Imagine for a moment that it is your birthday, and that someone special in your life has bought you a vintage camera that, while beautiful and of its kind quite perfect, only shoots in black and white. What now happens is the re-examination of the world about you looking for objects and settings of high contrast that will look beautiful in a mono chromatic setting. 

You begin to search out these things in your everyday environment and, even when the camera is not on your person, you still process the world about you for potential images, discarding all those that fail to meet these new criteria. 

The camera is acting upon your sensibility and allowing you to shape your creativity in one direction. It is now the tool you use to describe your world in artistic terms. But because it is so specific, it is not hard to see how refined the choices it presents are. The tool not only offers you an opportunity to be artistic but it conditions your mind to seek out those very images that it will excel at.

This simple analogy is so that we begin to understand just how critical the tools we give to children actually are. The play children engage in is their attempt to understand and explain their world, but their creative lives are evident from the outset. They colour on any surface available to them (even that freshly painted wall you finished during lockdown!); they dance to music as soon as they can stand; they beat time with their hands from infancy; they sing out of happiness as soon as they find a voice.

Children interact with us creatively from the very beginnings of their lives. It follows then that the environment we place them in can kill or enrich this. Arid childhood filled with stimulus rich but creatively barren technology only desensitises children to their own creative potential and affects their moods, attention spans and has a direct negative impact on their imaginative abilities in later education.

Music is a slowing down of all of that. It is like watching themselves in slow motion. The gesture that produces a note on a piano slowly refined with repetition to produce a sound that is first loud; then soft; then abrupt; now slow and gentle. Each gesture filling their minds with an arsenal of possibilities for when they come to express their innermost selves through a piece of music.

If we teach music as play, and instruments as the toys that enable that activity, we begin to shape the thinking of each child. Then if we make it so that each lesson is filled with possibility and challenge, the child looks to these tools to shape their world in their own image. Each piece of music becomes more than the sum of its parts. No longer just notes on a page but now a statement that is uniquely personal to each child. That is when the choice of music becomes magical and our work as educators takes on a meaning often quoted but seldom realised. Vocation.