How the humble recorder unlocked so much more than music when I was young - Laura Waddell

Fewer and fewer children are learning to play the recorder but we should celebrate this humble instrument and all that it can teach us, writes Laura Waddell

Last week’s Newsnight engaged a recorder quartet to play out their theme song. The reason? Learning the humble instrument is in decline, with some schools estimating an 80% decline.

I have a murky semi-submerged memory of communal instruments. A box of beetle-black recorder parts fetched for the novelty of an occasional afternoon music lesson, where we would learn the basics of instrument assembly: to jam the ends together - resin, at this point, nowhere to be seen - line up the fingerholes in a neat row, and hope for the best.

Before a tune could, if it ever would emerge, came loud, shrill, random notes. To the casual ear, a screech. This is the sound that still characterises the instrument in popular memory, rather than the woody, soft notes it is capable of. I wouldn’t have blamed our teacher had she stopped her ears up with cotton wool beforehand. But to a child, their first instrument is a new way to make something inside their head take form outside, and that is as exciting - and as full of possibilities - as sculpting shapes out of Plasticine. Little classroom deities, carrying out our earliest acts of creation.

Learning the recorder as a young girl was about so much more than music, writes Laura Waddell.

Covid has changed our perspective on a lot of things. The BBC, speaking to a principle of Chetham’s Music School in Manchester about the decline, summarised that “people were worried about spreading the infection through the air by breathing too heavily or through respiratory droplets landing on other people, from activities such as speaking, singing, exercising, coughing or sneezing.” To be fair, the recorder was always a particularly slavery instrument; condensation, rather than saliva, can gather inside and drip out after a long playing session. That children are germy around the mouth at the best of times is all the more reason for each of them to be given their own instrument.

Later, in high school, still bent on woodwind, there was mention of a clarinet that never came; the budget either never materialised or was drained elsewhere. I had no natural aptitude for playing the keyboard; my singing, acceptable in a choir, was a dead end unaccompanied. True to this value, I still won’t do karaoke. So it was on the humble recorder I learned how to read music, to put feeling into what I was playing, and to listen and wait for my cue.

While everyone else was in class, a friend and I would go to a quiet spot outside the assembly hall, where sun filtered through huge panelled windows and made everything feel unusually ethereal and still, in marked contrast to the noisy gauntlet of bodies and boots come bell time. It was an hour of blessed relief. There, inbetween messing around, spontaneous renditions of pop songs and ad jingles, we would practise Handel duets for our exams.

We were good enough to take great pride in the precision and flair of our playing, but what we were striving for, I think, went beyond a pass mark. It was an opportunity to be playful with music but there was something deeply satisfying in practising itself. The crescendos came with emotional highs, but the focus on breathing, listening, and following the flow of the music was meditative.

In the North Lanarkshire schools choir I attended, I came to appreciate the strictness of our choirmaster, a petite Glaswegian woman of Italian heritage who would slap the top of the piano to emphasise a command. The glossy baby grand was a sophisticated, exotic object we liked just being near; there was no better piece of staging for teen melodrama. If, once the sopranos and altos and tenors came back together from their individual practice rooms and sounded chaotic in concert, she would tell us. We ourselves could sense the lack of cohesion, but we benefited from the frankness. It pushed us to make progress, harmonies melding together and timing clicking precisely into place. When we got it right, we could feel it. The buzz of electricity would ripple through the hairs on the backs of our arms and through the rows, right up to the only true mezzo-soprano the district could muster, ringing out the highest note she could to a crowd of proud relatives. Pooling our small voices, working to the same end, our collective of uncomfortable in their own skin teenagers became an entity bigger than our individual selves. There was such wonderful community in that.

When I think of these times, practising the humble instruments of recorder and voice, the feeling conjured up in my body - other than the olfactory ghosts of Moonberry Musk body spray from Boots and cappuccino scented lipbalm - is of contentment. It bears resemblance to the combination of relaxation and focus I’ve more recently experienced, if not as habitually as I’d like, through meditation, yoga, or sauna. For some, practising music is primarily creative self-expression; for me, it just felt good. Music, and art lessons in general, contributes so much to mental wellbeing. All the more tragic, then, that music funding for schools is so often on the chopping block. Education should be about more than just funnelling kids into different career paths.Many years after high school recorder lessons, it feels like some sort of joke has been played on us. The thing we dedicated ourselves to understanding and playing as best we could, taking it seriously enough to study for examinations, is essentially a national joke.

Known by adults as a quintessential starter instrument, and one of the most inexpensive to acquire, almost everyone has played one, but rarely beyond a discordant tooting in their early years. It’s easy to pick one up and have a go on it, but somehow easier to put down and dismiss.

Britain, so fascinated by class order, loves to sneer at the accessible. The common experience is depicted as something to rise above. All the things I got from music lessons - friendship and community, play and creation, discipline, focus and clarity, silliness and fun- were learned on the most humble of instruments.