Royal Northern College of Music: KS3 Cross-Curricular Resources

The archives of a music college may not be the obvious starting point for a Key Stage 3 cross-curricular teaching resource. But the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) holds a wealth of material relating to notable musicians and composers, including the remarkable Bolton-born composer Thomas Pitfield. Excited about the educational potential of the story of Pitfield’s life, RNCM’s archivist applied to MLA North West for funding through its Strategic Commissioning: Cultural Entitlement Programme.

The grant enabled RNCM to work with a teacher in developing the resource pack, digitise the content, record a CD and organise a launch event. The pack itself covers many aspects of Thomas Pitfield’s long and productive life, including his childhood in Bolton, his commitment to vegetarianism, his experience as a pacifist during the Second World War and his various creative endeavours as artist, poet and musician. The pack’s themes are relevant to Art and Design, Citizenship and History, Drama, English and Music.

RNCM supplemented its own holdings with material from the archive services in Bolton and Trafford. This three-way partnership has highlighted the range of material held in Greater Manchester archives and their collective potential in supporting many different aspects of the school curriculum.

Target Audience

Schools and Teaching Staff

Aim

• To create a cross-curricular teaching resource for Key Stage 3 about the Lancastrian painter, poet and musician Thomas Pitfield
• To pilot the education pack with a local school which has never used an archive service before
• To link the holdings of three different archive services and draw attention to archives in Greater Manchester as a curriculum resource.

Process

Why did the project take place?
The Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) archives encompass the records of its two predecessor bodies, the Royal Manchester College of Music and the Northern School of Music, as well as the personal papers of many notable musicians and composers. The collections are a rich repository of information for genealogical enquiries, local studies, biographical research and social history.
Having already run an education project for schools in 2005 through MLA’s Learning Links programme, the RNCM archivist was keen to develop a new resource for a slightly different target audience. MLA’s Strategic Commissioning Cultural Entitlement Programme provided the funding to do it. The aim of the programme is to increase the use of museums and archives by schools that are not currently accessing their services.

What happened?
The Bolton-born composer Thomas Pitfield (1903- 1999) seemed an obvious focus for Key Stage 3 pupils, because of the longevity of his career and the sheer variety of his activities, from political activism to writing poetry and composing music. The choice of Pitfield as a subject also enabled RNCM to draw on material held in neighbouring archive services in Trafford and Bolton. The three archive services had never worked together in this way before.

Pitfield’s life is a fascinating subject. After completing a seven-year engineering apprenticeship, Pitfield enrolled at the Royal Manchester College of Music at the age of 21 in 1924 and began to make money from teaching piano and cello. In his early thirties, he also studied at Bolton College of Art, consolidating a natural artistic talent which would subsequently ensure a steady stream of work as an illustrator. A dedicated vegetarian and pacifist, opposed to all killing on any grounds, he became a Conscientious Objector during the Second World War and turned down offers of work from the Ministry of Information. From 1947 until the age of 70, he was Professor of Composition at the RNCM and produced many works of poetry, plays and ballet scores. He even invented his own musical instrument, the ‘Patterphone’ – so called because it made a sound that resembled rain-drops (this instrument can now be found in the RNCM Archives).
The wealth of documentation surrounding Pitfield’s life provided ample subject-matter for the Educational Resource Pack. But it required careful organisation. The three archive services employed an education specialist, Saira Knowles, to do this. Although copyright issues relating to publishers and recording companies proved more complex than anticipated, she nonetheless succeeded in developing a resource that is truly cross-curricular, with schemes of work relevant to Art and Design, Citizenship and History, Drama, English and Music.

The pack begins with an account of Pitfield’s life entitled ‘What’s the Story?’ and an Introductory Lesson inviting students to compare his upbringing with their own, consider the importance of his journals and diaries and debate the question of how and why we investigate less famous people in history. The schemes of work include a diverse range of activities, from exploring the relationship between art and music to improvising the kind of courtroom situation that Pitfield must have faced as a Conscientious Objector in 1941. Images, texts and a CD of Pitfield’s music are available to accompany the pack.

Number of participants

The formal piloting of the pack in Manchester is still underway. Since the website was launched on 2 July 2007, however, the homepage of the resource has received 1800 hits (at time of writing, 12 February 2008). The ‘How to use this resource’ page has had 1992 hits; the ‘additional text and images’ page has had 1661 hits; and the ‘additional activities’ page has had 1671 hits. A teacher who used to work in the north west and has now moved to Boston, USA, is intending to use the pack over there with her pupils, so knowledge of Pitfield is spreading right across the Atlantic!

Evaluation

The pack has been evaluated using MLA’s Generic Learning Outcomes and Inspiring Learning for All.

Future development

The pack will remain online for the foreseeable future, subject to revision and review as and when necessary. There is scope for the pack to be further enhanced and developed, through the addition of sound clips and extra music resources. This will be analysed against user feedback.

Project website [1]:

www.rncm.ac.uk