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This picture from the late 1950s of the orchestra and its conductor, Rodney Mayes, at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre gives some indication of the scale of the school's music making. Together with the members of the Choir and junior instumentalists who were not yet in the orchestra, almost a quarter of the school was involved in extracurricular music. The fully symphonic scale of the orchestra was remarkable at a time when Music Centres and County Youth Orchestras were not common. On more than one occasion the Ministry of Education made recordings of the orchestra. The orchestra continued till 1985, directed successively by Adrian Officer, Robin Black, Robert Bunting and Barry Russell. Rodney - like others who were establishing a golden age of music in state education at the same time - had at least three prongs to his strategy. The first was to build up a large body of instruments for hire to pupils at a nominal rate of about £5 a year. Those who took to an instrument were encouraged to upgrade to one of their own. (Schools and brass bands did this sort of thing for themselves in the days before commercial hire schemes bacame widespread.) The second strategy was to induce local instrumentalists to take the school's pupils for nominal fees. Tuition was largely one to one, with very few joint or group lessons, and most of the teachers taught only their special instrument. Lessons were out of school hours, usually on the premises. It was a system perhaps less compromised than today's, which has peripatetic teachers moving from school to school. Rodney's third strategy was to avoid the published 'school orchestra' repertoire, which at the time was, with honourable exceptions, in an infancy of simplification. Most 'school scores' were heavily arranged, with much 'doubling up': Rodney preferred to play things which were substantially in their original scoring. Most of the school's music happened 'after hours'. Timetabled music was virtually limited to a single period a week for junior forms, devoted initially to learning the indispensible Eighty Hymns without which no Christian soul was complete. Once there were memorised, there was time for muscial appreciation.
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