is even if they don’t necessarily want to play it because I think that this kind of understanding is very important. What is difficult about the workshops I do is that I have young people that I would like to work further with but we only have one day, a week or even a onesession or two for a project. So you don’t get the chance to develop something fully partly because you have to do something quickly and so you do something quite simply so you don’t necessarily explain. I’ll say to them, “Use this combination of notes to make the base line and I won’t necessarily have the chance to tell them that this comes from the pentatonic scale that is a very strong combination of notes. I just think that music education as it stands in this country hasn’t worked so well across the board because it’s been focused on people learning instrumentally (which is fine obviously) but they are learning to play just for music. That is to say they are learning in
the Western tradition and you need a lot of people quite skilled in their instruments not being able to improvise or make up their own music. Equally I think that kind of approach to playing music doesn’t turn a lot of people on and a lot of people would much rather be making electronic music. What I would really like is for every young person in this country to be entitled to an hour’s worth of tuition—or at least half an hour—per week. One on one is really important—there is only so much you can do in a big group. The problem with groups is that certain people always shout louder and are more keen and you don’t want to stifle that, but equally you are very aware that there are people who are too shy to say anything. I think one on one is important even if it is shorter than half an hour. If they want to play the cello, they should get to play the cello;