If one was looking for an example of how human creativity can overcome physical disability, then surely the story of Frenchman Jean-Dominique Bauby, former editor-in-chief of Paris Elle who literally blinked out the masterpiece The Diving Bell and the Butterfly comes quickly to mind. After being paralysed from a massive stroke, Bauby was literally ‘locked in’ – a condition where the mind is alert, but the body unable to function. Bauby’s paralysis was so extreme that he was actually unable to move or speak, and he dictated his soul-wrenching book through the movements in a single eyelid.
Within the world of music, similar aspirations to liberate creativity from its bodily confines can be found in the life transforming work of the Drake Music Project – a charity that ‘uses music technology to create opportunities for people with physical disabilities to explore, compose and perform music’. Without doubt, this charity has opened a window on life for those robbed of movement and voice through disabilities.
The work of the Drake Music Project has been to create suites of advanced programming techniques and refinements in pressure sensors and pointing devices that are the sophisticated cousins of our computer touch pad and mouse. These tools convert residual movements into “MIDI”, – which is a digital code for communicating with electronic musical instruments. In effect they become the musicians new instruments.
Similar tools have famously freed the mind of Professor Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist who holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics. Hawking is most famous for his book – A Brief History of Time (a best-seller translated into 33 languages which has sold over nine million copies). And he has been called ‘one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists. Many consider him to be the most brilliant since Einstein.’ Hawking has also suffered from Motor Neurone disease for over 20 years. He cannot speak, move or breathe without assistance. Luckily for Professor Hawking, help came along in the form of technology. As he explains on his own website: ‘A computer expert in California, Walt Woltosz, heard of my plight. He sent me a computer program he had written. This allowed me to select words from a series of menus on the screen, by pressing a switch in my hand. The program could also be controlled by a switch, operated by head or eye movement. When I have built up what I want to say, I can send it to a speech synthesiser.’
In the same way that Stephen Hawking’s computer programme was designed to allow him to communicate, so too has the Drake Music Project created a technological programme that allows Drake tutored musicians to compose and play their original music.The application of these technologies within the creative arts is however hardly known outside specialist circles. That is why the Drake Music Project differs markedly from the traditional view of music therapy for the disabled. Rather than bringing music to the disabled in a passive sense, the charity allows the disabled to realise the music that is locked inside themselves. And whilst we are still perhaps realising ways of judging and appreciating this skill, the extreme effort, dedication and perseverance required to use these computer interfaces may in the future be recognised as a new form of musical virtuosity.
It is this new virtuosity that brings the Drake Music Project into focus. Touted as an empowering force, the programme supports rather than allows disabled people to make music through technology. As Development Coordinator Nick Shaddick explains, the charity was originally formed by Adele Drake in 1988. Adele had a sort of epiphany it seems, after a series of tragedies struck her own life – one of her daughters committed suicide at the age of 18, and her sister was diagnosed with MS. Through her work and study Adele Drake saw an actual connection in how technology could facilitate the composition of music for disabled children and adults. Now, almost sixteen years later Adele Drake is ready to retire, but her charity has established projects in 11 cities in the UK and Ireland.
In a BBC article on the project, the headline read – ‘Disabled make themselves heard’, but the Drake Project is not simply about encouraging disabled people to make music. It is a more complex programme that taps into the minds of talented musicians who happen to be disabled, and provides them with the infrastructure and tools to create, compose, teach and learn. It is an entire experience, not a single facet.
With E-scape as the in-house designed technological tool, the charity has pushed forward to the point where it was recently awarded, as explained by Nick Shaddick, a recovery and stabilisation grant from the Arts Council of England. Shaddick saw this grant as a decisive boon to the charity, since it provides an almost symbolic show of the changing of the guards. This grant means the new Drake Music Project will be shedding some of its administrative millstones and become ‘lighter on its feet and more flexible’ even whilst ‘objectives stay the same’. The key strategic realignment however, according to Shaddick, is for the charity to aim for a large expansion in London. As he explained ‘We need to have an impact here’, because even though the programme functions in Scotland and Ireland, these projects carry only the name of the charity and there is no current managerial overflow.
According to Shaddick, the charity is also at the stage where it is assessing how or if to commercialise its E-scape programme and possibly turn out more end-result products like its first CD 2 Days later with Jools Holland. (Holland is a high profile patron of the charity). And the charity would work more as a conservatorium for disabled musicians. As Shaddick explains, the Drake Music Project works with its disabled musicians according to their ability and skill. The workshops are set out to follow a specific model based on three levels of skill, and as is the case in all music schools, some musicians will reach level three and (hopefully) become successful musicians, whilst others will reach level one.
A couple of years ago the Musicians’ Union selected the Drake Music Project as its charity to support. They worked together for an entire year to raise funds and increase awareness of the cause throughout the professional music world. Members of the Musicians’ Union were also invited to take the Drake BTEC Advanced Award in Tutor Training. When asked whether he thought these collaborations placed the Drake Music Project slap bang in the middle of the music industry regardless of disability, Nick Shaddick agreed wholeheartedly that this is key to the purpose of the programme. Through such alignments and associations, the project stands less left-of-centre. Instead it becomes central to the artistry that is music in all its shapes and sizes – creating a new genre perhaps but certainly not a therapy.
And as history and these achievements have taught us, there has never been, (nor will there ever be), an adversity of the body or oppression of the soul that can silence human creativity.
For more information on The Drake Music Project check out their website www.drakemusicproject.com.
