Graham Lyons, who died in June this year, was a musician and educator whose wide-ranging career defies easy categorisation. MT readers may know him best as an educational composer and the inventor of the Lyons C clarinet, but his other accomplishments might be less familiar.
Lyons learned the piano from the age of six, but, inspired by Benny Goodman, he switched to the clarinet at 13. After a period of national service, he enrolled to study physics at Oxford University. But he ended up spending most of his time on music, which brought his time at Oxford to an early close after only a year.
Fortunately, he was able to change course quickly and soon found himself studying bassoon and composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, paying his bills by performing in a jazz club on piano, clarinet and saxophone. A picture emerges of a versatile young musician whose broad interests combined well with the pressing need to earn a living.
For the next 20 years, Lyons worked as a performing musician in symphony orchestras, musicals, clubs and on broadcasts. He also composed advertising jingles and television background music, and arranged for bands, cabaret and various BBC radio orchestras. Alongside all of this he taught woodwind instruments part-time in schools.
Later in his life, Lyons would come to be known for his educational publications, which included more than 60 tutors and albums. Sales of his music exceeded half a million copies, and his compositions featured over a hundred times on graded exam syllabuses. But educational music was only one part of his contribution to music learning. The other was his important work in the field of adapting woodwind instruments for younger learners.
His first major step as an inventor of such instruments was the Lyons C Clarinet. This was a lightweight plastic clarinet in the key of C, which allowed children to start playing the clarinet from as young as four. The key of C served to make the instrument smaller and lighter than the B flat equivalent, as well as making it easier for learners to play along with others at concert pitch.
I myself learned the clarinet in the 1990s, and I remember the Lyons C Clarinet causing quite a stir at that time. My teacher had acquired one, and we marvelled at its original modernist design and its recorder-like weight. Most importantly, it was actually a clarinet – different from the clarinet proper but similar enough, facilitating a simple onward progression to the bigger instrument. The Lyons C Clarinet went on to win a British Design Award in 1993, suggesting that Lyons’ one year of studying science at Oxford had not been wasted.
Today we are used to all sorts of adapted instruments, from tenoroons to pBones, but at that time no-one played wind instruments very much before secondary school (apart from the recorder, of course) and whole-class ensemble teaching had barely been dreamed of. This made the Lyons C Clarinet an important disruptor, asking music educators to consider what might be possible if primary-age children could learn an instrument like the clarinet, perhaps even in whole-class groups. Nowadays the idea of whole-class ensemble teaching has significant momentum behind it, but without the work of Lyons and other innovators, this may not have been the case.
In 2008, Lyons visited Hong Kong to discuss the redesign of the Lyons C Clarinet. Working with product designer Max Clissold, he set up a new company, Nuvo, which would update and rebrand the Lyons C Clarinet as the Clarinéo. The company now sells a wide range of its own instruments around the world, including the jSax, the jFlute and the jHorn. Importantly, it also offers schemes of learning and resources to support the use of Nuvo instruments as part of a broader curriculum of music education.
Lyons was extremely proud of the Lyons C Clarinet and of Nuvo, but these projects were ultimately in support of his larger aim to share the joy of music with learners of all ages. The name of his music publishing company, Useful Music, provides a neat summary of his life and legacy: he wanted to be – and was – of great use to music and musicians.
