Don’ t Stop The Music – first campaign success

Don’t Stop the Music – Channel 4 Multiplatform

A message from

James Rhodes, pianist & campaigner for music education

19 Mar 2015

Dear Supporters,

Thank you.

We have had our first campaign success with Don’t Stop the Music – and it couldn’t have been done without your tireless campaigning.

Ofsted have agreed to include a ‘broad and balanced curriculum’ in their inspections of schools.

This is great news! It is the first step in helping ensure that children have access to a proper music education. It could not have been done without your support.

And on Tuesday night, I got to speak in parliament to members of the House of Lords and House of Commons about our concerns and what we need to do to protect music for future generations.

I had the opportunity to discuss our findings from the initial stages of Don’t Stop the Music; findings that gave me sleepless nights. Music education is in desperate need of support from the Government, and with May’s election fast approaching I need your help to make sure music education is not forgotten in the next Parliament.

We need consistent funding, not a post code lottery, opportunities for children to progress beyond their first musical experiences, more action from Ofsted, a trained teacher in every school, and school accountability measures (league tables and the like) which value music properly.

What I am asking your help with now, is making our voice as strong as possible.

If we have 100,000 people signed up to this campaign by the start of May, we will be able to make sure music education is not side-lined by a future Government.

So I am asking for your help, once again, to ensure more children have the opportunity to play musical instruments – please forward this message to your friends, put the petition link on Twitter and Facebook and get as many people as possible to sign up to the campaign

Thank you, thank you and thank you again.

Best wishes,

James

Sign the petition here (it takes literally a minute)

#DontStopTheMusic

Books That Changed Lives – suggestions for book groups

I’ve been in a book group with some old school friends and a motley crew of other geezers for 13 and a bit years now. Here is a summary of our first 10 years. Well it’s my turn to choose the book again now – it takes 18-24 months for the honour to come round these days so you can’t take it lightly. I put a call out to social media friends for books that had really changed their lives or ways of seeing the world. Loads of interesting suggestions came in and rather than let them fade away in the ephemeral world of Facebook etc. I thought I’d save them here so other people in other book groups/book clubs/reading groups could make use of the titles. (The quotations are from the friends making the suggestions.)

• Out Stealing Horses – Per Petterson
• Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner
• A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
• My brilliant friend – Elena Ferrante
• Random Family – Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
• Kevin Barry’s City Of Bohane
• Don de Lillo’s Underworld
• Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera
• Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels – “made me think differently about how the past shapes your present/future and how as individuals we get to choose if the negative parts of our past consume our futures or not. It is also beautifully written and made me revisit poetry too.” “it is the book that taught me how beautiful words can be”
• Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
• The social animal – David Brooks
• Do No Harm – Henry Marsh
• Andre Agassi’s “Open”
• The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities
• Us – David Nicholls
• Amongst Women by John McGahern
• Malloy by Samuel Beckett
• The Master by Colm Tóibín
• The Country Girls by Edna O’ Brien
• Foster by Claire Keegan
• At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’ Brien
• The Quest for Corvo – AJA Symons
• Good Behaviour by Molly Keane
• Birchwood by John Banville
• How Many Miles to Babylon by Jennifer Johnston
• The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton
• Love’s Work – Gillian Rose
• The History of History – Ida Hatemer-Higgins
• Inventing God, Nicholas Mosley – “felt my mind shifting on religion/geopolitics/Middle East. God as the greatest invention of humankind. Humanist but generous to those who have faith – a gentle riposte to the Hitchens/Dawkins approach. In a novel.”
• A window for one year – John Irving
• A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving – “love, friendship and sacrifice”
• Wild, Cheyl Strayed
• Dracula – Bram Stoker
• The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt
• Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
• For whom the bell tolls – Ernest Hemingway
• To the End of the Land, David Grossman
• Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood – “felt the terror of teenage girls when read and re-read both as a teenage girl/40 yr old woman”
• The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy – “felt the power and grace of the quiet man”
• Things Fall Apart – Chinwe Achebe
• Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother “Made me respect young people more”
• A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
• The Mezzanine by Nicolson Baker “It’s very short, very unlikely and some in the group will HATE it and for others it’ll change the way they look at the world around them. You’ll never see perforations or a straw in a fizzy drink the same way again.”
• Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman – “had a huge influence on my going to university and recognising the need to never find oneself in a position where you are wholly reliant on a man. All teenage girls should read it.”
• William Leith’s The Hungry Years “taught me how not to be a food addict”
• Cervantes’ Don Quixote “taught me to rely on my inner compass rather than external signage.”
• Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow “showed me that our personal interpretation is where the colour and joy of the world are to be found, but to keep it just shy of solipsism”
• Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book “became my personal cultural key to unlocking New York”
• Stoner – John Williams
• Steppenwolf – Hermann Hesse “made me see my middle class/ inner animal struggle in a clear & cleansing light, Damn you Herman Hesse!”
• Plumed serpent, D. H. Lawrence – “opening to the mythic underbelly”
• Henry James’s ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ “because his characters are so compelling and so flawed. Our heroine’s youthful arrogance and stubbornness sees her turn down suitors because she values above all her freedom, only to find herself trapped in a way she could not have imagined. I was excited at her prospects and I feared for her. There were other characters I was rooting for too! Having re-read it more than 20 years later, I was interested and surprised to find I had more compassion for some characters I disliked intensely and impatience for those I felt sympathy for when I read it as a teenager. A truly astonishing, complex masterpiece.”
• The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
• Cormac McCarthy’s The Road “is the most piercing book I’ve read. The description of the trials faced by the father and son has stayed with me for years.”
• 1984 – George Orwell – “”We are the dead” “You are the dead” stopped me in my 13 year old tracks. Never saw it coming”
• Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day – “because it really does require you to take a big chunk out of your life to read it – Rams home the idea that reading is subversive: stops you working, earning, socialising and kinda does stop time.”
• A fraction of the whole – Steve toltz
• Douglas Coupland’s ‘Microserfs’
• Be Here Now – Ram Dass
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
• The english and their history by Robert tombs – “Amazing and definitive book that filled in every gap for me in understanding where we live and why it is how it is”
• The Spinoza Problem by Irvin Yalom “Despite the title, it’s a real page turner. Yalom goes back and forth between Spinoza and Rosenberg (part of Hitler’s propoganda machine). My book club had a fantastic discussion.”
• Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine
• Humanity: A Moral History of The 20th Century by Professor Jonathan Glover
• Lolita -Vladimir Nabokov
• The Bone People by Keri Hulme
• Homage To Catalonia – George Orwell
• The Unbearable Lightness of Beingby Milan Kundera
• The Wind-up Bird Chronicle -Haruki Murakami – “Extraordinary writing that made me see the world differently”
• Strangers on a Train – Patricia Highsmith
• Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
• House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
• Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

Again, thanks to all those who kindly contributed to the list.

In the end I opted for The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (partly because I thought Cloud Atlas was something pretty special). Will report back on how it goes.

People Born on 11th September

John Martyn (1948 New Malden)

in 1973

Erno Goldfinger (1902 Budapest)

Herbert Lom (1917 Prague)

DH Lawrence (1885 Eastwood Nottinghamshire)

Harry Connick Jnr (1967 New Orleans)

Brian De Palma (1940 Newark)

Pierre de Ronsard (1524 Couture-sur-Loir)

Tony Gilroy (1956 Manhattan)

Richard Ashcroft (1971Wigan)

Blitzed Again

11th September 1940

I’m a Londoner born&bred. A total Londonphile. I’d have a London passport if I could. And my hobby is being a flaneur with a camera, wandering around the city aimlessly taking photos.

Today I’m taking a staycation and headed off for Paddington. I’m now sat on the bank of the Grand Union Canal a bit beyond Little Venice in the Spring sunshine.

When I went on a similar (un)mission on Saturday it struck me for the first time that London really is in danger. I headed to Borough as a starting point. I really couldn’t find any real people to photograph – just sheepish tourists in queues at a market with no proper stalls selling largely non-local food. I remember enjoying eating in the shadow of Southwark Cathedral not that many years ago – I couldn’t even find where that was. There were just wall-to-wall visitors chowing down legs crossed, penned in. I couldn’t find anything worth eating.

I retreated onto London Bridge and headed over into the weekend City. It was punctuated with cranes. Building sites everywhere. Fox, a shop established in 1868, with its silver Art Deco frontage was empty.

I bussed out to The Angel to the canal. Rammed with French speakers (and I’m happy London is now the 5th or 6th biggest French city) adding, in the lack of variety, to the feel of a city being smoothed over and having the edges knocked off. I managed to get some good shots with the camera I just bought the Enfants Terribles but it was an unusual struggle.

On my way out today I picked up a copy of Time Out. The cover was Save London. So it’s obviously not just me feeling this vibe. This is the first time in my life London feels under real threat on a Blitz scale. Property developers who don’t care; dirty money playing Monopoly; Euroblandness; buy-to-let neglect; chain everything death by consumerism; a wash of global sameness from the Internet age and Capitalism eating itself.

The city I love is in real peril. Better a Dornier than a Subway.

Brave New London (complete with crane)