Depending on your view, the recorder is an instrument of “incredible versatility” or a tool of torture that has terrorised primary schools for too many generations.
But now, warn its champions, the Marmite of the woodwind world faces extinction, with one of the UK’s top music schools reporting an 80% decline in the number of young people playing the recorder in 10 years.
So imperilled is the instrument’s future that the European Recorder Teachers Association is trying to spearhead its renaissance so it does not go the way of the lute. The ERTA argues that if the recorder was good enough for the Beatles, it has a place in contemporary music today.
Tom Redmond, the joint principal of Chetham’s school of music in Manchester, said only three of its pupils practised the recorder, compared with 15 a decade ago.
He blamed the pandemic for the decrease in the number of children taking up the recorder and other wind instruments in schools.
