Education: Symphonic variation for hotplace and lollipop: Orchestra players are helping thousands of primary school children to create compositions and perform them, writes Diana Hinds

The lesson begins with Saint- Saens' portrayal of hens and cocks from Carnival of the Animals. The pupils at the school in inner-city Birmingham listen thoughtfully and are then asked to write on the blackboard what they have heard. They produce, with a bit of coaxing, a short sequence of dots and a squiggle.

'There, that's music. Easy peasy]' says Maggie Cotton. A percussionist with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, she establishes an instant rapport with the class of 9- to 11-year-olds. This is the second of five afternoons she is spending at St John's Church of England Junior School, helping the children to prepare their own musical contribution to an ambitious national project entitled The Turn of the Tide.

Organised by the Association of British Orchestras, and funded by the Foundation for Sports and the Arts, Shell UK and the Arts Council, the project centres on a new work by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, designed to include short compositions by primary school pupils. Sixteen orchestras - including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Halle, the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields and the Bournemouth Sinfonietta - are taking part, together with 20,000 children from 300 primary schools.

Individual players from each orchestra 'adopt' a local school to work with, and the orchestra and schools in that area then combine forces to stage a series of performances - taking place around the country until late June. At each performance about 150 children sit at the feet of the players, playing their own compositions and singing in the final choral section of the work.

It sounds like a recipe for chaos, but each school receives highly detailed specifications and hefty teaching packs to ensure that the children's compositions are the right length and properly integrated into the work as a whole.

The central theme is the creation and potential destruction of the environment, and St John's, one of 15 Birmingham schools taking part, has been allotted the task of representing birds. With the help of Ms Cotton, and their class teacher, Beverley Thomas, and using a range of percussion instruments, they are to produce three short sections, two lasting 60 seconds and one of 90 seconds, on the creation of birds, their migration and subsequent falling from the sky.

'I want you to write some bird- song on the board for me and then I'm going to play it,' Ms Cotton tells the class. 'Do me a little short piece of sound and then I can keep repeating it.'

She produces a silvery-sounding glockenspiel and, after playing it herself, invites the children to have a go, showing them how to produce just the right sound: 'Imagine you're touching a hotplate with a lollipop and you don't want it to melt. That's it, excellent.'

Groups of children practise musical ideas for their first composition on a selection of chime bars, maracas, tambourines, recorders and cymbals, and play them to the rest of the class. Despite occasional lapses into general classroom cacophony, the bird noises are starting to materialise - short, repeated phrases on different instruments, played over a constant triad, C-E-G, on the chime bars. The next stage will be for the children to develop these ideas for the 'migration' section, and find a way of writing them down. 'It's the process that's so important, rather than the results,' says Ms Cotton.

This kind of practical composition work may seem worlds away from the basic class singing that many people remember from their days at primary school, but it is central to the requirements of the national curriculum. The curriculum sets out two main targets - for music, composing and performing; and listening and appraising - but specifies that two-thirds of the time should be spent on composing and performing.

These activities can seem daunting to teachers with little or no musical training. Ann Tennant, education co- ordinator for the CBSO, says: 'Teachers often do need specialist help in music, and working with orchestras can be a good way of doing this.'

She runs a substantial number of educational projects through which CBSO players help in schools. Simon Rattle, principal conductor of the CBSO, is a passionate advocate of such work. After winning an international Montblanc de la Culture award last month for his work with the orchestra, he announced that

the prize money (about pounds 6,000) would go to the CBSO's educational programme.

'The players tell me they get a lot out of it themselves,' Ms Tennant says. 'The very nature of being an orchestral musician is that you become an artisan, playing someone else's music according to someone else's interpretation. But to do educational work, alongside performance, means that you can keep in touch with your own creativity.'

Ms Cotton says that getting the children to concentrate can be difficult. 'They've got to learn how to sit still and quiet while someone else is playing, and that's really hard. They also have to learn to listen, and to be critical about what they're doing themselves.

'But it's very challenging, and I enjoy doing some creative thinking. I have peculiarly high standards and I have to be careful not to expect more of the children than they can give. But equally, you must never underestimate them; they can come up with some marvellous surprises.'

(Photograph omitted)