Rachel’s Blog

Music Leader South West ran a training day in June entitled Making Music For Health. The purpose of the day was to get together with musicians and others working in the field of arts and health, and to discuss our experiences, and to explore opportunities for music-making in health-care settings. Although it was specifically for musicians in Gloucestershire, I thought I would hop over the border to find out more.

Some key aspects of the day:

• Gathering Voices, a Bristol-based organisation that works with young people, focussing on singing and percussion from around the world, did an energising warm-up using a simple approach to rhythm and voices.
• Prof. Norma Daykin of University of West of England gave a brief explanation of Why Music in Hospitals? Key points included the research finding that there is the strongest evidence for beneficial effects of music on health, over the effects of other art-forms; live music is known to reduce anxiety, heart rate, pulse rate, and reduce levels of stress hormone cortisol, and is therefore a useful additional treatment in pre- and post-surgical wards. She also emphasised that using the arts in healthcare not only has an effect on the patients, but also on the staff and on the wider organisation.
• Kathryn from Arts in Trust described the work they do taking musicians into wards in Cheltenham General Hospital and Gloucester Royal Hospital. She described how difficult it was to recruit musicians, as working in a ward can be very difficult and scary if you don’t know what to expect. We later heard from Peter Gill, a pianist who plays in hospitals for Arts in Trust. He described playing in a hospital ward as “playing within a scenario, not competing with it”.
• Jacqui of Music Leader South West described an example of good practice, where musicians played in the waiting room of a paediatric consultant. The parents and children were awaiting, often, scary diagnoses, and the presence of a musician helped the child and the parents feel more relaxed, which, the paediatrician reported, made them much easier to communicate with.

It was such a worth-while event to attend, and particularly enjoyable as a large part of the afternoon was devoted to singing and drumming.

A few months ago I received an email from  the Age Concern community development worker I work with, asking if I would like to take the Singing for Fun group to a festival in Long Wittenham, near Abingdon. This year was the 10th annual Wittfest, or Long Wittenham’s Charity Music Festival.  It is free to go along, and any money raised is divided between 2 charities. This year the charities were Pets as Therapy and Age Concern’s Singing for Health programme.

We were given a room from 4.30 in the afternoon, but the weather was so warm and beautiful, and the room a little small, we all decamped to the front garden of the pub….

Now, this side, you sing this bit....

It was great fun to be singing outside – many of the passers-by stopped to join in, and as we continued the crowd grew. At it’s height there must have been between 30 and 40 people, all singing in 4-part harmony.

As well as the act of singing together being a truly wonderful community activity in practice, it also serves as a living metaphor of Diversity + Unity = Harmony.

I was very pleased with the way our session went – the Singing for Fun and Health group from Abingdon really enjoyed themselves, and it was great for them to meet the Witney group, who were still on a high when I saw them on Wednesday. They all had a wonderful day out, and described Wittfest as ‘their own Glastonbury’. A great deal of credit is owed to Lucy Quinn and the proprietors of The Plough for the fantastic organisation that went into the weekend.

I think we’ve signed up for next year! You can view the photos here.

I’m just home from a residential care home, having led a short ‘taster’ session. It was seriously challenging as well as being enjoyable too.

It is a fairly large residential care home, with a fantastic ethos – the activities co-ordinator frequently takes some of the residents to the pub! As with larger numbers of people, there is bound to be a greater diversity of people in terms of their abilities/limitations. Having previously met some of the residents, I wasn’t quite prepared (in terms of variety of songs/resources) to cater for the different levels that I found there. Although the session went reasonably smoothly, and part of the reason for this taster session was to gauge people’s needs, I was disappointed that I had not been able to engage with every person, and draw them into what I hoped to be an enjoyable and uplifting musical experience.

Having said this, many participants did enjoy themselves. Some were singing along and using percussion instruments to beat (or shake) in time. I think a small change of mixing up the people of different abilities would help enormously, as it would enable the less able people to feel more involved.

Key Learning:

• Take in more material than you plan to use, including songs of varying complexity, from the very simple, to the more difficult.
• Develop songs or activities to assess people’s different levels.
• Underline the importance of a tailored music session and emphasise the point of a taster session
• Don’t be afraid to ask staff for small changes in the set-up. They want the sessions to be positive, as much as you do.
• Enjoy it! Even if you feel like you are struggling, keep going, keep being enthusiastic, don’t give up.

A couple of weeks ago I ran a session which went really well. Looking back on the session plan – which is happily written in purple felt-tip – I could see why:

• I thought very carefully about each song
• I experimented with soundscapes, and vocal sounds, not just on songs and song-words
• Many of the songs used very simple guitar chords so I could concentrate more on interacting with the participants
• We varied dynamics, speeds – almost resulting in seasickness during What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?
• I introduced simple descants over well-known songs
• Participants were encouraged to think of their own words for verses

All of these things, as well as other elements relating directly to the singing and the use of percussion instruments, I feel helped the participants feel more confident about their musicality and the range of sounds they can produce. So, why can’t they all be like this? As I gather new repertoire, inevitably, some of it might be a little shaky – it may take me some time to develop the activities around a song. The key is to keep things relatively simple and to rely on the range of emotions we can employ and convey with our voices.

It was good to see another hospital embracing singing as an aid to people’s health. I find it interesting that it is referred to as singing ‘therapy’. Yes it is therapeutic – but isn’t it simply singing?

I’ve been at the Substance office today in Manchester near the beginning of an exciting collaborative learning project, bringing together a variety of creative and cultural organisations in a partnership to share learning on leadership. Included in the core partnership are Substance, Greater Manchester Music Action Zone (GMMAZ), Music Leader North West, and Performing Arts Network and Development Agency (PANDA). My role within this project is to facilitate the online sharing, provided on a web-platform. I want to use this post to explore how I use technology, and its potential for freelance artists and arts organisations.

My experience of distance learning and online forums has been, most often, frustrating. People did not respond to each others’ posts, content was messy and badly presented/described, and in the case of distance learning, the obligatory contributions to online discussions were so forced as to hardly be worth writing. This is why I am really looking forward to getting started on the leadership Lab project, where I will be providing online facilitation. Just as a discussion is most often useful when effectively facilitated, so too online discussion needs to be guided, especially as online discussions will be at a slower pace, as new comments are added over days and weeks.

Blogging can be equally frustrating at times, especially when no one comments – how do I know anyone is reading it, or that it is worth writing? Blogging is definitely worth the effort as it is a wonderful method of documenting publicly any influences, ideas, learning, project development, anything, in a concrete, yet informal way. And as someone running a small business, it’s a cheap (free with Wordpress) way of having a website which is more than just an online poster.

Twitter is another tool which I have found incredibly helpful, mainly because it has greatly improved my google rating (yes, I admit, in my vainer moments I occasionally Google myself). Twitter is also great for seeing content I may be interested in. I follow people I am likely to be interested in such as musicians, community arts organisations, my friends, people in my local area e.g. local hospital as I am interested in health issues, local journalists and some newspapers. Twitter etiquette means you can follow as many people as you like. The Twitter question is different from Facebook, which is more about status/state of mind etc, where as Twitter asks the question ‘What are you doing?’. This can be useful for businesses as it is less personal, you only have 140 characters, so a ‘tweet’ might be “at the Substance office in Manchester meeting the orgs involved in Leadership Lab with @timdavies”

All of these different technologies have required a fair investment of time to get set up – the blog being the most time-consuming, although quite straightforward, and Twitter being very easy indeed. They are definitely worth doing as once they have been set up, they are easy to update and show everyone what you are doing/thinking, which is where the conversations should start. Tim Davies has written a series of one-page guides to help people start up with these different web-tools.

I want to draw attention to this wonderful choir based in London. Called Sing for Joy, it is made up of people with Parkinson’s Disease, and their friends and carers. It was initiated by two women who were diagnosed with PD and did not want to sit back and be medicated.

I heard these women speak at a conference last year, and there was something so inspiring about them. I felt they refused to be pathologised in a way so common in the healthcare system; you are your disease. And I felt it must be so empowering to feel, as someone with a life-changing condition, that there is a way of self-medicating, that something you are doing is helping, and you’re not just sitting back and letting someone prescribe drugs for you to passively swallow.

In fact, there is something about singing which is the antithesis of ‘passively swallowing’. Singing is powerfully life-affirming; I am still breathing. This is my voice. My voice. Do you hear me? Listen.

On the BBC Headroom site, there is a section all about alzheimer’s disease. It is from here you can watch again Terry Pratchett’s documentary ‘Living With Alzheimer’s’- but there are also a number of other short videas made by different people, ordinary people, about alzheimer’s in their lives. It’s really interesting that many of the people being interviewed actually have the disease (is diagnosis getting better/earlier?) as most of my work is with people in the later stages, and therefore they do not communicate a great deal, let alone about themselves or their condition.

There is a disturbing message from many of those with dementia that somehow they will become less themselves, lose their humanity, or as one woman put it become ‘just a shell’.

I don’t know how I feel about this. I see the pain caused watching a loved-one increasingly struggle with daily tasks, and experience non-recognition, or unpleasant, or even violent behaviour from that loved-one. However, Alzheimer’s should not result in the slipping away of someone’s humanity. Just as disability campaigners argued against a medical model of disability, it is absolutely crucial that communities ensure an individual’s sense of personhood. Speaking to a carer at a residential dementia home, she expressed how she felt she knew a resident, even when they were very late stage dementia. There is more to our personalities than what we think, do or say. It’s our humanity talking.

Research released today by the Alzheimer’s Research Trust suggests that staying active later in life may delay the onset of dementia. In an interview with the BBC World Service, Rebecca Wood of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust stressed the importance of “keeping minds active and bodies active and keeping those social networks going”.

The full BBC article can be found here.

An interesting report from Channel 4 News showing the growing recognition of the importance of using arts as part of the treatment of dementia – and momentum too as the government pledges £150million to improve dementia care.