Blast from the past: The recorder
A new report has suggested that only around one in six children now learns the recorder after a decline in its popularity over the past decade
The paper by the ABRSM, the exam board of the Royal Schools of Music, said the recorder is one of the most “given up” instruments.
I’m not surprised. Who can ever forget primary school music lessons spent ‘learning’ the screeching woodwind instrument, and the equally bizarre glockenspiel and xylophone. Show me an adult who kept up any of those un-mellifluous instruments, and I’ll show you a very strange, possibly friendless, individual.
It was worse, of course, for parents who had sit through cacophonous school concerts, for a recorder in the hands of many small children trying to play Mary Had a Little Lamb is, indeed, a migraine-hastening experience.
Besides the droning screech and the weird hole at the back you always forgot to cover, the recorder just wasn’t hygienic. I can recall having to share one with a classmate with a perennial cold.
So, what are kids opting to learn these days? The ABRSM said the piano and keyboard remain the most popular instruments, but the ukulele is also up there, creating a new generation of George Formbys. Oh dear.