THE case I carried to school most days was heavy and cumbersome, but playing the saxophone made me feel lighter than air.

As well as one-to-one tuition from a woodwind teacher, there was wind band twice a week and sometimes extra events with the Fife Youth Jazz Orchestra. Then there were the bands formed with friends, the impromptu lunchtime gigs, the C90 tapes exchanged in the playground. The music cupboard at Glenwood High, Glenrothes, was the first place I recall hearing Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Claude Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune, and 30 years on I still listen to both.

I was never going to be music school material, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was getting the chance to learn and play, both as a soloist and with others, the instilling of a lifelong love of music. By the time I left school in 1993 I’d received seven years of music tuition, all for free, just as it was for my classmates who played trumpets, cellos, bassoons, French horns, drums, guitars and violins. My parents would never have been able to afford private music lessons, and buying a saxophone would have been out of the question.

Clearly, I have much to thank my old school for. Looking back, though, I believe learning the language of music was as fundamental to my education as English, maths or history. Music makes the earth move in mysterious, magical ways written and verbal language cannot adequately capture. It changes, fulfils and sometimes even saves lives.

And that’s why the current situation facing music tuition in schools is enough to make anyone of my generation weep. Campaigners warn the system faces death by a thousand cuts, as cash-strapped local authorities slash budgets and drastically reduce the range of instruments and opportunities on offer, hiking the cost of tuition for parents or introducing fees for the first time.

Clackmannanshire Council, which has a number of schools in areas of high social deprivation, recently announced plans to start charging parents £524 a year for lessons, while pupils who play string or percussion instruments in West Lothian are to lose their tuition altogether.

These areas are not alone. Eleven local authorities increased their rates for tuition in 2017-18 and another 11 are considering similar moves or cuts. Over the last 10 years, the number of music instructors in schools has dropped by more than a third. The inevitable conclusion of all this is that many already squeezed parents will have to make heartbreakingly tough choices about whether they can afford music tuition, often for multiple children and instruments. One imagines many heavy-hearted “sorry, love” conversations to come.

Culture and the arts have long been viewed as the preserve of the wealthy, but at least Scotland was always able to point to its free music tuition in schools as an indication that we were determined to give every able child a chance to discover the joy of playing an instrument, thus avoiding accusations of philistinism.

After all, what’s the point of having one of the best music schools in the world, in the form of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, if the only people who can ever aspire to go there have wealthy parents and/or come from somewhere else? For the vast majority of young Scots from any background learning an instrument in school will not lead to a professional music career. But the wider and lifelong social, intellectual and economic impact of music should not be underestimated, as the successful Big Noise orchestras in deprived areas across the country have proved.

As the Scottish Government knows, finding ways to close the attainment gap in such places is frustratingly difficult. But this will become harder still if our teachers have fewer tools at their disposal to offer children of all ages, abilities and backgrounds, fewer opportunities to encourage young people to engage with the world in different ways, fewer strategies to help prise out the talents of every individual child, even those who may be struggling in other subjects. Music gives schools and children the potential to unlock all of these things, and it should be offered as a fundamental alongside the likes of reading, writing and arithmetic.

After all, no state school would dream of charging parents for the teaching of these basic skills.

Our schools are not currently required to offer instrument tuition, which has given rise to the horribly unfair postcode lottery we see today. And this is where the first change that must be made.

It’s time for the Scottish Government to step in with a national funding model that allows free music tuition to be a core element of the curriculum in every school. The current taster sessions for all are not enough - telling children they have a talent then giving them no means to pursue it is cruel and unnecessary.

If we allow the current situation to deteriorate to a point where music becomes an extracurricular luxury for the few rather than a fundamental opportunity for everyone, then we will have become philistines after all.