The New Year brought the very sad news that Bill Salaman had died. He and I edited the British Journal of Music Education between 1998 and 2002. We were previously colleagues in the University of Cardiff from 1980 to 1988, where we supported both teacher trainees and serving teachers reading for higher degrees. We devised professional development courses and pursued research in the wake of the impact of the Schools Council Projects on music, which had stressed the role of music in the general education of all children, something to which we were both passionately committed. Bill and I brought to our work in Cardiff a wealth of differing experiences. After graduating from Cambridge University and following a PGCE course, Bill worked as a French horn player in the Bournemouth Symphony orchestra, before becoming Head of Music in a school in Dorset. His own prolific contribution to the literature of musical education included the book Living School Music (1985), a brave and honest endeavour to come to terms with the very difficult job of being a school music teacher. The 1980s culminated in the establishment of the GCSE, followed by the National Curriculum in the early 1990s. Bill left Cardiff in 1988 to become one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors, a post he held during the following turbulent years of debate in education.
It was a tribute to our former working relationship that we happily renewed our association when John Paynter and Keith Swanwick ended their long stint as founder editors of the BJME in 1998. We took over at a time of transition both in education and in the technologies that supported it. At the time, the Internet was still in its relative infancy. Articles were still submitted on paper and photocopied to be sent out to reviewers. Apart from much correspondence, mostly by e-mail, phone and handling a plethora of ‘floppy discs’, Bill and I would meet for a working weekend and spent long hours putting together the next issue at his house in Nantwich. The weekends were not entirely confined to work: there was some conviviality, a great deal of good humour and also playing of chamber music with friends, which relieved the hard graft of assembling the next issue for publication. We were fascinated and intrigued by the diversity of the contributions which, during our stint as editors, became increasingly international in scope. We were particularly proud of Issue 15.2 (1998) that highlighted African contributions to musical education, published a few months before the International Society for Music Education (ISME) held its conference in Pretoria later that year. We aimed to turn around submitted articles within two months and, on the whole, authors seemed grateful for our feedback and constructive suggestions. However, by 2002, we had both taken early retirement and felt it was time to hand on the editorship to the expert hands of Gordon Cox and Stephanie Pitts, a scholarly team still working full time in higher education and therefore more in touch with developments.
Bill was an enormously kind and generous person. We had many debates about teaching and learning in music, but there was never any rancour between us. Our favourite mutually shared sport was sending each other up when either of us lapsed into pomposity. The fact that he could appreciate and embrace different points of view showed in the thoughtful obituary he wrote after the passing of John Paynter in the Guardian in August 2010, which was followed by his fuller tribute to John in issue 28.1 (2011). I shall miss his hospitable companionship, his support as a colleague and especially his humour.
