NEWS
Class Band takes flight
Yamaha UK introduced its Class Band pilot in January 2011, following the 17-year success of the German Bläserklasse programme which has expanded to some 1500 Class Bands across many European countries. The goal for the UK pilot, with eight schools
in Coventry and Staffordshire, was to confirm how the programme would work in both urban and rural secondary schools in the UK. Yamaha’s education department also recognised that the success of such a programme would need some flexibility in a music education sector which continues to undergo rapid change and which is likely to have been completely transformed by the time the new National Curriculum is introduced in 2014. Nigel Taylor of Staffordshire Performing Arts and Trevor Jones of Coventry Performing Arts Service (PAS), and their teams, have taken a leading role in helping Yamaha’s education team launch the pilot programme and extend its content to cover a broad range of music learning, way beyond a conventional band method. They also joined Yamaha’s music education manager Bill C Martin when he and the education team delivered a presentation on Class Band to around 35 heads of music service at their annual conference in
Coventry and Staffordshire Class Band teachers at a Yamaha seminar in September
Manchester last summer. Since then, interest in Class Band has snowballed, with already more than 20 schools and music services likely to join the programme in 2012 – and all that before the pilot is complete!
Meanwhile, Amie Hutchinson and Richard
Dickins, our Class Band lead teachers working for Coventry PAS, recently assisted Class Band’s originator, Wolfgang Feuerborn, in delivering a training seminar to around 15 class and instrumental teachers joining the pilots in Coventry and Staffordshire this term. Regular, high quality teacher CPD – covering advanced group-teaching pedagogy – is a key benefit of Class Band. The teachers – usually two instrumental teachers and the class music teacher – receive at least two days of training per year, and opportunities to take part in Class Band conventions and events in other European countries, share best practice and schemes of work with other teachers, access additional band arrangements, and take part
Double-MOBO winner YolanDa Brown at Coventry Class Band event
in Class Band exchanges between individual schools across Europe. All this has been possible because of the quality of Yamaha’s brass and woodwind instruments used in the programme, which the participating school can buy or lease for each class, and which in Germany have typically been lasting for around 10 years. At a time when some music services are reeling from having spent the last government’s windfall money in 2008 on poorer instruments, many of which have already been consigned to the skip, there’s never been a better time to join a programme like Class Band, which helps music services and schools radically improve their KS3 offer and which is sustainable as a long- term programme.
For more information about Class Band and how to join the programme, please visit
http://bit.ly/jIOfOF or contact
education_administrator@gmx.yamaha.com
ambassador, will work with the Class Band project as it continue to grow, to help inspire these young musicians.
Yamaha UK’s Class Band ambassador, YolanDa Brown, talks to young musicians about her music career,
Warwick Arts Centre, June 2011
Double MOBO winner and Yamaha artist, the sax player YolanDa Brown, joined 90 Coventry 12-year-olds at Warwick Arts Centre in June for the first performance by the Yamaha Class Band whole-class wind band project being piloted in three Coventry secondary schools, in a partnership between Yamaha UK and Coventry Performing Arts Service. The Class Bands had begun learning together only five months previously and impressed the audience, which included representatives
from other schools and music services who are considering joining the project. After the morning’s Class Band concert, in
which YolanDa also guested with Coventry’s Youth Jazz Orchestra, she led an afternoon workshop, teaching the Class Banders a blues. She also performed with her keyboard player Ayo Johnson and gave an exciting presentation about her music career so far and some of the top artists she has performed with. YolanDa, who is the first UK Class Band
Class Band performers from Coventry’s Barr’s Hill, Lyng Hall and Blue Coat schools, the first to pioneer the project in the UK, were clearly impressed with YolanDa’s contribution to the event. Having probably one of the ‘coolest’ young sax artists generously supporting the Class Band programme was a strategy designed not only to help inspire young people already taking part in Class Band, but also to help head off the negative peer pressure which sometimes challenges young people who choose to play a brass or a wind instrument. Not only has YolanDa already helped combat this but other young people in the schools are asking, ‘can we do this, too?’ The fact that Yamaha makes instruments of a high quality attracts national and international artists across its full range of instruments. As the Class Band programme expands in the UK it is expected that additional Class Band ambassadors will be appointed to help inspire young musicians.
See Barr’s Hill School deputy head Claire Whitmore’s take on the impact of Class Band in her school, on page 13.
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Photo: Yamaha Education Department
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