Blown away: will we miss the sweet sound of school recorders?

Sound the Last Post, if you can find anyone to play it: research shows that some orchestral instruments are in danger of becoming extinct, due to young people’s lack of interest. YouGov research, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) to find the most popular instruments among schoolchildren, has revealed the increasing popularity of the ukulele, with one in eight expressing a desire to learn, making it the highest ranked instrument behind the typical rock-band grouping of guitar, piano, keyboards, drums and bass guitar.

But younger generations’ interest in “more sophisticated instruments”, as the Times sniffed, is waning, with the three least popular being the French horn (also known as The Wolf, in Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf), the double bass (Peter) and the trombone (not a major player).

James Williams, managing director of the RPO, made it clear that it would not be arranging Beethoven for a 70-piece ukulele orchestra to keep up with the kids. (The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain has already done that, anyway.) “The evidence we have here is that instruments such as the french horn and double bass are becoming endangered,” he said. Williams believes the changes reflect the increasing pressure schools are under to provide music education, and went on to say that more needs to be done to interest secondary school students in the “wider panoply” of instruments. His concern was for the composition of future orchestras, should the trend towards instruments that rock and/or roll be allowed to continue. But there may be yet another casualty, and one that few would be quick to mourn: the humble recorder.

Cheap, convenient, easy to learn, and suitable for solo and ensemble performances, the recorder was once the go-to instrument for children’s early musical education. But in many schools it has been usurped by the uke, which, for teachers, offers many of the same benefits with none of the lasting damage to hearing and/or sanity caused by successive years of tuneless tooting. Plus, from a student’s perspective: you can plausibly play Metallica on one.

Not all hope is lost for the cream-coloured, slightly chewed, 10-quid Yamaha recorder of yore, however. About 13% of girls and 4% of boys surveyed by YouGov said they wanted to learn the recorder. Surprisingly high, for those of us still haunted by memories of recorder ensembles’ broad approximations of Scarborough Fair. As unlikely as it may be, these children’s interest in the recorder must be fostered, and not just because especially diligent players go on to become clarinetists (The Cat, in Peter and the Wolf). The endurance of the always-amusing YouTube subgenre of “recorder cover of My Heart Will Go on” depends on it.