For 10 whole years, I was a pupil at Culford - and for 10 whole years, I realise as the taxi drops me outside its elegant Georgian portico, I never quite appreciated how idyllic it was. A mixed, independent, part-day, part-boarding school comfortably ensconced in 480 acres of parkland near Bury St Edmunds, Culford offers the kind of peaceful seclusion that parents love and teenagers loathe - yet hanker after as soon as they leave.
Up on the first-floor corridor, the creaky floorboards are still giving off the same smell of polish. As it hits my nostrils, I'm back in 1992 with a clunk. This corridor was practically my home. By the time I was an A-level student - the only one doing music in my year - I was decent enough at the violin to have persuaded the teachers who supervised "private study" periods that I would be better off using the time for practice. The same went for PE. The violin was my ticket out of those freezing cross-country runs.
The classroom is reassuringly familiar - same piano, same carpet, even some of the same posters - and so is the head of music. James Recknell co-wrote the school musical I sang in as an eight-year-old. Later, he had so honed my skills at harmonising Bach chorales that that section of the A-level held no fear for me.
Mr Recknell's GCSE students are down the corridor preparing an ensemble, so we look at their course book. First comes the western classical tradition: Mozart, Beethoven, the stuff you expect. Then there's "Changing directions in western classical music": Stockhausen, Berio, John Cage. Another tranche takes in African traditional music and Indian ragas. But the remaining section brings me up sharp. The Chemical Brothers are on the syllabus! And Dizzee Rascal, and a load of DJs I've never heard of. Plus there's a section on "the Britpop explosion of the mid-90s".
Wow. I briefly wonder how much cooler I would have been in my friends' eyes had I been studying this kind of stuff. Then I remember that for today's schoolchildren, Britpop is something their parents might have listened to. And there was a pop element to the GCSE course back in 1990, though cool wasn't exactly the word for it: I won't forget sitting through 10 merciless playings of Heart's soft-rock ballad Alone in my listening exam. Now there is an emphasis on the idea of music as product, not just art. Students must write something to a brief, often a commercial one: for a film or for advertising.
In the last period of the morning, the Upper Fifth are tapping away at their pieces in the room where I used to practise. Gone are the dusty scores and bags of mismatched recorder parts; it is lined with computers hooked up to keyboards and headphones. The pupils use Sibelius notation software. Their ideas spring straight on to the screen in neat musical staves. How easy it all seems.
Some are still using the old-fashioned piano, however. Will Cahill, 15, who hopes to become a professional musician, says he finds the GCSE course "good fun, really useful". Will and I discover we have happy memories of violin lessons with the same teacher, Kate Livermore; and he plays in the local West Suffolk Youth Orchestra, just like I did.
In the afternoon, I sit in on lively lessons taught with irrepressible enthusiasm by St John Weyers. Eleven-year-olds are learning the Trolley Song from Meet Me in St Louis. "Clang! clang! clang! went the trolley," we sing - and ding! ding! ding! goes my triangle. Grace is playing a handbell, Jordan is on xylophone, and Sparky is bashing a long, yellow tube called a boomwhacker. Recorders, it seems, are out of fashion. Instead, most of these children get a year's experience of playing a genuine orchestral instrument. Seven and eight-year-olds learn violin, viola, cello or bass in separate groups for two terms before playing together for the third. It sounds enormously encouraging and has been a popular choice.
Culford is certainly pushing participation in the arts. It has invested in a studio theatre, and now offers GCSE drama; it stages more plays and musicals than before, and, reckons Will, around half the pupils play an instrument or sing.
Each year, there is a big concert involving numerous school rock bands. In a crowded market, many independent schools now sell themselves on such extras: there are pictures of those bands in the prospectus, which is a bit of a change. I remember only two school bands, both viewed with suspicion by staff (which probably didn't do them any harm).
But still, as ever, it's largely up to the parents whether talented children get to fulfil their potential. How lucky I was to have a family who believed in music education, and, from the age of five, a marvellous piano teacher called Josie Tute, who laid the foundations for the curiosity about music I've had ever since.
I leave feeling wiser, but not yet hopelessly older. Culford has changed since 1992, but not unrecognisably so. Only one thing I saw left me speechless. When I was a pupil, camouflage was the only clothing boarders were forbidden to wear at weekends; now, after lunch, half the senior school emerge in army fatigues. Tuesday afternoon, apparently, is cadet training time. The only way to skive it is to sign up for "community service".
Whatever my violin practice was, it clearly wasn't that. Suddenly, those cross-country runs don't seem so bad after all.
