Okay, folks. We've aired our views on the new Model Music Curriculum... you can read about our concerns (AND our solutions to these concerns) here. But can we put our music where our mouth is and give some examples of musical styles we’d add to the MMC? Of course we can! With Sounds Like..., our monthly series of songs and music representing a different theme.

So, here are a just a few of the entries we would use to enrich the experience of learning music, and give it a localized context and flavour...

First up, as we mentioned in our response to the MMC, the Northumbrian Pipes and Kathryn Tickell. Here’s Kathryn and her band at the Proms. You can see how the pipes are worked differently to (Scottish) bagpipes. Lots of lovely listening to the sounds of individual instruments, changes of speed and mood, instruments playing single lines, instruments playing chords (and some that can move between one and the other):

Then there’s this is lovely piece and the lyrics are a poem by Kathryn’s Dad, Mike Tickell. The poem is about Holywell Pool, near Stonehaugh in Northumberland:

We’ll continue a very northern British theme with some British Jazz, which also seems to us to be not mentioned quite enough in the MMC.

Here’s John Taylor, superlative pianist, performing his own piece ‘Coniston’, part of the Ambleside Days Suite, first commissioned in the 1980s. Jazz pieces are often adapted for whatever instruments are in the room, and here John’s on his own (but multi-tracked, as no-one could do all that with two hands). Listening; jazz often takes a while to find its way to the theme, wandering (or here, trickling) until it finds the lake itself (Coniston is a Lake, as well as a town. We’re pretty sure this is about the Lake).

Not everyone likes jazz. In the YY&M office, one of us absolutely loves it whilst another ‘likes it apart from the twiddly bits’ (meaning improvisations…). So we make a sharp right turn to Brass Bands, synonymous with the Yorkshire and Lancashire heartlands. As the Brass Bands culture is such an important one (particularly for the North of England and its relationship to the social, economic and political history here in the UK), we think it is worth a spotlight within our playlist as a celebration of another localised musical tradition still in existence today (albeit one in decline):

Shall we finish with a bit of British Pop? To be fair, there’s quite a bit of that, so we thought, is it Yorkshire enough? And of course the answer was no... But there is Pulp, who were formed in Sheffield back in 1978, singing here with about 20,000 common people helping out: