Open Orchestras
A musical canon for everyone
There is a tune in the film Gattaca called Impromptu for Twelve Fingers. It is by Michael Nyman - a version of Schubert’s Impromptu in G-flat Major, Op. 90 No.3 – and it is written specifically for someone with twelve fingers.
Barry Farrimond, the co-founder of Open Orchestras, is telling me the story of Impromptu for Twelve Fingers, and explaining its meaning. He asks me: “Can you imagine if all music was written for people with twelve fingers? You’d never be able to play it, because it is not written for you”.
Over the next few days, I can’t stop thinking about that – what it would be like if all music was written for people with twelve fingers. You wouldn’t be able to play it unless you had twelve fingers, which you don’t. You would only be able to experience it as a voyeur. It would have nothing to do with you; it would stay someone else’s dream.
Music should be universal, an ever-changing gift. But, often, it isn’t. It calcifies into an unforgiving canon and exists, too much, for the ten-fingered who can play notes, at speed, in the correct order. If music comes from love – from a desire to cherish something – it doesn’t feel like that for everyone. There isn’t enough music for everyone, and that is a tragedy.
When Open Orchestras was born, in 2013, there were orchestras in roughly half of Britain’s mainstream schools. In the special schools, which need them even more, for reasons that should be obvious, there were none. Open Orchestras exist to create musicians; or rather, teachers of music who will create musicians. It is not musical therapy; it is ambitious musical education for all disabled young people. It is musical education for young people with complex needs. They need music, and we need to hear their music. But we almost never do. Expectations are insultingly low; and barriers are insultingly high.
“Pretty much everything about it [the orchestra] disables people,” says Barry, “The way it is consumed by audiences. Most of the musical instruments require two hands and ten very dextrous fingers to play. Most of the musical repertoire has been created for those musical instruments. It’s a top down methodology. You have the composer who is the ultimate authority, and these are the notes played by these musical instruments in this order and if you deviate from that you are somehow not doing it properly”.
Barry is a specialist in sound, interactivity and accessibility and he has made improbable and original music for many years (he once used data from a nuclear power station to control a synthesiser). But it’s a conversation with a friend who taught music to disabled young people that changed things. It led Barry to invent with help from potential musicians and others, a musical instrument called the Clarion. He refined it over eight years. It works on iPad and PC. You can play it with any part of your body - your fingers, your toes, or the movements of your eyes.
The notes are represented by colours, and shapes and it can break compositions old and new down into small elements and rearrange them. The Clarion summons a new canon, with new musicians.
A few weeks after my conversation with Barry, I am in a bright music room in a special educational needs (SEN) school near Bristol. It is filled with instruments: keyboards, guitars, an enormous drum kit, the Clarion and its speakers.
I am with Jonathan Westrup, a warm, young music teacher, and his students. They come in, in small groups, for twenty-minute lessons. They are all aged between 16 and 19. There are students with Autism spectrum conditions, students with physical impairments and students with complex social, emotional and mental needs. Some walk in alone; others are accompanied by their support staff.
Jonathan has run classes here for four years and has 17 students. He does not invite me to sit in the corner with a notebook. That is not his way. Everyone is a musician here. He gives me a drum. I play it with my pen.
A young man plays his composition. He wrote it at home on Garage Band. It is called Crime Scene and it sounds, to me, like an L.A. noir sound-track. As he plays it, he makes his toy dog dance alongside it.
Then a boy plays the guitar – he is very good, he curls round the instrument with love. Another taps the microphone. They pass the beat – a guitar chord, then a smack on the microphone, then me and my pen and drum, and Jonathan on the drum. We are a small, but dedicated band, and we are listening to each other.
Later, Jonathan says the boy with the guitar just picked it up and played it. No one had given him a guitar before. He has aptitude. You can never tell.
The next pair play the Star Wars theme on guitar and keyboard and it sounds so slow, and plaintive, that I hear something I have not heard before and it delights me. They are delighted too. They bow.
Then they play a game. Jonathan holds up a picture of a cheetah to tell them to play fast. A lion is for loud; a mouse is for quiet; a snail is for slow. He asks: “are you ready, boys?” The boy on keyboards makes great noises, like soft screams. Then fast – and loud. Then a long, thin note.
Then Jonathan says: “shall we have another go at Star Wars?” “Yes!”, they cry. “Yes! Yes!” He asks: “Are we going to rock it a bit?” They do, and, again, it has more yearning – and is more interesting - than it ever is on screen. “That’s very emotional,” one says. “Yes,” says the other. “Rockier”. Sometimes they play with their eyes open; and sometimes they don’t. They give it a “spooky” ending.
They don’t really want to tell me why they love music. They would rather play it. But the people around them tell me stories of isolated children who found a gang in the band; or a child who will go all the way to the National Open Youth Orchestra. One boy tells me: “You can communicate with musical instruments to have a masterpiece”. They want to know when they will play a performance. Jonathan says: “maybe at Christmas. Maybe outside”. “What the!” they say. And in fact they do. Before the year ends, they play it in public, in a concert for their friends at the school.
In the next session a boy makes shapes with his hands: “Oh yes, yes, this, this,” he says. He is describing – I think he is playing - the music with his hands. “We’re good at music,” says the other.
© Clive Tagg, Lewisham Music and Greenvale School Open Orchestras performance
© Clive Tagg, Lewisham Music and Greenvale School Open Orchestras performance
“It’s not the case that every disabled young person is mad about music. They’re not." says Jonathan. "They are just like any other group in their peer group. And quite often you just need a couple of characters in the orchestra who can really hold the thing together. You might need someone who can hold a rhythm. But they can work really well with somebody who finds it hard to play a rhythm. You get what we call musical glue. When you’ve got all these different identities and interests and young people you need a bit of musical glue there, like me on the bass or something, just to hang it together”.
The penultimate two had it, I say, I heard it.
The first boy, Jonathan says, “can play patterns of notes in sequential order. That means he could provide some of that musical glue. He could play a tune, a recognizable tune. Now the stuff underneath it can be a lot more open-ended and less formal and it’s still going to work”. Sometimes it does more than work; sometimes it creates, by its very irregularity, a sound that could not be made by a group of ten-fingered musicians playing the canon. Its possibilities are different from that, and in some way, more infinite and touching.
He says that, for some, it’s just the music, and the emotions it helps them to name, and feel. For others it’s the fellowship. “I know everyone fights their corner for their subject in the curriculum,” he says, “but music is special”.
That “special”, by itself, sounds like music. Then he says: “you can teach the whole curriculum through music”. He didn’t have to say it. Music is more profound than any tongue.
He remembers a young woman who was using Eyegaze [the Clarion connects with assistive communication devices to respond to eye movement].
“We tried to work around her playing using Eyegaze and this went on for weeks and it wasn’t quite working. We decided to try a different tack. She had some bells round her wrists and she was just playing like that and it brought her more into the group because she didn’t have the screen between her and the group. It was just like the sun coming out, you know? Because what was important to her was being part of the gang. More so than playing notes in a particular order, which was what we initially were starting with. It’s just reminding yourselves that you have to look at who’s in front of you. It’s different every time. It really is different every time”.
When playing the canon the parameters are specific. This, I think, is something more unpredictable, and thrilling. Bells!
Now comes a larger group: a boy, ecstatic on drums, two guitarists and a Clarion player who also has a pink ukulele in a pink ukulele case, hanging from the back of her wheelchair. She is thrilled by the ukulele and the sounds it makes for her. She dances with her arms to celebrate the music and, afterwards, places it tenderly back in its case. “Don’t ask me why I’m protective of my ukulele,” she says. “I just am”. Jonathan tells them: “We need to make a river of sound”.
Open Orchestras provides specialist training and resources to those wishing to teach music to young people with special educational needs, so that they can build their own orchestra and run it sustainably; So it lasts. No two orchestras are the same and the possibilities are, like the music they seek to make, infinite. In 2018, there were 54 Open Orchestras in Britain, with new ones starting every year.
Some will become very skilled musicians. Others will be happy, which is as good.
Barry tells me a story about a very anxious, autistic boy, who, when he began his music lessons, wouldn’t stay in the room for more than 12 seconds. He felt he couldn’t. A few months later he was in a concert hall in Bristol in front of 300 people. “He didn’t play a single note,” says Barry. “He just hovered his hand above the iPad nearly playing the note. Very nearly. Everyone in the audience was watching him. Is he going to play it? And, in the end, he chose not to play it. He made the music that he wanted to make”.
I am a writer, and I have always believed that in the choice you make, and in the story you tell - or do not tell - lies the totality of the art. So this boy chose for himself, and in the silence that he made, he too heard his own music.
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