Here’s some life advice Ralph Allwood gives to the teenagers who attend his week-long residential Rodolfus Choral Courses, held all through the summer at various schools and colleges across the country. Some of the singers are being pressured by their parents to take just maths and sciences, or other lucrative career-oriented subjects, for A-level or at university, and to give up music.
‘Right,’ he says, as the teenagers assemble for a final rehearsal, ‘this is how you decide what you’re going to do next. Get advice from everyone you can: from your teachers, your parents, the universities, that aunt who wants you to do a sensible subject. Say thank you, then go into your own room and close the door. There, make up your own mind about what you want to do.’
If Allwood hadn’t done exactly that with the university authorities when he was a ‘determined 19-year-old’, he would not have lived the life he has. And it has been, and continues to be, a richly fulfilling and musically generous life. After being head of music at Pangbourne College and then Uppingham, he was precentor and director of music at Eton for 26 years. Now aged 75 and by no means retired (‘Retired is a silly word’), he directs a handful of top choirs, including the Old Royal Naval College Trinity Laban Choir in Greenwich, south London, and runs the Pimlico Musical Foundation, which he founded ten years ago: an organisation that brings choral singing into the weekly lives of state primary school children in Pimlico.
‘By the skin of my teeth I managed to do A-level music at my grammar school, Tiffin, along with maths and physics. I started reading maths and physics at Durham. A music don spotted some talent when he saw my exposition of a Mozart violin sonata, and asked: “Would you like to change to Honours Music?”’
His parents were supportive of the plan, but his father’s engineer colleague said: ‘Head him off!’ Having taken both sets of advice, Allwood went into his room, decided to take the music path, and ‘from that moment I’ve been consistently happy’.
I visited him in the elegant flat in Pimlico he shares with his husband, the interior designer Alastair Davey. The drawing-room is a book-lined haven, with music open on the grand piano and a ladder to reach the highest bookshelves.
A strong ‘please don’t give up music’ ethos was and is prevalent at Eton. ‘If a boy said, “Oh, sir, I’ve got GCSEs and want to give up choir”, all 24 housemasters I knew would say to that boy: “What do you enjoy doing?” And the boy would say choir. And the housemaster would say: “Well, carry on doing choir.”’ Allwood mentions what he sees as ‘this idiocy about getting teenagers to do certain so-called “sensible” subjects. Far fewer people are doing music as a result.’
A study was recently carried out by Simon Toyne, director of the David Ross Education Trust, which brings music to 14,500 children at 34 state schools across the East Midlands. The study showed, Allwood tells me, that teenagers who carried on with co-curricular music achieved two grades higher across their GCSEs than their school average.
‘You don’t just add up the number of hours you spend on an academic subject and get a better mark the more hours you spend,’ says Allwood. ‘The brain doesn’t work like that. It compounds things in a different way. If you’re inspired and elated by the music you’ve found time to sing or play in your busy school day, you’ll actually do better in the exams.’
Through more than half a century of running music departments, teaching music and directing choirs, Allwood, a man sparkling with enthusiasm, has gained wisdom useful to adults as well as to young people. First, if you’re directing a children’s choir, don’t abide by the comfort-zone theory that goes: ‘We try to do the kind of music they’re already used to.’
‘No!’ Allwood says. ‘Give them the best music you can. This is what education is: leading children out of and beyond what they’re already used to.’ It’s amazing, he tells me: ‘If you introduce children to the Byrd five-part Mass, or a great anthem by Herbert Howells, not only can they sing it, but they love it.’
‘If you’re inspired by the music you’ve found time for in your busy school day, you’ll do better in exams’
That’s how the music bug takes hold and changes lives: children being introduced to masterpieces of the classical repertoire and having their minds opened up to a whole new musical plane. What Allwood has achieved in Pimlico, he feels, could be rolled out across Britain. All you need is a cluster of schools quite close together, and some adults to be teacher-singers.
‘When I first came to live here in 2011, I went into the local state primary schools, and found that not a single one did any singing. So I got in touch with the vicar of St Gabriel’s Church, the excellent Fr Owen Higgs, and said “I’ve got an idea for a choral foundation scheme for state-school pupils in Pimlico.”’
Ten years later, the Pimlico Musical Foundation is well established, with an evensong choir for the keenest and most talented children – they sing choral evensong on Wednesday evenings in St Gabriel’s – and a non-auditioned children’s choir for concerts. ‘The heads and deputy heads of the schools love it. Trusts, foundations and individuals help to fund it, and we now want to endow the foundation so it can go on for ever.’
Just one parent, out of hundreds over the decade, has said: ‘But we’re Muslim, and this is a Christian church.’ Apart from that one voice, Allwood says: ‘No one has ever said, “Why are you doing this Christian music with Muslim children in a Christian church?” The music itself is so good, and the children respond to it so enthusiastically, that this is never an issue.’
I first heard Allwood’s name when I made a friend at university in 1981 who was in a state of elation and inspiration after attending one of his summer choral courses and said what a superb choir director he was. That was his second-ever Uppingham Choral Course. The courses have now been going for 45 years, morphing to the Eton Choral Courses and then to the Rodolfus Choral Courses. There are now four or five senior courses and two junior ones each year, plus some choral weekends for adults.
Each summer, one of the senior course evensongs is broadcast live on Radio 3. There have now been 250 courses: formative weeks for thousands of young people, which have kicked off lifelong musical crazes as well as friendships. ‘For some of them, when the courses are held at Oxbridge -colleges,’ Allwood tells me, ‘this might be the first time they’ve ever visited Oxford or Cambridge, and they think, “Ooh, I’d like to come and study here…”’
And it all started because young Allwood, as a schoolmaster at Uppingham in 1980, saw the long school summer holidays looming without any music in them, and wanted to rectify that.
I asked him about musical talent, and how much pressure parents should or shouldn’t put on their child who might be unwilling to practise. ‘There are different parts of the brain,’ he tells me, ‘for loving music and for being good at music. Thus, you might have a child who’s brilliant at it but doesn’t want to do it. And you might have one who is extremely keen on it but not very good at it. Every now and then you get a child who’s strong in both parts.’
‘If you introduce children to the Byrd five-part Mass, or a great anthem by Herbert Howells, they love it’
However much you long for your child to be a high musical achiever at his or her instrument of choice, he tells me, the drive needs to come chiefly from the child. And he’s taught some stand-out boys over the years, who have had both the talent and the enthusiasm. It was thanks to a chance encounter with a film director called Stephen Walker, whom Allwood happened to sit next to on a plane to Princeton, that the unforgettable Channel 4 documentary A Boy Called Alex was made in 2008, about the remarkable Etonian Alex Stobbs, who was determined to fulfil his dream of conducting a notoriously demanding choral work by Bach, in spite of suffering from cystic fibrosis, which required deliveries of car-boot-loads of medication.
This was Eton at its enlightened best. ‘Aged 16, Alex came to me and said: “Sir, I’d like to conduct the Bach Magnificat.” I told him I could suggest so many pieces that would be easier but he said: “No, I want to do the Magnificat.” So I said: “Do – but you’ve got to organise it yourself.” And he did.’
The film took us through the lead-up and rehearsals, with Allwood helping him to prepare the piece for conducting. Then almost at the last minute, Stobbs was laid up in hospital, deeply frustrated by his lungs failing to work. He recovered enough in time to conduct the concert, which was a triumph. He went on to be a professional music teacher and composer.
That’s just one highlight of an impressive career for Allwood. ‘I’ve always loved watching good lessons,’ he tells me. And he’s still learning, both from other high-calibre teachers, and from the children and teenagers he directs, whose teasing banter he finds delightful and infectious.
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