Sir George Dyson's final sentence in his 1952 retrospective contribution to the 50th Jubilee Meeting of the Music Masters' Association (reproduced above, pp. 104–8), suggested that, ‘If in the next fifty years we can maintain the progress of the past two generations, the future of our music will be more than secure, it will be one of the highlights of our civilisation.’ He would surely have been delighted by the transformation of musical opportunities and standards in what are now known as Independent Schools, and amazed by the exceptional quality of the independent specialist music schools that emerged over the following thirty years or so.

In a Prefatory Note to Music and the English Public School, Bernarr Rainbow emphasised that the book had ‘been designed to allow contemporary writers to present their own accounts of salient features’. In writing a chapter about the specialist music schools, I have accepted this approach gladly. It would need individual school histories to do justice to the extraordinary stories and idealism that have created these centres of excellence, and each school has abundant information about its history and purpose available on its website. What follows makes no attempt to provide detailed consideration of each of these truly remarkable and successful schools, but represents my own experience and perceptions, albeit greatly enhanced by the colleagues and supporters with whom it has been my good fortune to come into contact during twenty-two years as a governor of two of the schools concerned.