Album: The Langley Schools Music Project

Innocence & Despair, Setanta

How do children learn about music? If, indeed, they are allowed to learn about such frivolous abstractions at all in these days of budgetary constraints and educational league tables. I'm not referring to the teaching of music as a vocation, but the simple appreciation of musical form, whereby children might be brought to some more lucid and empowering relationship with the medium, before Pop Idol lures them into regarding it as just another get-rich-quick ticket.

It's pointless trying to reach them when they're in their teens and all kitted out in the attitudes of youth rebellion. You've got to catch them earlier than that. Which is what Hans Fenger did as a music teacher in the Langley Schools district of British Columbia, Canada, in 1974. Working with pre-teen children from rural schools, he eschewed the teaching of theory and technique in favour of simply instilling a love of music: from the first lesson, he had them sing and play songs together, corralling them into 60-strong choirs which he taped in the Glenwood School gym, whose cavernous reverb gives these recordings a distinctive character, akin to a low-budget Spector Wall Of Sound. The instrumentation was simple – Orff xylophones, tambourines and similar hand percussion, augmented by Fenger's piano and rhythm guitar – while Fenger's vocal arrangements were scaled-down versions of the originals, with harmonies appropriate to material largely drawn from the Beach Boys catalogue.

The two recently unearthed albums have been justly acclaimed as "outsider art" masterpieces by the likes of John Zorn and David Bowie, who described the version of his "Space Oddity" as "a piece of art that I couldn't have conceived of, even with half of Colombia's finest export products in me". He's right, too: there's a purity and bittersweet, otherworldly charm about the best tracks here – "Space Oddity", "God Only Knows", "I'm Into Something Good", "In My Room", "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft", "Rhiannon", and a beautifully fragile solo version of "Desperado"– that fully bears out the title, Innocence and Despair.

These certainly aren't karaoke versions: their renditions reflect the innocent immediacy of their responses to such dawning emotions as love and loneliness, and the imaginative appeal of subjects like witchcraft and space travel. Some voices are out of tune, some instruments miss the beat, but there's an ingenuous enthusiasm that renders such shortcomings immaterial. The attention paid to each song's mood and dynamics, meanwhile, affirms how Fenger's methods have instilled in his charges an appreciation of music as an uplifting, organic presence, something that can come from within them, not just be inflicted upon them. Don't you wish your children had a music teacher like Hans Fenger?