Just over a year ago, Time Out conducted a cultural experiment. We invited two musicians – one, a hip hop artist, the other, young classical violinist, to swap lifestyles. Despite the fact that the two of them had devoted their lives to music, for both it was like a journey through the Looking Glass, where the familiarity of their own world was replaced by incomprehensible rules and topsy turvy logic. For the hip hop artist it was an especial eye opener: on the way to watch the violinist in rehearsal with her quartet, he asked with some incredulity whether violinists actually moved their fingers to create notes.

His question raised a serious point about the way people outside the classical music world often perceive what it means to make music. Music, whatever the genre, is rightly celebrated as a universal language, and it’s becoming increasingly unfashionable to suggest that you might need to learn some of its grammar in order to be able to speak it. Three weeks ago I attended a power breakfast looking at the best ways to promote musical education for young people in the capital. One of the topics up for serious discussion was whether or not it was elitist to emphasise the fact that young people should learn notation. Thankfully most people seemed to agree that learning notes was important, but in politics today there’s such a nervousness about being branded with the ‘exclusive’ rather than the ‘inclusive’ tag, that where – thirty years ago – it was unquestionable that notes should provide a foundation for music education, today it’s a point of contention.

That link between politics and classical music is becoming increasingly complicated. Starting with David Blunkett’s pledge, early in the honeymoon days of New Labour, that ‘Every primary school child should have access to instrumental tuition”, this government’s relationship with music education can be seen as schizophrenic at best. Despite projects like Music Manifesto to broaden music education among the young, the promotion of music in schools is often given little more than lip service by ministers – and any action seems to a large degree down to the priorities of the headmaster or headmistress. The crisis in what schools were achieving was highlighted when in 2002, five years after Blunkett’s pledge, a survey by Classic FM discovered that 65 per cent of six- to 14-year-olds were unable to name a single classical composer and could not differentiate between instruments. In 2007, when a £10m package was announced to boost singing and music education, a Lib Dem spokesman pointed out that the situation was still bleak, with only 13% of primary school children learning classical music. This summer former Culture Secretary Margaret Hodges seemed to deal classical music a further death knell when she criticised the Proms for not being diverse enough in its reach. It seems that classical music is caught, potentially, between conflicting prejudices: on the one hand seen as the poor relation in education, on the other, damned as the preserve of white middle class snobs. Yet like so much music today, much of it was composed by social outsiders, keen both to reflect their own passions and to play with and subvert the trends of their age.

Time Out has only become involved in this debate surrounding perceptions of classical music recently, because we decided this summer to support the campaign, spearheaded by Julian Lloyd Webber, to set up orchestras for disadvantaged children (see bottom of page). You’ll probably all have heard of the inspirational Venezuelan project, El Sistema, which has been running successfully for three decades now, and essentially gets children in the slums to exchange weapons for instruments. The emphasis – unlike in the West – is for children to practise their instruments together – so that right at its roots classical music is seen as a cohesive activity, which reaches its most potent expression in orchestral, rather than solo, playing. It’s been a massive success both socially and musically – so it’s no surprise that both before, and more emphatically since the El Sistema orchestra performed at the Proms last year, certain ministers – from both the Labour and Tory side - have realised that perhaps classical music could be useful after all, and have expressed interest in the setting up of similar schemes over here.

When I first started to research the best way for the magazine to support the project I was put in touch with Music Manifesto. Now I know there’s strong history of sceptical antagonism between the Institute of Ideas and the Music Manifesto, because of the manifesto’s perceived lack of emphasis on musical discipline, but I think it has evolved significantly since the first volleys were fired from the Institute of Ideas. I think a healthy debate needs to be kept going on what it needs to be striving for at any given moment, but what it has achieved cannot be underestimated: not least because of the huge part it played last year in securing £332m of funding for musical education from the DCMS. Yes, sometimes it’s guilty of dissolving into meaninglessness because it strives to be inclusive, but this is a political disease, and others are doing far worse. I don’t believe it’s guilty of the cynical glibness – say – of the intial launch of the Cultural Olympiad, which among other apparently meaningless schemes proposed a music project under the delightfully nebulous title of ‘Sounds!’. This apparently constitutes participatory projects for young people across the country, but from its title could mean anything from simulating the farts of wolves in the wild to stamping repeatedly on Seb Coe’s and Jude Kelly’s toes in the hopes that the shrieks they emit will eventually be described as a symphony.

Just to point me in the direction of what they, and hopefully Time Out, are trying to do on a social level, the Music Manifesto directed me to look at last year’s Unicef report titled ‘An overview of child well-being in rich countries’. Through El Sistema, music is being seem as some kind of solution, but exactly what kind of problems is it addressing? In the report’s introduction it declared ‘The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children’, and went on to look at everything from whether children regularly had breakfast, to quality time spent with parents, to basic levels of literacy and numeracy, to how many had been drunk or taken cannabis by the age of fifteen. In the overall survey of the 21 leading developed countries, which ranged from the US and Hungary to the Netherlands and New Zealand, the UK came resoundingly at the bottom.

Just on a general level, what was most alarming? That in literacy and numeracy we were in the bottom four, that British kids came top for drunkenness, that we seemed to be breaking records for underage sex? Or was it the striking factor of just how lost UK kids seem to be? Asked what percentage of young people aged 11, 13, and 15 found their peers ‘kind and helpful’, Britain came last. In other words, both at school and on the streets, teens are more in collision with each other here than in any other well-off country, at a loss when it comes to forming a community in which their generation can thrive. On paper we’ve gone from the nuclear family to the atomised generation: drugs and drink are its primary expression, so little wonder that knives are proving one of its most popular accessories.

How can classical music help with this? Well, I think on the most simple level, both singing in a choir and playing in an orchestra bring one of the most profound expressions of community you can experience. Despite the politics that’s surrounding it, once you get down to the nitty gritty of performing it, music is more empoweringly personal than political: and in a group it becomes about listening to others, collaborating with them, knowing when to take a lead, and when to fall behind, and, perhaps most importantly, how to take flight when expressing yourself in a group. The deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie famously talks a lot about experiencing notes through their vibrations. In a group these vibrations can become extremely resonant, and at its best, being in a large orchestra playing a symphony can be as powerful an experience as taking off in a Boeing 757.

Secondly to play classical music is a great way of expressing yourself while at the same time losing your ego. In this X Factor era that’s quite an unusual concept, but I think it’s important that at the same time as allowing you to express a wide range of emotions, classical music allows you to distance yourself from the immediate traumas and frustrations of your own life. I certainly remember that Rachmaninov and Liszt, and then later, Bach, got me through quite a few tough periods in my life not least by allowing me to express my anger at the piano rather than whichever man who was causing me grief at the time. If you’re a teenager, and life all around you is spiralling out of control, being able to express yourself in a controlled way through music is a fantastic pressure valve.

Thirdly, learning how to play classical music is an incredibly physical discipline, and teaches you a lot about your relationship with your body. I’m sure that most of you know that any tensions at all – even if they’re stored in your elbow, or your little toe – will reflect themselves in your singing, and equally playing anything from the cello to the flute teaches you to open up your body and use it healthily. I often compare being a classical musician to being an athlete: the way you breathe, the way you use the muscles in your arm, the way you warm up and learn how to conserve your energy for a long sprint, the way you learn about muscle memory – all of this is just as valid for classical music playing as it is for completing a marathon. Again, when you’re young, learning how to use move your body and breathe is so crucial to your general sense of wellbeing, and – I say this as someone who loathed sports – this is one of the most enjoyable ways of doing it.

Finally – and it’s in my difference of emphasis on this, that I part company with the Music Manifesto, I firmly believe that classical music is as exciting for the discipline it instils as in the flights of creative self-expression it can let loose. To learn discipline means a release from the prevailing culture of instant gratification – which may sound a little Victorian – but I believe that working slowly and steadily to achieve something allows a reinvention of the self which is far more enduring and exciting than anything celeb-style transformation on the X-Factor. So much of classical music practise is a basic life lesson in problem solving: whether it’s learning that a passage that looks impossible at first glance is more than manageable if you break it down and go over it slowly again and again, or figuring out that if you try and understand the motivation behind a piece of music more, you’re going to have a better relationship with it.

I want to tell you another story about the hip hop artist – which links my points about the physicality and discipline of learning classical music -  as part of our experiment I took him to a flute concert at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital. When we came out, he told me he was amazed by the fact that the flautist had managed to play the whole recital without getting exhausted and out of breath. Because he hadn’t learnt any technique, this was a revelation. In classical music training – and this ties in with the physical aspect too - he would automatically have been taught both how to produce the best sound his voice could make, and how to build up his energy, so that like an athlete, he could steadily increase his stamina for performance.

I want to conclude by saying that while - like the Manifesto - I think children should be exposed to all kinds of music, and should feel free to adopt whatever they feel most expresses who they are, unlike the Manifesto I believe firmly that a foundation in classical music makes most sense for creating a sustained and meaningful involvement. One of the great achievements of the Venezuela project is to reveal that classical music is not elitist – and I think it’s key to overcome this prejudice over here. If you’re exposed to Bach and Chopin early, at the very least it gives you a lifelong ability to tune into the passion and intellectual excitement of their music. As well as the benefits I’ve already mentioned, a classical training also gives you the kind of harmonic grounding which will allow you to spiral off into jazz, a sense of a range of rhythmic and structural possibilities which will give you flexibility as a composer whatever the genre, and, as the hip-hop artists discovered, a discipline and physical stamina which will make performing all the more enjoyable.

Don’t get me wrong - I think it’s a mistake to reduce something that can be so sublime to a series of social and educational prescriptions, but it really doesn’t take much imagination to realise that classical music is one of the most exciting and enabling languages you can learn. Whether it simply ends up meaning that for you a definition of perfect happiness involves listening to Parry’s ‘I was Glad’ or gives you an interesting, if tangential, route into learning how to work with others, now is the time to make sure that people drop their prejudices and work out what can be achieved if they go Bach to basics.