Put away your earplugs … UK children are ditching screeching recorders for mellifluous melodicas

A recorder at the mercy of a small child has often been regarded as a form of torture by parents. Now, as schools up and down Britain dust off their music stands, relief from teeth-clenching squeaks and whistles is at hand. The recorder, once the instrument of choice in schools, is being edged further from the classroom by a new contender – the melodica.

Twenty primary schools in Yorkshire have swapped recorders for this keyboard wind instrument which, advocates say, is much more mellifluous.

“It’s hard to make [melodicas] go out of tune,” said David Pipe, director of the keyboard studies programme at the Diocese of Leeds. “Trying to get them all to play the same note can be tricky, but it’s certainly not as shrill as a recorder or kids scraping on violins.”

The programme began with a handful of schools two years ago but has grown rapidly, and there are signs that this relatively obscure instrument is growing in popularity. It is the latest to challenge the recorder, which has been in decline in schools since the 1980s, when the similar but less squeaky ocarina and, in more recent times, the ukulele began to replace it.

Melodicas can be played as a handheld instrument with a mouthpiece – the preferred method of 70s reggae star Augustus Pablo and 90s indie band New Fast Automatic Daffodils. In classes run by Pipe and his colleagues, the melodicas are placed on a desk and played through a longer flexible tube.

The advantage over other instruments is that children learn both breath control and keyboard skills, giving them a foundation to move on to wind instruments or piano – a key aim for Pipe, who is the organist at Leeds Cathedral and hopes to increase the number of trained organists.

“We’re not going to turn out a class of virtuoso pianists,” he admitted. “But they can feasibly move on to the piano. We’re trying to find children who may have never come across a keyboard, but might have aptitude for it.

“We had a completely unsolicited email from the head of music at a secondary school in Leeds, saying that, in 20 years of teaching music, she’d never come across year sevens [11- to 12-year-olds] in their first year of secondary school who seemed to be so musically knowledgeable and literate.”

The origin of the melodica is a matter of debate, but in the late 1950s various blown instruments with a piano-style keyboard were launched – a Clavietta by M Borel of Paris, melodicas by Hohner in Germany and Melodions by Suzuki in Japan. The instrument was and still is very popular in Japan, and was introduced into every school in the country.

Howard Johnson, European sales director for Suzuki Music, has been supporting the project and said there has been a marked increase in sales of Melodions – the company’s version of melodicas – around the UK since it began. “I’m having to get an emergency shipment from Japan, mostly of Melodions, because we just ran out,” he said.

Someone who has done much to promote the melodica in the UK is Daren Banarsë, a professional composer whose music has been performed for the Rambert dance company and on TV shows including The Apprentice, Top Gear and Horizon. “It’s small, portable, cheap and very expressive,” he said. “You can use it in so many different sorts of music.”

Banarsë set up Melodica World, an online forum, in 2013, and now has a Youtube channel with tutorial videos. “Ten years ago, no one was talking about the melodica. I had this intense interest but couldn’t find any other players, so I started this forum.

“It’s growing as more and more people are talking about and starting to use it in bands – it’s becoming a cool instrument.”

This is good news for melodica fans because until now the instrument has suffered an image problem, Banarsë said. He records music for production libraries to be used as background on TV shows, and compositions including a melodica had been deliberately mis-labelled, he said. Although it was good enough for Steve Reich, who used a melodica for one of his minimalist compositions, TV producers have been turning up their noses at the thought of using the instrument in their shows.

“I use it for professional recordings as a composer,” he said. “The publishers I’ve done most melodica recordings for put it down as accordion or concertina. If someone heard it was a melodica, it might put them off using it in their production.”

Now Banarsë and other musicians are making high-quality wooden melodicas to be used in productions. He is even working on a two-handed melodica with a keyboard on both sides.

Banarsë said: “If children in school learn to use the melodica, they can actually stick with the instrument – the pathway is being forged.”