The first five bernarr rainbow lectures have been delivered over a period of twelve years. Each of the lectures conveys an individual message of relevance and distinction, and an awareness of what Bernarr Rainbow stood for in his life's work bound up with music education. The publication of these lectures is an integral part of the ongoing Rainbow heritage, supported by the Bernarr Rainbow Trust, with further material to come.

Issues in the politics of education move so fast that there are inevitably references in all these lectures that rapidly became out of date. So we have invited John Stephens to provide a 2013 perspective to this collection. Things have changed – and usually not for the better. The arts in this country have lived through a golden age since World War II, although we may not always have appreciated it as such. However, the fundamental convictions expressed by all the lecturers are so important now and into the future that the Trust felt that the five Bernarr Rainbow Lectures, along with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's lecture, should appear in more permanent form.

Baroness Warnock approached the subject of imagination as a philosopher, and, after establishing criteria, applied her findings to music. Today, with musical literacy either sidelined or regarded in some absurd way as élitist, it is salutary that she says ‘a child who is not taught to read music is shut off from enormous areas of pleasure and understanding’, and that ‘the parallel between reading words and reading musical notation is quite close’.