Q&A: Michelle Kelly

What's your musical education background?

I'm university-trained, with a BA and an MMus, and I spent a year at Guildhall doing performance communication studies, leading improvisation workshops through a community of musicians. I work as a violin teacher and choral director and previously worked in Durham Cathedral as director of music outreach for about seven years. I've recently come down to Suffolk in the last three years and I'd like to get similar projects to the outreach work that I did in the north east.

How long have you been involved with teaching and outreach?

I've been teaching for roughly 30 years, working in schools both state and private, and then I worked for Kent music service. I've been in outreach for about ten years. For me, outreach is about supporting a community and in the north east we were using music to raise academic aspirations. We held up the choristers as role models and trusted that this would help the children to find their feet in whatever they chose to do – hopefully music! Because they were making music to a high standard, they applied those standards to the other work that they did.

Can you tell us a bit about the work that Jubilee Opera does?

It's a fascinating organisation that came about for the Queen's Jubilee – a lovely local lady named Jenni Wake-Walker got her sons, their friends, and other people in the community and put on a performance of Britten's Noye's Fludde. It's been putting on an opera every autumn since then from a wide range of sources including Britten and Williamson, as well as some it has commissioned. They get a new generation of children every few years. Many of them have never sung a word in their lives before and they sound quite professional after three solid months of training with us. Recruitment used to be easy, it was all word-of-mouth, and children would just appear. In the last ten years, it's become more difficult for families to think that this is for them – it feels like more than them simply feeling that opera isn't for them.

How do you think that fits in with the wider state of music education?

I was startled to find that many of the schools have to spend so much time on numeracy and literacy that the arts simply go out of the window. Children are getting to the age of ten before they're singing in school – if they don't sing, they won't develop an interest in music. They'll take classroom instrumental lessons but it won't go any further.

We could be losing something that is absolutely crucial for these children. Music is useful for addressing social issues like loneliness by giving them the opportunity to engage and socialise.

What do you find most difficult about getting children involved?

There is a culture at the moment that music isn't for us as a society, classical music certainly, and I just want to change that. If you've got something like a cathedral behind you, it's a status symbol and families will initially come forward because of that symbol. They stay because the music is worth doing, whether it's secular or sacred, classical or musicals, folk or jazz. They stay because the children love it. I find that getting started seems to be the issue – once I've got a foot in the door with various school, the children are very forthcoming. They want to sing. I want to use that to get them interested in learning instruments.

Do you think there's anything in particular about singing that catches children's attention?

I think you can teach all aspects of music through singing. Kodály music principles teach that every child has a birthright to be able to do music, and to do it well. You can organise singing games so that students develop an understanding of pulse, meter, pitch and rhythms – because it's all through games, students don't realise that they are learning anything, they're just having fun with other children which is exactly what they like to do anyway. They like to get themselves together in little groups and amuse themselves and I'm more than happy to organise that. Singing is the ultimate way of bringing them to music because it's already in them – the music is in their mind. If they go straight into learning a musical instrument, they will be slightly mechanical because they've not been taught to see the human side of music-making.