When the innocent but wise Maria starts teaching the Von Trapp youngsters their vocal skills in The Sound of Music, she does so using the "tonic sol-fa" method which gives names to musical notes ("doh", "reh", "me" etc) to make them easy to remember.

She's able to do that thanks to a Heckmondwike-born man called John Curwen, who's remembered and revered as the individual who did more to simplify musical education than anyone else in Britain.

John Curwen arrived on the scene on November 14, 1816, at Hurst House, just opposite the park. His father, who had the unusual first name of Spedding, was a non-conformist minister in the town.

The young John didn't remain in Heckmondwike for long. When he was three his father began a series of moves which took the family first to Cottingham and then to Hull. In 1824 Spedding Curwen became minister of the Barbican Chapel in London and then moved to Frome in Somerset.

Despite his short association with Heckmondwike, John Curwen is reported to have been proud of his West Riding roots and to have maintained an interest in the town until his death in 1880.

He regularly stayed with friends in Bradford, Halifax and Huddersfield. When a commemorative plaque was unveiled in Heckmondwike's town-centre park 1988, two representatives of the Curwen Institute in London attended the ceremony.

So how did he come to have an institute named after him?

Well, it didn't happen until later in his life. Early on he followed his father into the ministry, entering theological college and in 1838 becoming an assistant minister at an Independent chapel in Basingstoke.

There, one of his duties was to take charge of a small school, which proved to be a turning point in his life. He developed a keen interest in education, and became convinced that music, and particularly singing, was of immense value in teaching the young. He began to ponder on how he could make it easier.

In 1840, in Norwich, he met a clergyman's daughter, Sarah Ann Glover, who was already successfully employing a form of the sol-fa system in the school where she taught. Curwen began working on his own method.

It was slow to catch on. A decade later, only about 2,000 people were learning music by Curwen's method. A breakthrough came when he wrote about it in Cassell's Popular Educator. At the end of the next decade, 186,000 people were using it.

When his health collapsed in 1864 he had to leave the ministry and struggled financially for a few years. Then, when his health improved marginally, he went into the printing business.

Being a hard worker and discovering a shrewd head for finance, he made the business a commercial success at which point he decided to publish and print his new theory of musical notations in book form and launch a correspondence course.

It was a move which turned him into one of Heckmondwike's most famous sons. When he died in 1880, at Heaton Mersey near Manchester, he was mourned by music lovers all over the country.

Without him, who knows how Maria would have managed to drum musical knowledge into the heads of the children she took under her wing as governess.