Yesterday I went to a reunion at my old primary school, The Highlands School, Tilehurst. I didn’t get very much opportunity to relive shared memories as it turned out that few of the former staff and pupils who attended overlapped much with my time there. So I’ll put some of the music-related ones down here instead.<\/p>\n
I remember playing a Euro-melody “Eye Level” as part of a recorder ensemble (I can still recall how it went though I rather wish I couldn’t) and singing an arrangement for choir of a folk-song “Marianina”. I can’t remember which if either of these I performed at the Tilehurst Eisteddfod, but I certainly recollect competing in that too.<\/p>\n
I think I overheard yesterday that the pupils still did “Margaret Morris” dancing as part of their physical education. I have rarely heard of this in any other context but as I understand it Margaret Morris was a disciple of Isadora Duncan and had similar ideas about going back to the ancient Greeks for inspiration; at any rate her system was based on something called ‘Greek positions’. I can only remember one of the dances we did; it involved swinging your arms in front of you in a kind of figure-of-eight, and we executed it to the strains of the seventh of Schubert’s Deutsche T\u00e4nze<\/em> D783.<\/p>\n One thing which I suspect has changed was the strongly Catholic flavour of school assembly (though it wasn’t a Catholic school). We used the English Hymnal<\/em> (the hymn Ye who own the faith of Jesus<\/em> seemed to come round about once a fortnight), supplemented by a little booklet in a pink cover which contained, for example, an uncut version of Lord, for tomorrow and its needs<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday I went to a reunion at my old primary school, The Highlands School, Tilehurst. I didn’t get very much opportunity to relive shared memories as it turned out that few of the former staff and pupils who attended overlapped … Continue reading