Big Noise makes for healthy and happy young musicians

Published on Monday 20 April 2009 19:59

THE health portfolio in the Scottish Parliament actually refers to health and wellbeing, so I used the latter description as an excuse to pay a much-anticipated visit to the Big Noise in Stirling.

You may have heard of this project, closely modelled on El Sistema in Venezuela, where a quarter of a million children from disadvantaged households have been encouraged to take up orchestral music.

The most gifted form the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, which took the 2007 Edinburgh Festival by storm and went on to play in a packed Albert Hall during the same year.

The main point of El Sistema, however, is not to produce gifted musicians, but to give self-confidence and a sense of worth to children and the communities in which they live.

Scotland has its fair share of children and communities in need of these commodities, so Richard Holloway, of the Scottish Arts Council, decided to set up a pilot, and chose the Raploch estate in Stirling as the place where it would happen. Could lessons from the New World be applied here at home?

The scheme sees five-year-olds introduced to musical instruments and they choose what they would like to play. Teachers then help them to make an appropriately sized papier-mch model of the instrument and the year is spent learning its parts and how to hold it. Next, the children are introduced to real instruments and, reversing what happens normally in this country, learn to play their instruments as members of an orchestra.

It can sound fairly weird at first, hence presumably the name, the Big Noise, but participants soon learn to love the three-times-a-week orchestra practice after school and rarely miss a session.

I had the privilege of watching 22 youngsters aged six to eight from the estate mastering the art of playing a range of instruments in unison, while others practised in smaller groups or attended one-to-one lessons. It is too early to chart the benefits of the Big Noise – it hasn't yet even been going for a year – but who before now would have predicted that classical music would have such popularity in an area that usually hits the news for all the wrong reasons?

Back at parliament, health featured in several of the debates recently.

The Conservatives used one of their debates to praise the contribution of the independent sector to health in Scotland, mentioning in particular the success of the privately-run regional treatment centre at Stracathro Hospital.

However, the motion, which was finally agreed after several votes, not only praised Stracathro, but also the nationalisation of the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Glasgow, a compromise that must present a fairly mixed message to those looking for wisdom from this quarter.

Then we had a debate on hospital waiting lists that seem to be getting shorter, allowing the Jeremiahs among us to grouse that, by concentrating on achieving this aim, we risked ignoring even more important objectives. Sometimes you simply cannot win.

The health and sport committee has finished taking evidence on how to encourage more folk to take up sport, and exercise in general, and our report should be available towards the end of the year after we have absorbed all we have been told.

We have now started our review of psychiatric services for young people – and a real hot potato it is proving to be. Already, evidence has pointed to the importance of providing good services in the early years of life, yet we are told those services are thin on the ground in areas where the need is greatest.

A major report on mental health in young children was published four years ago, yet some health board witnesses seem scarcely to have heard of it, let alone whether it has been implemented in their areas.

And teachers wrestle with the fact that they are legally obliged to break the confidence of children under certain circumstances – hardly an encouragement to problem-sharing. We have a lot of work ahead of us.

&#149 Ian McKee is a Lothians MSP and a member of the Scottish Parliament's health and sport committee.