Much speculation exists as to the prospect Music and the Performing Arts face in the wake of the 1988 Education Act. Research shows that interaction and fusion, which exist between Music and the Performing Arts, intensify expressive character for young people, and generate more powerful and sustained responses, in comparison with single art forms.

Results of experiments show the value of fused artefacts with significant implications for future Arts education, as regards both making and appraising.

This article examines the musical structural processes used in songs invented by 32 children over a period of 18 months. It takes the view that the organisation and relationships of musical events in time are fundamental to music's meaning, and that we should expect structural considerations to be important as soon as a child begins to be musically articulate.

I have been continuing my study of young children's invented songs (Davies, 1986), analysing them in the light of recent writings on music as mind. If music is an activity of mind, the question arises, what are musical thought processes, and can we find them in the musical inventions of young children ?

In this article I expound my method of teaching the language of music to my pupils. I aim to enable them to express themselves through music, just as they are expected to use the tools of language for creative writing and art materials for original work.

My class organisation and the syllabus by which my pupils learn to compose is explained in some detail for years seven to nine and in more general terms thereafter.

I include examples of compositions, from Year Seven and from GCSE pupils. I hope I can encourage other teachers to adopt similar objectives and therefore reap similar rewards.

Over the past decade, some major changes have taken place in the policies of Britain's symphony orchestras towards the communities within which they operate. Responding to local needs, most have now evolved enterprising educational activities. This ‘community’ brief has itself generated enthusiastic commitment from the participating musicians; but it has also highlighted the new responsibilities of orchestral management to the personal and artistic development of the players who must work in this somewhat different cultural climate. The author, Gresham Professor of Music and Director of the Department of Performance and Communication Skills at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, examines these issues and their implications for the future of orchestral musicians.

Education Departments in Arts organisations have traditionally taken on the role of explaining the repetoire to young audiences; forward-looking education officers have sought to bring in new audiences by engaging them in the processes involved in their particular art form. The ‘Opera On The Pier’ project, which became known later as Hastings Spring, achieved this end with spectacular results.