29 April 2025
Reassessing Children's Music with BBC Radio for Schools
The music placing desk has recently become the temporary home of a fascinating collection of pamphlets from the mid-20th century. BBC Radio for Schools produced a number of long-running programmes during this period, such as Singing Together and Time and Tune, that were aimed at bringing music education and communal music-making to children across the country.
Although music programming aimed at school children had been broadcast on occasions since the 1920s, the BBC School Radio began to be used significantly and regularly during World War II, when children were experiencing evacuation and the practice of community music-making was considered necessary to support their integration into new schools. Leading this was a programme called Singing Together, which ran from September 1939 to March 2001 and is fondly remembered by many people around the UK. Singing Together (and the accompanying Teacher’s Notes) is well represented in the collections on the placing desk, along with other programmes like Time and Tune, Music Session, Making Music (BBC Television Broadcasts to Schools), and Music Workshop. The pamphlets span a wide period of time, 1955 to 1974, that saw various changes to the radio programme including its home station and its presenters.
Due to BBC taping policies, the vast majority of the Schools Radio broadcasting output is lost, save for a handful that exist in the BBC’s archives and other archives (including the British Library’s own Sound and Vision collections).[i] The pamphlets that accompanied each term of programming are the best documentation we have of long-running and culturally significant programmes such as Singing Together, aside from anecdotes and memories from those lucky enough to have experienced them as children or as teachers.
As I explored the BBC Radio for Schools pamphlets, I noticed how rare it is nowadays to find children’s sheet music so beautifully designed and available to all schoolchildren. The collection reflects the vastly changing landscape of music pedagogy in the 20th century. Inspired by these collection items, the following blog post taps into my own musicological research, and considers how these unique, historic items might relate to broader contemporary attitudes and perceptions of children's music. A later post will explore the many artists and designers behind these pamphlets.
Communal music-making
As nostalgia becomes an increasingly potent cultural sentiment, recollections of shared childhood experiences have seen more media attention. In 2014, BBC Radio 4 broadcasted a documentary hosted by Jarvis Cocker which revisited Singing Together and featured many accounts of people’s experiences of the show in the 1960s and 1970s.[ii] My own experience of regular communal singing and music-making was very different however. I grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, when radio was losing its youth appeal in favour of CDs and streaming, but I was privileged to have access to holistic music-making throughout my childhood at Coda Music Trust, a registered charity, and music and arts school/therapy centre located on the south coast. This was not the case for the majority of my peers and, I suspect, children up and down the country at that time. The collection of BBC Radio for Schools pamphlets at the British Library illustrates a cultural tradition that has largely been left behind: community music-making as a live, nation-wide practice. Singing Together saw thousands of children all, well, singing together at the same time, singing the same song, in classrooms from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, every week.
As an adult, I have rediscovered long-distance (or rather, time-displaced) communal singing through uploads of Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest on YouTube. This was an educational show from the mid 1960s featuring Seeger and various guest musicians including legends like Johnny Cash, Elizabeth Cotten, Mississippi John Hurt, and Buffy Sainte-Marie. A favourite of mine was the episode featuring Bernice Reagon, and I had a particularly transformative experience singing along with Reagon, Seeger, and other guest Jean Ritchie from my student digs in Leeds during the pandemic, 60 years after the episode’s first broadcast.
These practices are incredibly powerful, community-building activities that both children and adults alike can benefit greatly from participating in. The BBC Radio for Schools pamphlets at the British Library document an extremely effective curriculum for communal music-making that has had a huge impact on those who participated in those classes as a child, as can be heard in the Singing Together documentary.[iii]
Children’s music
Children’s music sadly remains a genre greatly overlooked by the general public and musicologists alike. Its cultural significance is often forgotten, and contemporary children’s music is dominated by the Kidz Bop series that has been criticised in recent years for its overly censorious tendencies.[iv] But there are examples of older recorded children’s music that gained cult status upon re-release. One such example is The Langley Schools Music Project album, a collection of pop song covers recorded by Canadian school choruses in the 1970s. Reissued by Bar/None Records in 2018 under the title Innocence & Despair, the album garnered critical praise from many of the artists covered.[v] For example, Fred Schneider of the B-52s described the music as “a haunting, evocative wall-of-sound experience that is affecting in an incredibly visceral way.” Likewise, David Bowie spoke on the cover of ‘Space Oddity’: "The backing arrangement is astounding. Coupled with the earnest if lugubrious vocal performance you have a piece of art that I couldn't have conceived of".
In fact, the haunting effect of children’s voices, with all their associated innocence, cheerily singing songs like ‘Space Oddity’, Barry Manilow’s ‘Mandy’, the Eagles’ ‘Desperado’, the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’, and ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’, creates a dissonance of affect that can be incredibly moving. In the aptly re-titled Innocence & Despair, musical simplicity is combined with communal music-making, children’s voices, and powerful lyricism in an aesthetically significant way. There is surprisingly little musicological research into the affective experience of hearing music made by children.
Like the Langley School Music, another release that highlights the haunting quality of recorded children’s music is Trunk Records’ Classroom Projects, a compilation of music made by and for British schools in the latter part of the 20th century. Similarly to the BBC Radio for Schools output, many of the pieces featured on this album have a more educational tone, as opposed to the pop music of Innocence & Despair. There are classroom experiments in aleatoric music and musique concrete as well as “public service broadcast”-style songs about drink-driving. The introduction track with narration by Robert Gittings as well as the voice featured in ‘Examples of 12 Note Melodies’ feature the clipped, received pronunciation associated with wartime BBC radio broadcasts like those represented in the British Library collection. However, Classroom Projects takes the “haunting” descriptions we have already seen to a whole new level. Its focus on discordant and atonal contemporary classical music of the era has a disquieting effect that is only amplified when you remember that it was made by children (‘Music for Cymbals’, ‘An Aleatory Game’, ‘Musique Concrete’, and ‘Duet for Two Flutes’). Other tracks featuring vocals reveal what can only be described as a dark imagination in the children making them, such as ‘The Lonely Coast’ and ‘Autumn’. Traditional ballads and contemporary folk songs like ‘Jimmy Whalen', ‘A Soalin’’ and the utterly terrifying ‘The Lyke-Wake Dirge’ illustrate the capacity of children’s music to elicit horror in listeners.
Even cheerful or mellow tracks have a temporally uncanny quality to them as a result of the noise and low fidelity sound that accompanies the intended music (‘Portland Town’, ‘Puppets’, ‘Alleluia’, ‘Strawberry Fayre’). The stand-out track for me on Classroom Projects is The Small Choir of St. Brandon’s School’s cover of ‘Bright Eyes’. It is hard to describe accurately the experience of listening to this song, other than to say it is, to me, the sonic equivalent of a rictus grin. At once deeply sinister, saccharine, and peculiarly melancholic, I find this example of children’s music incredibly moving.
It may be time to reevaluate the aesthetic significance of children’s music, and, to return to the collection at the heart of this post, a good place to start is with the BBC Radio for Schools collection of pamphlets. This collection represents more than simply the paper accompaniment for long-cancelled radio shows. They reflect profound experiences of music and community felt by children from all corners of the UK for many decades, experiences that are held dearly in the memories of 1000s of adults today and that have not successfully been replicated for children growing up now. The fullness of the musicality held in the pamphlets of Singing Together as well as the albums mentioned above cannot be overstated: a full spectrum of complex and intense emotions channelled in the communal and nurturing medium of music education.
Lou Baynes, Collections Support Assistant, Music Collections
References
[i] BBC Archive, ‘BBC Archives - Wiped, Missing and Lost’, BBC Archive Service (online, n.d.) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/archiveservices/wiped-missing-and-lost> [accessed 8 April 2025].
[ii] Jarvis Cocker, Singing Together, produced by Ruth Evans, BBC Radio 4 (November 2014) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b04stc6c> [accessed 8 April 2025].
[iii] ‘Singing Together: the radio show that got schoolchildren singing’, BBCNews, (28 November 2014), <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30210485> [accessed 8 April 2025].
[iv] Aditi Shrikant, ‘Why Kidz Bop’s “censored” songs aren’t just annoying – theyre problematic’, Vox (online, October 2018) <https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/3/17930132/kidz-bop-censorship-music> [accessed 8 April 2025].
[v] The Langley Schools Music Project, Innocence and Despair, Bar/None Records (2001) <https://bar-nonerecords.bandcamp.com/album/innocence-and-despair> [accessed 8 April 2025].
Further reading and links
barnonerecords, ‘The Langley Schools Music Project - Space Oddity (Official)’, YouTube (15 October 2013 [2001]) <https://youtu.be/YWjTbB4ONeM?> [accessed 9 April 2025]
BBC Archive, ‘BBC Archives - Wiped, Missing and Lost’, BBC Archive Service (online, n.d.) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/archiveservices/wiped-missing-and-lost> [accessed 8 April 2025]
Borstal Boy, ‘The Small Choir Of St Brandon' s School - Bright Eyes’, YouTube (15 December 2015 [2013]) <https://youtu.be/ahJUAU0zzlY> [accessed 9 April 2025]
‘Classroom Projects - Incredible Music Made By Children In Schools’, Discogs (online, n.d.) <www.discogs.com/release/4956614-Various-Classroom-Projects-Incredible-Music-Made-By-Children-In-Schools> [accessed 9 April 2025]
Cocker, Jarvis, Singing Together, produced by Ruth Evans, BBC Radio 4 (November 2014) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b04stc6c> [accessed 8 April 2025]
Coda Music Trust, <https://www.coda.org.uk/> [accessed 8 April 2025]
Gilles Spadari, ‘Sounds & Silence – The Lyke Wake Dirge’, YouTube (2 October 2015 [2013]) <https://youtu.be/KchxCQlzqwY> [accessed 9 April 2025]
The Langley Schools Music Project, Innocence and Despair, Bar/None Records (2001) <https://bar-nonerecords.bandcamp.com/album/innocence-and-despair> [accessed 8 April 2025]
Rr R- Folk Music Channel, focusing on Pete Seeger, ‘Episode 5 - Rainbow Quest by Pete Seeger: Jean Ritchie and Bernice Reagon’, YouTube (online, 29 January 2022 [1965-1966]) <https://youtu.be/XaNHD371py8?si=pUdVnRMsb79v7dCi> [accessed 9 April 2025]
Shrikant, Aditi, ‘Why Kidz Bop’s “censored” songs aren’t just annoying – they’re problematic’, Vox (online, October 2018) <https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/3/17930132/kidz-bop-censorship-music> [accessed 8 April 2025]
‘Singing Together: the radio show that got schoolchildren singing’, BBC News, (28 November 2014), <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30210485> [accessed 8 April 2025]