It was my wife to be, whilst teacher training at Goldsmiths in the early seventies, who drew my attention to this extraordinary man. Large, amiable, typically English in so many ways, polished shoes, be-suited, courteous, brilliant. She remembers now some 40 years later the experience of being taught, being inspired by him as a visiting lecturer on her postgraduate, initial teacher-training primary course, promulgating a philosophy of creativity in the class room whose mantra was manna to the ears of eager students, wanting in turn to teach and inspire children. This visit followed closely the publication of the revolutionary Sound and Silence, a book that changed the face of music education for ever. In their introduction to the book John Paynter and Peter Aston wrote:

For many, meeting John for the first time, these sentiments seemed strangely incongruous with the image of a university music lecturer. For their own experiences in higher education were often diametrically opposed to the notions contained in this introduction. Many intending teachers were leaving universities with degrees that prepared them for training in the art of disseminating musical knowledge and skills rather than in educating through music. John's advocacy that children should and could be encouraged to think, to reason and to discover the use of sound as a means of expression, was far removed from their own experience and he reinforced this belief throughout his career until 2008 when he wrote

It was not surprising, therefore, that John's experience as composer, author, teacher in primary and secondary schools and teacher trainer in Liverpool and Chichester, made him the obvious choice for director of the second project to be commissioned by the Schools Council for England and Wales.

The aims of the secondary school curriculum project were concerned with the development of new principles for school music taking account of both interpretative and creative ideas and widening of the impact of these new principles through the production of guides and teaching materials. However the third aim, to allow teachers the ‘opportunity to develop modes of working that would allow them to make a greater contribution to the overall policies of education’ was radically different to many of the Schools Council Projects which were similarly commissioned. Teacher involvement in policy making was rare and the primary-based project, centring wholly on material production and development of an agreed methodology, contrasted markedly with the secondary project. With a small team based in York, John began to identify teachers who were deemed to be thinking practitioners and whose practice reflected the aims of the project. These teachers were seen as working in pilot schools with a greater number receiving materials to trial and provide feedback on. Newsletters were widely distributed though often the trigger for criticism were nonetheless a vital component in John's desire to change practice.

Residential conferences and workshops followed, with the aid of those music advisors sympathetic to the project, in what was now rapidly becoming a partisan divide in music education. The project became to be viewed as radical in approach by many whose very solid traditional classroom practice generally did not include creative work within their curriculum and those of us identified as coming from pilot schools were viewed with suspicion. Inclusion of all children in music making in the first two years of secondary schooling was seen by many as betraying the very basic tenets of music education and as an assault on our heritage, and John the unlikely radical leader of the curriculum terrorists. This sometimes extended to local authority advisors who were reluctant to allow their teachers access to project materials or attend courses.

The most advanced means of capturing good practice and sharing with other teachers were utilised by John; for example the production of tape slide sequences (with synchronised sound!) of pilot teachers' work and a summarising film towards the end of the project's life. In addition a group of ten project centres for disseminating information and materials and organising mini conferences were established in a variety of settings with support from local authorities and universities. Their impact was considerable and through them John's influence on the gradual advocacy of performing, listening and composing becoming the central tenets of music education finally to be enshrined in the national curriculum for music.

The project ‘Music in the Secondary School Curriculum’ under John's direction was controversial, expensive, at times unwieldy but above all democratised the subject of music with the most far-reaching effect. John might well have coined the phrase ‘every child matters’ for he certainly believed every child to be creative and creativity to be an essential part of music teaching. In the book of the project, John wrote