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Good morning. On Monday evening I was in a red brick church near Chichester. With the sun still bright in the sky an amateur choir, with soloists and two organists gathered for their summer concert – a programme of English music. Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, Hubert Parry, Judith Weir. At the end we all stood up at the conductor’s signal to join in Parry’s hymn: ‘O praise ye the Lord’. Music has been a poor relation in many of our schools for years. So it’s good news that the government is planning to put millions into music education, with extra money to buy musical instruments, including for those with special needs. I’m so grateful for music. One of my earliest memories is of being taught to hit a triangle in what must been a cacophonous orchestra of toddlers. There was always music at school in one form or another. Singing lessons, choirs, orchestras. I was never particularly competent: two failed attempts at the piano, another at the organ but I just about managed to get by with the guitar. And I sang a bit. While I loved strumming and singing Bob Dylan and the Beatles; I was also discovering Bach, Handel, and the late Beethoven Quartets. It's wonderful to make music with other people. As you learn to keep time and pitch, to own up to others if you go wrong, to concentrate on difficult notes and transitions, the ever-restless ego gives way to something bigger. On our annual Founder’s Day at school we always sang the 150th psalm, which calls on the whole orchestra of ancient Israel to praise God. ‘Praise him in the sound of the trumpet, praise him upon the lute and harp’. But this human praise is only part of a larger harmony, the praise of the whole of creation: ‘O praise God in his holiness, praise him in the firmament of his power’. The version we sang was based on a simple plainsong chant, given organ accompaniment and harmonisation by Charles Villiers Stanford. ‘Praise him in the cymbals and dances, praise him upon the strings and pipe’. The organist would pull out stops to imitate the dance, the strings, the woodwind. ‘Praise him upon the well-tuned cymbals, praise him upon the loud cymbals.’ All leading to the great climax: ‘Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord’, with a thrilling high G in the top line, which, we were told by our music teacher, should be loud enough to be heard a mile away at Edgware station. Every child should have a chance to experience such moments of exaltation. Music shows us the spiritual in physical terms and raises us up whether in church or at Glastonbury. Whether we sing, or play, or listen: we are not alone.