed to pose the greatest “threat to the development of a constructive sense of citizenship.”⁵³ Left-leaning intellectuals, in their desire to combat this unfortunate situation, placed a new importance on art's potential to inspire a critical engagement with society—a mindset that subtly narrowed the distinction between educational and artistic fare. W. H. Auden, for example, argued in a 1935 paper that there were two types of art: “escape-art,” which prompted people to disengage from the shortcomings of their lives, and “parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.”⁵⁴ The teaching method of the latter was not dogmatic, but rather suggestive: by raising awareness of higher ideals, parable-art would encourage the public to reflect critically on their existence and, in doing so, equip them to make better life choices. Auden's ideas were shared by the pioneers of the documentary film movement (with whom he was involved in the mid-1930s): as Paul Rotha explained, by “bringing to life” familiar subjects and places, documentary film would inspire audiences to make an “honest assessment” of modern society.⁵⁵

The pervasive dissatisfaction with contemporary life was also expressed in nostalgia for an idealized, preindustrial past, in which (it was believed) the people had played an active role in the creation of culture. F. R. Leavis's words are typical: “Folk-songs, folk-dances, Cotswold cottages and handicraft products are signs and expressions of something more: an art of life, a way of living, ordered and patterned … growing out of immemorial experience.”⁵⁶ The ideal of a “lived culture” was no longer attainable, but Leavis maintained that literary criticism could go some way to salvaging “a worthy idea of satisfactory living”: by teaching the public “to discriminate and to resist.” As war grew nearer, such ideas gained a timely political edge. Britain wanted to distance itself from its Fascist enemies, and encouraging the public to develop critical thinking skills provided a useful contrast with the image of German brainwashed conformity. It also served as a counterbalance to the unprecedented degree of state intervention in 1940s Britain—a mode of governance whose proximity to totalitarianism caused anxiety.⁵⁷ The authorities toed a precarious line, seeking to promote positive models of citizenship without provoking accusations of cultural indoctrination.

Following the outbreak of war, the practical constraints of wartime life made education reform only more urgent. First, the war stalled the implementation of a new Education Act—a delay that, if accepted as necessary, was nonetheless thought far from ideal. Within a matter of days, war's unprecedented disruption of children's lives began. Although traditionally children fell with women into the noncombatant group, the Second World War was a total war, in which the normal divisions between soldiers and civilians became blurred.⁵⁸ Besides the general disruption caused by rationing, bombs, conscription, etc., evacuation brought significant change to many children's lives.⁵⁹ On the top of the domestic complications caused by the encounter between city and country life, attempts to adjust the school system proved disastrous. In reception areas (i.e., those receiving evacuees), plans were made for schooling children in shifts—sometimes up to three a day. Meanwhile, many of those who remained in or returned to the cities found that their schools had been shut down. The chaos was reflected in reduced attendance figures: a survey carried out in early 1940 revealed that, of elementary school children, more than one-quarter were “receiving no schooling at all,” while a similar percentage were being taught at home.⁶⁰ The disruption heightened existing concerns about child welfare—concerns that were antagonized by reports of a marked increase in juvenile crime.⁶¹ If worrying statistics exacerbated what historian Colin Heywood describes as the “generalized unease … over the physical and moral condition of populations living in an advanced, but ‘fatigued and sensual,’ civilization,” they also heightened concern about child welfare and misspent leisure.⁶²

When discussions began about rebuilding the nation—both literally and metaphorically—access to the arts was a central concern. Especially for Britain's vocal left, the appropriation of the arts to the ideology of the “people's war,” and subsequent to that of the emergent welfare state, added force to calls for democratization: in a more equal postwar world, art would be everyone's prerogative.⁶³ From the outset, children were afforded an important role in postwar imaginings as guardians of the future.⁶⁴ Unlike wartime experiences of childhood, postwar childhood would be safeguarded as an investment. An expanded program of state education rendered school an important forum in which the next generation could be prepared for the duties and rights of citizenship: a process that demanded the cultivation of children's minds and spirits, as well as their bodies. As Noel V. Hale, the music organizer for Bournemouth, explained, if, in failing to teach “things of the heart besides those of the head,” education did not lead to “spiritual growth as well as to intellectual progress and physical fitness,” it was “incomplete.”⁶⁵ What is more, for the government, the promotion of constructive leisure activities was “now, as never before” a concern.⁶⁶ When war ended, the public would have more free time; if well spent, this might help maintain a civilized nation.

By the mid-1940s, then, a variety of arguments supported a more participatory approach to culture. Nonetheless, this ideal remained highly problematic. Despite the widespread consensus about the need to combat the mind-numbing influence of mass culture, unthinking consumption posed a serious threat to the democratization agenda. If the public's perceived propensity for the mindless reception of commodities was frequently given as evidence of mass culture's inferior status, democratization ran the risk of tainting high culture with similar connotations. In other words, reformers did not want elite culture to be reduced to just another vehicle for public escapism. However, it was not obvious how to give the public an active role. Whether because the conditions of urban life were not conducive or because of their desire to maintain certain standards, most intellectuals agreed that the masses would be unable to make a significant contribution to the production of high culture. The challenge, then, was how to train the public so that their reception of culture would be an active process.

When it came to music, this question raised a particular set of problems. Music had long held an “ill-defined … precarious and uncomfortable” place in the education system.⁶⁷ As BBC employee and musicologist John Horton explained, its uncertain status reflected a common view that music was “something one does (or lets one's womenfolk do) when one isn't too busy fighting or making money.”⁶⁸ Where schools had had the facility and inclination to teach music, the emphasis had tended to be on practical musicianship. In state schools, this usually meant singing; in public schools, it also encompassed an array of instrumental activity. Since the standard of school music was inevitably limited, and since relatively few people would manage to sustain a performance-based engagement with art music into adulthood, there was an urgent need for music educationists to imagine an alternative form of participatory culture.

“Intelligent Listening”

The function of music teaching in school should be to provide for its continuous development as a means of expression and source of enjoyment throughout life. It should furnish all children with healthy tastes, most children with simple vocal skill, and many with instrumental practice; and the exceptionally gifted should be afforded suitable facilities and teaching up to any degree of proficiency. Only so can music become a natural and welcome ingredient in adolescent and adult life and make its proper contribution to the enlightened leisure of the whole nation.⁶⁹

In 1942, the government commissioned an investigation into the “supply, recruitment, and training of teachers and youth leaders,” the findings of which were published two years later in the McNair Report.⁷⁰ Citing the recently published Norwood Report (1944), the authors observed that music, as a latecomer to the curriculum, had too often been taught as an “extra” or “spare-time activity.”⁷¹ Grouping music with “the more academic studies such as history, French and science, under the heading of ‘general subjects,’” they proposed that music should instead be treated as a “normal” subject. As noted, music's uncertain place in the curriculum was hardly new: as early as 1873, John Curwen—pioneer of the tonic sol-fa movement—had published a pamphlet about The Present Crisis of Music in Schools, following the removal of music from the Educational Code.⁷² In 1926, the Hadow Report had recommended that secondary schools allocate two periods a week to music: one for practical music making and one for music appreciation. But despite repeated calls to make it a compulsory subject, music remained on the periphery of most schools' curricula: the only change effected by the 1944 Education Act was to elevate music to a School Certificate subject—a development that many music lovers felt actually undermined music's potential educational significance.⁷³

In a now well-established tradition, the McNair Report framed school music teaching as a vehicle for cultivating good citizenship—a means by which the wider public might master “the art of living.”⁷⁴ Whether in the hands of socialists or others, however, ideas about what constituted “good” citizenship continued, as David Matless has observed, to be “bound up with assertions of cultural authority.”⁷⁵ When it came to music, the segregation of culture into high and low provided an obvious framework for mapping musical preferences onto ideals for citizenship. Even the most democratically minded intellectuals tended to uphold a musical hierarchy: although they promoted equality, they also maintained that not all cultural forms were equal. Music educators were united in projecting this ideology onto school music: Hale spoke for many when he asserted that the primary aim of music teaching should be “the ‘formation of taste’—the discrimination of wheat from chaff.”⁷⁶ If it failed to accomplish this, the consequences would be grave: It is plain that, unless something more profound has been instilled, this “amusement,” given full rope in the adolescent and adult world of music outside, reappears in a guise which was never anticipated. Absolute nonsense is mistaken for humour, gaudy display for artistry, square and tawdry time-beats for rhythm.⁷⁷

Quite where “enlightened leisure” ended and “amusement” began—if, that is, they were not in fact the same thing—was unclear; but Hale was certain that promoting the latter limited not just musical enjoyment but personal development more generally: “Emotional experience may then never reach further than weak sentiment, or music beyond mere notes.”

The notion that education might foster a love of good music at once reinforced and undermined the distinction between high and low. The intellectualization of music appreciation served to strengthen the idea that art music, unlike popular music, was complicated, that the depths of the composer's genius could only be realized through academic study. The difficulty in translating such principles into teaching method, however, lay in the materiality of musical culture: most children would leave school unable to read a score or play an instrument.⁷⁸ Another obstacle was the uncertainty about the extent to which an ability to appreciate music could be acquired through study. On the one hand, the democratic mindset of midcentury Britain had encouraged educationists to reconceptualize musicality as a universal characteristic; on the other hand, developments in psychology—a field that had burgeoned during the 1930s and 1940s—were simultaneously inspiring a new emphasis on the differentiation of children according to musical ability. As Pitts has observed, this “urge to classify children” added force to the idea that musicality was not just learned but inherited, a notion that contradicted the “egalitarian philosophy” increasingly advocated by contemporary pedagogues.⁷⁹ Either way, the fact remained that some children exhibited a greater talent for music than others. The politics of catering to a range of supposedly innate abilities were only complicated by the recent expansion in state education. The reality was that children from poor backgrounds usually displayed less of this allegedly natural skill than those from well-off families. Music educators worried that attempts to meet everyone's needs might result in a lowering of standards.

From the early twentieth century, technological advances promised a solution. The advent of the gramophone and subsequently radio accelerated an emerging culture of music pedagogy centered on listening—one that loosely converged under the banner of “music appreciation.”⁸⁰ In one of the earliest publications dedicated to The Musical Education of the Child (1915), music appreciation pioneer Stewart MacPherson highlighted the problem with current education methods, which left children unable to appreciate “the higher forms of music.” He summed up the matter by citing a 1908 article from the Catholic Crucible: So long as we persist in teaching our boys and girls to play, without giving them this essential education in the vital facts of music, we are simply giving them a possibly useful course of finger and hand gymnastics, with, in some cases, a certain amount of emotional development; but we are not training them to become intelligent listeners, or enabling them to make in their after life any acquaintance with that great literature of music which should be open to all.⁸¹

The music appreciation movement was founded on the belief that the “normal listener” would appreciate “good” music (that is, Western art music) more if they approached it with a knowledge of the rudiments of music theory and interpretation.⁸² Put another way—in the words of Percy Scholes, another of the movement's pioneers—music appreciation was “a form of educational training designed to cultivate in the pupil an ability to listen to seriously conceived music without bewilderment, and to hear with pleasure music of different periods and schools and varying degrees of complexity.”⁸³ Although “the pupil” could be anyone of any age, “the importance of accustoming youth to the better kinds of music and weaning it from the worse” formed a central part of “the appreciationist's programme” from the outset.⁸⁴ Reaching a height of popularity during the interwar years, the music appreciation movement played a significant part in expanding the focus of school music teaching. The traditional focus on practical musicianship—note the McNair Report's reference to “vocal skill” and “instrumental practice”—was increasingly complemented by a new emphasis on equipping children to be “intelligent listeners.”⁸⁵

Central to the movement's success in Britain was the BBC, an organization whose foundational values broadly overlapped with those of MacPherson and Scholes, largely thanks to its first Director-General, John Reith.⁸⁶ Profoundly influenced by the paternalistic values of his father, a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, Reith believed that to exploit “so great a scientific invention [as the radio] for the purpose and pursuit of ‘entertainment’ alone” amounted to “a prostitution of its powers and an insult to the character and intelligence of the people.”⁸⁷ Instead, he aimed for broadcasting to combine entertainment with edification and enlightenment, so that the BBC would pave the way for public education on a hitherto unimaginable scale. In part, he hoped to achieve this by the careful selection of appropriate programs; but hand-in-hand with this went demands on listeners: “to discriminate in what they listen to, and to listen with their mind as well as their ears.”⁸⁸ Just as people were picky about what they watched at the theater, so, Reith argued, they should be selective about the broadcasts to which they listened.

If the “art of listening” was to be applied to radio in general, it was particularly pertinent to art music, the broadcasting of which caused considerable controversy. From the outset, music (of all kinds) made up a significant part of the BBC's schedule; but what percentage of this should be allotted to art music remained a contentious issue.⁸⁹ While some complained about the amount of airtime given to highbrow music, Reith maintained that it was the BBC's duty to give the public what they needed, not what they thought they wanted. Moreover, he believed that if suitably educated, the public would gradually come to appreciate the higher forms of art. To this end, he recruited to the BBC music educators sympathetic to his ideals, among them Scholes, who became Music Editor. The music appreciation movement expanded with the establishment of public broadcasting. The BBC pioneered instructional talks, which were complemented by articles in its magazines, the Radio Times and the Listener. For example, in April 1924—barely a year and a half after the foundation of the BBC—Walford Davies began an experimental series of music broadcasts for schools; by September the following year, he was also delivering a weekly half-hour talk for adults; and from the early 1930s, “explanatory talks” were increasingly scheduled before important musical broadcasts.⁹⁰

When it came to school music teaching, however, “intelligent listening” continued to have a problematic relationship with performance-based learning. Scholes claimed that “the foundation of musical appreciation work in school may be said to lie in the singing class, the eurhythmics class, piano lessons, the school orchestra, and similar activities.” He continued to place a high value on skills traditionally associated with performing: good intonation, rhythmic understanding, and a basic ability to read staff notation. But at the same time, he maintained that “it is an error to suppose … that any full appreciation necessarily comes by ‘doing,’” not least because children's “capacity for enjoyment” was “always in advance of the capacity to perform.”⁹¹ Walford Davies's school broadcasts exhibited a similar confusion. While giving weight to the singing and reading of music, Davies felt that “only when musical construction and design were addressed would ‘the full Hamlet’ be achieved.”⁹² To this end, part of his broadcast was dedicated to teaching composition—the musical equivalent to essay writing. In doing so, the aim was expressly not to produce composers, but rather to enhance children's ability to appreciate music. In its most extreme form, the fuzzy boundary between music appreciation and music performance paradoxically allowed education theorists to afford listeners the same status as performers. For example, working from the premise that the making of and listening to music were “of equal importance,” music educator Leo Kestenberg concluded that “recognition of the fact that work itself [i.e., listening or performing] may be an intense and fructifying experience relegates the passive, purely sensuous, unthinking sort of musical ‘enjoyment’ to its proper place.”⁹³ In doing so, it allowed a new type of relationship to form between “the creator, the performer, and the listener”: one based on “active participation” through “conscious, synthetic listening.”

But bad listening habits were not just a product of mass culture. As Kestenberg explained, intelligent listening exercised “a healthy, sobering, and clarifying influence after the art-for-art's sake attitude of musical instruction in the Romantic period.” The risks of mindless listening extended even to elite culture. Art music's appropriation for film scores had only exacerbated the problem. If cinema aroused anxiety about passive consumption among intellectuals, the use of music for dramatic effect threatened to implicate art music in this escapism—unless, that is, it could be made to interact with the visuals in such a way as to foster a participatory relationship between film and audience.

So, how exactly did the producers of Instruments of the Orchestra envisage that this film would help people to develop the right sort of listening habits?

Instruments of the Orchestra

The UK premiere of Instruments of the Orchestra took place on 29 November 1946 at the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, London.⁹⁴ Although it was not uncommon for education films to be shown in cinemas, for the first screening to be afforded the status of a premiere was unusual.⁹⁵ What is more, Instruments of the Orchestra had been intended “primarily for non-theatrical distribution”—it was only because MGM liked the film that it was also widely distributed as a short.⁹⁶ The Central Office of Information (COI) managed to secure a contract with MGM, giving the studio exclusive rights to theatrical distribution, while, in an exceptional case, the COI reserved the right to distribute the film “in any bona fide educational establishment including Schools, Schools of Music, Technical Colleges, Universities, and Teachers' Training Colleges, as part of the educational curriculum.”⁹⁷ The COI's arrangement with MGM caused some consternation at the MoE, whose employees resented the limits on nontheatrical distribution imposed by the contract, which prevented the film from being shown, for example, in youth clubs and music societies for the first nine months.⁹⁸ The MoE's belief that educational interests should take priority over commercial ones was not shared by the Treasury, which stood to gain 65 percent of profits. Takings turned out to be higher than the COI anticipated for a film of such a “highbrow” nature—by December 1947, the film had been booked 702 times and was “still booking well.”⁹⁹ Quantifying the film's distribution in schools, however, is more difficult. Copies of the film were placed in the Central Film Library, South Kensington, from where they could be borrowed by approved institutions free of charge. But exactly when the Visual Unit went into circulation is unclear: a memorandum from November 1946 predicted a release date of October 1947, but it may have been available sooner.¹⁰⁰ Nor has any record survived of how many schools used it, although plans relating to the first unit, “Houses in History,” reveal that the MoE aimed for a geographically representative sample, encompassing schools from Northumberland to Pembrokeshire and Exeter.¹⁰¹

As well as benefiting from a successful cinema run, the music for Instruments of the Orchestra also reached the public via another medium. The composer's concert-hall adaption, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, was premiered before the film on 15 October 1946 in Liverpool by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, with Sargent conducting.¹⁰² By the 1940s, it was not unusual for film music to be transformed into concert music. In the case of this score, relatively little adaptation was necessary: the alternative title was complemented by a new, optional commentary by Eric Crozier.¹⁰³ The dedication in the score—“To the children of John and Jean Maud: Humphrey, Pamela, Caroline and Virginia, for their edification and entertainment”—suggests that the composer not only endorsed the film's educational agenda, but also hoped that his adaptation might serve a similar purpose (see title page in fig. 1).¹⁰⁴ Of the MoE's Visual Units, then, Instruments of the Orchestra was unique in the scale and methods of its distribution. The variety of outlets exposed the music to a larger and more diverse audience than it would have met in the classroom alone, which can only have helped to realize its pedagogic potential.¹⁰⁵ Furthermore, by employing such varied methods of dissemination, the producers enacted the fluid transition between school education and edifying leisure pursuits that intellectuals had long been trying to foster. Whereas the accompanying teachers' notes suggest how the film might have been used in the classroom, critics' reviews of the relatively high-profile premieres provide the main insight into the score's contemporary reception.

Cinema, concert, and school audiences were guided through the performance by a commentary that provided a brief, factual introduction to the various “blowing,” “scraping,” and “banging” instruments.¹⁰⁶ “More complete appreciation” was only possible in the classroom, where teachers' notes could facilitate extended discussion.¹⁰⁷ Here, technical explanations of how instruments work—for example, that flautists blow across the top of their mouthpieces—were accompanied by a biography of Britten and a history of the Theme and Variations form, both of which explicitly set the music and its composer in a nationalist context. In particular, Britten's decision to use a theme by Purcell—most likely inspired by the 250th anniversary year—enabled the writer to set Britten alongside Purcell in a lineage of great British composers.¹⁰⁸ Where once critics had predicted that “sheer technique and ability would stultify [Britten's] depth of thought and true inspiration,” this work “especially in the dignified treatment of Purcell's theme [showed] the composer as a genuine and mature artist.”¹⁰⁹ Using an analogy from art history, the teachers' notes referred to the variations as a series of “portraits” revealing different aspects of the ancient composer. For example, “Britten lights up the music of Purcell's tune with a glowing and fiery display of the violin's qualities”; or “It is through the combination of martial vigour and quiet tenderness that Britten makes [the bassoons] present their picture of Purcell.” But while pictures hang ever-present in a gallery, the process of performing music added vitality to this reenactment of the past—a vitality that the writer, somewhat paradoxically, felt was preserved in the film: When we see Dr. Sargent conducting the final presentation of the great Theme in all its modern glory, we can think of Purcell's brooding figure in the background and Britten's portrait of him; Dr. Sargent and the London Symphony Orchestra are bringing the thoughts of these two composers to glowing life.¹¹⁰

Borrowing a theme from elsewhere might have incited criticism of uninspired, derivative thought; but the author made it grounds for praise—at once a tribute to Purcell and evidence of the young master's skill.

While the complement of score, visuals, and teaching notes drew on pedagogical techniques designed to impart knowledge that intellectuals believed to be crucial to “intelligent” or “synthetic” listening, the film's documentary-inspired style was also fundamental to achieving its didactic aims. Where entertainment films used music to enhance escapism, here, as Mathieson explained, music's appeal to the emotions provided an important counterbalance for the intellectual nature of the film. In the absence of stars and technicolor, documentary lacked the “superficial appeal” ordinarily thought to attract audiences; as a humanizing counterpoint to the visuals, music could compensate.¹¹¹ Mathieson's claim resonated with film advocates' attempts to salvage education films from the medium's negative connotations. A Commission on Educational and Cultural Films, for instance, argued that “films used in teaching have an important and wider function than the immediately instructional. They may provide the mental and spiritual stimulation of a work of art.”¹¹² If any education film could inspire intellectual engagement, it was surely one about a “serious” piece of music.

Despite such claims, the educational experiment was not an unmitigated success. Technical limitations resulted in a recording that, in the words of one visitor to the cinema, was “muzzy and feeble in volume and so lacking in the higher frequencies that much of the individual tang and colour of each instrument was lost.”¹¹³ Music critic Hans Keller was so concerned about this “serious obstacle in the way of adequate appreciation” that he paid multiple trips to the Curzon Cinema in an attempt to identify the source of the problem. He eventually concluded that, even on better days, the sound quality “remained filmy to a damaging extent.”¹¹⁴ This problem can only have been worse in schools, most of which lacked the facilities to project 35 millimeter film reel and consequently relied on the poorer quality 16 millimeter version.¹¹⁵

Beyond the practical difficulties of reproducing art music in the cinema, the film's reception also highlighted an anxiety among critics that the music was at risk of being too entertaining. Britten maintained that he had not simplified his style on account of the educational context and target audience: “I never really worried that it was too sophisticated for kids—it is difficult to be that for the little blighters!” he told Basil Wright.¹¹⁶ But critics displayed a clear need to defend the music against the potentially negative connotations of its production context. The BBC, for example, was reluctant to refer to the work by its full title: announcers preferred the subtitle Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell. Donald Mitchell suggests that this tradition was started by Sargent, who “may have thought the proper title altogether too frivolous in the context of concert performances.”¹¹⁷ But Britten had other ideas. The music had been “written for an educational film and was not meant to serve any other purpose” and the composer was adamant that it should remain The Young Person's Guide “so that the reference to its origin always remains preserved.”¹¹⁸ Coming to Britten's defense, Erwin Stein asserted that the “brilliant” music's “lighter vein” should not be a source of embarrassment: “It is a blessing that we have, for once,” he proclaimed, “a composer who is not always only dead serious.”¹¹⁹ Stein went further, adding that “it might be justified to censure the present work if it bore the pretentious title ‘Variations & Fugue on a Theme of Purcell.’”

Meanwhile, Penguin Music Magazine's Scott Goddard wrote that Britten's music “combines education with entertainment in such a way that neither is weakened. To have done that is a triumph of tact and skill.”¹²⁰ He went on to offer the concert version as proof of just how clever the composer was: “It is a unique example of music that is precisely suited to film uses and yet can stand alone as a consecutive and self-sufficient work of art.” Somewhat more cautiously, Keller, having remarked on the range of “serious” and “frivolous” variations, suggested that it was “the serious aspect of the work that has, I think, been a little neglected.” Attempting to redress this, he explained, “The composition is not only brilliant and witty, but also—beautiful. Needless to say, it is among the best music that has ever been written for the cinema.”¹²¹

Britten's advocates also sought to undermine the potentially negative connotations of the target audience by underlining the film's broad appeal. Keller asserted that the “‘Young Person's Guide’ itself has, at last, produced a film that is fit for adult audiences.” A few years later, in Mitchell and Keller's volume championing the composer's music, Imogen Holst commended Britten for not thinking of “youth as a ‘problem’ demanding special measures in education: the Young Person for whom he wrote his Guide to the Orchestra,” she declared, “might just as well have been eight or eighteen or eighty.”¹²² If the music's accessibility was well suited to the democratic rhetoric of postwar England, critics used this as grounds to redeem what might otherwise have been dismissed as second-rate children's fare. The irony behind such comments was that although critics celebrated the new possibilities for educational music Britten's score promised, they also undermined the prospects of other composers building on his legacy. In their attempts to salvage Britten's music from the polarizing discourse of high and low, critics ended up reaffirming this divide, presenting the composer as an exception to the rule, a rule that they implicitly asserted as true. Nevertheless—and positive or otherwise—by engaging critically with the film, reviewers practiced precisely the sort of active reception the producers had hoped to inspire. But one would expect no less: showing the film to critics was like preaching to the converted. To what extent Instruments of the Orchestra fostered synthetic listening habits more widely is impossible to say.

What the film does suggest, however, is that when politicians, educationists, and intellectuals found themselves in conflict over the importance of the arts in school curricula, there was more than children's welfare at stake. The debate spoke to broader uncertainties about the arts' possible role in postwar Britain—about how they might shape and define the nation. These concerns were, of course, far from new; but in the mid-1940s, the return to peace and Labour's landslide victory gave them a heightened significance: having finally secured power, it was in the Labour government's interest to demonstrate that it could realize its promises for a better postwar life. The democratization of high culture remained an important part of this. Broadening access to art music promised to cultivate a public that was spiritually healthy and socially productive. In Heather Wiebe's words, the foregrounding of cultural concerns emphasizes how “the idea of the ‘immaterial’ continued to hover around the question of material improvement.”¹²³ At the same time, contemporary debates about music education reveal that anxiety about the aesthetic and ideological ramifications of broadening access to art remained widespread.

Whereas definitions of art were often premised on a categorical opposition of high and low, democratization threatened to undermine this dualism, dragging art into an unstable middle ground between the two. The decade's timely desire to align culture with entertainment as well as edification compounded the risk. As Ivor Brown noted in his postwar “Plan for the Arts,” “It is excellent that education, a name which frightens the average Briton, should be associated with entertainment and with the performance and enjoyment of the arts as well as with the study of them.” Only through this, he continued, might the “ugly gap in British life between schooling in the arts and their subsequent pursuit and appreciation” be bridged.¹²⁴ But walking a middle ground between enjoyment and entertainment was not as easy as Brown's optimistic words suggest. If promoting enjoyment could help expand audiences, it also threatened to undermine art music's elite status—to taint it with the dubious connotations of the lowbrow. Envisaging an active role for the public was one way in which reformers sought to protect art music from the mindless consumption they associated with mass culture. But when discussions turned from abstract rhetoric to actual cultural products—books, films, pieces of music—precisely how the ideal of a participatory, living culture might translate into practice was far from clear; and no more so than when it came to questions of audiences.

A lesson in the active reception of art music, Instruments of the Orchestra was an attempt to resolve the ideological tensions inherent in the desire for a democratized culture. Perhaps it was because “active” listening was so hard to define—let alone demonstrate—that its proponents placed such emphasis on factual knowledge. Being able to name the instruments of the orchestra or describe a piece of music's form were comparatively quantifiable measures of serious engagement. The notion that listening to such music was an acquired skill reinforced the high art canon's elite status. Thus, Instruments of the Orchestra sought to defend art music against a denigrating association with mass culture, even as it promoted this repertoire to a broad audience. Britten's involvement aided this agenda. Following the success of Peter Grimes (1945), he was considered by many to be the great hope of British music; yet his compositional aesthetic did not need to be compromised to make it accessible.¹²⁵ On the contrary, as we saw earlier, critics argued that his score complemented the film's educational program by allowing listeners to engage with the music on a variety of levels, depending on their individual experience and knowledge. One might even go further and suggest that the music's trajectory mirrored the journey on which pedagogues hoped to take the public: from repeated statements of a memorable theme, through variations introducing greater melodic and harmonic complexity, to the concluding fugue (the section that critics considered most suitable for advanced analysis), the score mapped out students' desired progress.

Seeking to avoid the risks of their chosen mass medium, the film producers hoped that the production would help to establish a modern participatory culture: one in which a broad public played an “active” role as discriminating listeners. Yet the film's agenda arguably reveals more about the limits of democracy than its accomplishments. The apparent need to control the reception of art exposed the paradoxes of a participatory culture in which only certain types of participation and certain responses to elite culture were recognized. Only the high road, it seemed, could lead to “artful living.”