It is a great honour to have been asked to inaugurate the Bernarr Rainbow Lectures and I am extremely grateful for the chance to honour a great teacher and a great historian of education, as well as a musician. I believe, as he did, in the central importance of music education, especially in school, and it is this that will be my theme this evening. Bernarr Rainbow would, I hope, have had some sympathy with this choice of topic. But, of course, his interests were much wider than this: he was a scholar in the history not merely of education but of the fascinating connections between music and the Church of England, a rich subject indeed, to which I hope another lecture in the series may soon be devoted.