In the 1966 March/April volume of the journal Music in Education, and in amongst articles on ‘Music and secondary school boys’, ‘The teaching of music in 16th century England’ and an analysis of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, Roger Eames writes an account of ‘A man and his music at York’. In three short paragraphs Eames tells of Wilfred Mellers, ‘musician, musicologist and lecturer’, now head of the Music Faculty at the University of York. In particular there is news of the Faculty's undergraduate syllabus and the three courses offered. One includes composition; another combines music with English and a third brings together music with education. On this course students go into schools engaging in ‘Creative Experiment’ lessons and, in preparation for work in Senior Schools, students ‘will also be taught to improvise so that they and their pupils may express themselves through improvisation and by the children writing their own popular songs’ (Eames, Reference EAMES1966, p. 83). This was fertile ground for the imagination of another musician, musicologist and lecturer to work on.

John Paynter, sharing ideas with Mellers at the time, had for many years been exploring in his own primary and secondary school teaching ways in which children could come to understand music through their thinking and making as composers. In the 1967 September/October edition of Music in Education, Paynter introduces a series of four articles under the title ‘Music in a liberal education’. Going with the tide of the Plowden Report and the call for creative work in music as in the other arts, Paynter announces a radical rethink about the place of music in the school curriculum. The articles that follow, penned by Paynter, Sherlaw-Johnson, Aston and Mellers, all composers, represent a bold incursion into the not entirely static state of 1960s music education. It is here that the public story of John Paynter's ‘thinking and making’ begins.

Thinking and Making is a selection of the writings of John Paynter on music education and sets out to present a coherent narrative of the richness of his thought as presented through publication over a period of 35 years, the period 1967–2002. It was the diligence and concern of Janet Mills, an early student of Paynter, who worked on the book in the months before her untimely death, which prompted and propelled the selection. In this way the depth of Paynter's thinking about music education is made available to a new generation of music teachers and policy makers, and is there too for those of us who have lived through the changes and chances of music education during the period covered. The work is organised in five sections: ‘Sound and silence’; ‘From hear and now to all kinds of music’; ‘The Schools Council music project’; ‘Interest from overseas’ and ‘Strengthening the theoretical base’. Each section is introduced by Paynter with gentle and modest words.

The article ‘Learning from the present’ which formed a part of the 1966/67 Music in Education series ‘Music in a liberal education’, is to be found in Part I following selections from Sound and Silence (written with Peter Aston and published in 1970). The ‘liberalising’ message is about reaching into the deep structure of the subject while at the same time reaching out to a world as experienced, imagined and represented through the other arts and other subjects of the curriculum equally able to provide sources of artistic inspiration and expression. This is a liberal education too because we can move away from instruction and training to imagination and discovery, to a way of seeing music in school as being ‘educative’ and as having a clear and distinctive part to play within the whole and for the majority of children. The selections from Sound and Silence remind the reader of the generous style of the projects presented, informing the teacher of the way music has been and is now being made, and all designed to draw teacher and pupil into a creative collaboration. The pattern of rationale, things to do, examples of pupils' work and follow up ideas remains unique within the canon of music educational texts. The teacher is presented with a process for making and developing practice, and is invited to become a thinker and maker. In the follow-up work to the project ‘Exploring stringed instruments’ the reader is connected to music of the present, recent past and less recent past. There are the opening sonorities of Britten's ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ and Haydn String Quartets alongside the compositions of children to consider. It is this holding together of a critical and contextual study of music with the pupil's own creative work that may be the most significant defining characteristic of Sound and Silence and that has contributed to its distinguished status. The past is never allowed to patronise the present, that here and now world of the learner's imagination, for it is the child and the teacher together who must make the future.

Part II ‘From hear and now to all kinds of music’ (1972–79), brings together the convictions that ‘today's music is for everyone’, that music education should be receptive to ‘an interdisciplinary approach’ and that there is a need to better understand ‘the role of creativity in the school curriculum’. The converging and diverging pathways of Paynter's thought are by Part II well established. There is justification for a music education that transcends attention to vocation, moral and cultural improvement, and neither is music education for recreation or for academic refinement. Instead there is a commitment to engaging with the music of the present time, to the education of the feelings and to the power of intuitive cognition freed from the overbearing nature of received knowledge, and what was to become a quieter, yet persistent theme, a concern for what was of fundamental interest to children, their inquisitive ‘why’ questions, questions about their very existence: ‘Why is the sky blue? Why does the sun rise each day? Why would we want to make music?’ Thinking and making is then an act of both self and musical understanding. This attention to what Kieran Egan (1992) thinks of as the child's mythical and narrative ways of understanding is revealed in the ‘The first sunrise’ selected from ‘The Dance and the Drum’ (written with Elizabeth Paynter) where all the arts come together through the making of musical theatre. Part II concludes with practical guidance for the teacher in managing the ‘small group workshop’ and appearing as the introduction to the series ‘All Kinds of Music’, guidance it would seem rarely heeded and already to be found in Sound and Silence and repeated in the later Sound and Structure.

Part III offers the first two chapters from the influential Music in the Secondary School Curriculum of 1982, the summative account of the Schools Council Secondary Music Project (1973–82) that had involved teachers, head teachers, music advisers and others, and that had evolved principles of music educational practice through the classroom innovation and experiment of teachers. In hindsight we see so clearly how this provided a model of curriculum development profoundly enhancing the teacher's capacity for what is now termed ‘professional development’, a way that can now only be longed for and dimly imagined in the climate of a performative present time.

In Part IV, three articles published overseas reinforce the message and mark the development of a fresh theme waiting to be realised in the final section where attention is paid to the centrality of the making process. In ‘The pursuit of reality in music education’, originally written in 1981 and revised in 2007, Paynter writes: ‘the goal is “musical understanding” – taking delight in the seemingly endless variety of structural possibilities and the sense of ‘finality’ (wholeness) that tells us a piece is successful’ (p. 91). This takes us to what may be the most significant of all Paynter's writings, the 1997 British Journal of Music Education article ‘The form of finality: a context for music education’. Music is to be conceived of as a ‘manifestation of thought and perceptual judgement,’ and there is ‘thinking with materials to create form’, a ‘search for integrity and unity’. Here is the core of Paynter's thinking and making, appropriately proved in the final selection of the book, and forming a poetically written epilogue. Unlikely to be known by many readers of the British Journal of Music Education, ‘Working on One's Inner World’ is taken from Powers of Being, a collection of essays marking the 70th birthday of David Holbrook in 1995. Paynter's contribution reads as a tender tribute to Holbrook's inspirational writing of the 1950s and 60s, which was so influential in the child-centred progressive movement of the time. Here we encounter a moving description of a creative process involving the work of a class of primary school children in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1960s. It is the character of the flying birds in the wind and observed by the children that leads the class into their creative writing:

What follows is a description of the process of making in which the children's ideas are continually evaluated in practice, empirically tested, and in which artistically intuitive judgements work towards what is felt and known to be right. In this case a piece in ternary form with coda had been created and contained far more than could be known by the makers in the process of making. The model of learning was inductive, form had been found, not given, and in this way there could be a coming to know and understanding, a process of making and revealing. There was a ‘working on one's inner world’ and moving towards cultural expression, and meeting with what until now has been unknown.

For Paynter, nurturing the musical imagination in this way required a kind of thinking and making that would yield the unexpected and, like making bread, it might even be a flop, but it did demand attention to discovering what might be possible, allowing for and valuing coincidence and learning about the finality of form. It was this that was ultimately musically educative: ‘I see for one crammed second, order so explicit that I need no more persuasion’ (Jennings, Reference JENNINGS1986).

The selection presented enables re-evaluation of the work of John Paynter and in reviewing his thinking it is not long before its relevance to the present time becomes apparent. It offers an alternative to standardised curricula, to the prescription of outcomes, to standardised approaches to assessment, to prescribed strategies, to conventional thought about progression in musical learning, to the homogenising of ways of knowing and understanding and the systematic downgrading of intuitive understanding, to the teacher as unresponsive to what the pupil has to offer, to classrooms that proscribe pupils having ideas and lively classroom conversations, and to the marginalisation of thinking and making. It offers a way of being musical and knowing music.