The Cuckoo - sung here by The Occasional Singers (for the CD "A Dorset Affair")


From the first opportunity as a music teacher in a state comprehensive, I did not hesitate to introduce general classroom singing into all of my teaching. When I set out there was little advice about what, sensibly, one should do faced with teaching large numbers of children of hugely mixed abilities [both musically and generally] just once a week in ill-eqipped classrooms. I resolved from the outset to take the line that, whatever else, each person had one essential creative tool that s/he would always possess - the voice - and this was my starting point. And where better to look for material than the wonderful collections of folksongs to be found in a myriad of excellent publications which were so readily available. I always worked from unison [melody only] music and so developed my own idiosyncratic approach to harmonising and characterising each tune. "My Bonny Cuckoo" is one of hundreds of such little tunes, and also happens to be the first piece that I "published" using the Sibelius software I invested in sometime in the early 1990s for which I bought my first computer. The original Sibelius software was designed for use with the Acorn [binary] computer, and I still have the original software, computer & the manual - it was called Sibelius 7 and was absolutely revolutionary. The Finn bothers [Jonathan and Ben] dreamed it up in 1987 as students [of music, at both Cambridge and Oxford], and, failing to get any of the existing music publishers interested in their idea, formed their own company in 1993: Sibelius Software. The rest is history, as they say....

From a composer's viewpoint the software utterly changed, over time, the way one wrote music. Although the set-up costs were originally huge, the faith I placed in the system has never been dented, and I pushed hard for the resource to be readily available in Weymouth College as an essential tool - in much the same way as the PC was becoming an indispensible tool in education [as in all aspects of life]. You can imagine the fight I had persuading my institution to buy expensive Acorn computers [essentially BBC computers] - not PCs - which would be only used by music students! 

I was a lone voice for a while, but persistence paid off, and before I was so rudely and ungratefully shoved out of my job [my vocation, my life] at Weymouth College, I had installed whole suites of Sibelius systems to support the various curriculums we ran. It took the emergence of Music Technology as a very highly funded new course to prise the necessary funding out of our over-cautiously myopic senior management to purchase the hardware we needed. And by now the software was available on PC....