Letter: Music-makers in the community

Sir: Nicholas Williams's article 'Requiem for the symphony orchestra' (27 April) overlooks one of the most crucial developments in music today. This is the emergence of Community Music as a movement involving large numbers of people, many with little or no previous experience, in making and exploring music of all kinds.

In schools, youth clubs, village halls, hospitals, adult training centres, there are musicians hard at work creating new forms of music, exciting and new because they are made with, for and by people in that community. One of the beauties of this work is that it involves all types of musicians, from orchestra players to folk, jazz and rock musicians.

Research by the Arts Council shows that the Regional Arts Boards provide pounds 300,000 to Community Music, just enough subsidy to run perhaps one organisation per region on a shoestring. That is a very small amount compared to what some individual Arts Council clients receive.

Mr Williams is right in saying that there should be new thinking, but it is not then a simple matter of switching funds within the music budget of the Arts Council. Rather it is a question of what government funding is provided, how that reaches the Regional Arts Boards and how they use it.

Yours faithfully,

IRENE MACDONALD

Chair

Sound Sense

The National Association

for Community Music

Marham, Norfolk

27 April