Singing Matters
Singing Matters by Patrick Allen (music educator), which won the Times Educational Supplement/Educational Publishers Council Secondary Schoolbook Award in 1999, is the most influential and widely used classroom singing resource in the United Kingdom. Published by Heinemann in 1997 it broke new ground in the following ways:
- It employed a tessitura accessible to most pupils.
- It made frequent use of popular music, world music and folk music.
- It employed accessible methods of enabling harmony and part singing.
- It provided a methodology for rote methods and aural learning as a way of involving all students.
Singing Matters was followed by Developing Singing Matters which extended the range and repertoire of the earlier publication. Composing Matters, by Patrick Allen and published by Heinemann in 2002, applied Allen's practical, hands on and aural methodology to classroom composing in a series of 24 projects. Patrick Allen is an Advanced Skills Teacher working at Ifield Community College in Crawley and won the Guardian Award for Teacher of the Year in a Secondary School in 2004.