Marina Gall, Val Williams, Joe Webb, Sandra Dowling

Ensemble music-making can be a practice that excludes many people. That applies maybe particularly to classical music-making, which depends on having an instrument, music lessons, and technical skills.  Without access to a musical instrument suited to their personal needs, many children and young adults with disabilities are excluded from engaging in ensemble work.  Therefore ‘Getting Things Changed’ was keen to collect data which focused on a new approach to ensemble music-making in special schools, Open Orchestras which has been devised by the directors of  ‘OpenUp Music’. The use of a new technological instrument – the Clarion –  is central to this programme. It can be played on an iPad, using a Satnav (in which a small sensor is placed on the part of the body that the students can move, and which triggers notes on a laptop computer screen) or using Eyegaze. This newly-designed instrument can be adapted to suit most students’ physical needs. The Open Orchestras programme also offers new musical repertoire for these ensembles.

This project thus allowed us to take a close look at interactions with 10 young people, aged between 14-21, who had a range of profound and complex physical as well as learning disabilities. The groups included six young men and four women, with two from black or minority ethnic groups (BAME). The central research questions focused on ‘How can everyday decision making be facilitated in people with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD)?’  We were also interested to learn more about Open Orchestras, as a creative practice which arguably has changed the face of music making for disabled young people, to conceptualise how change can be made in social practices more generally. 

Our data consisted of videos of 22 hours of naturally occurring Open Orchestras music sessions and a concert, in two special schools for students with profound and/or complex learning disabilities. Ethnographic notes were taken during the sessions themselves, and footage was afterwards taken back to five staff and one young adult musician. Interviews were also carried out with seven other significant staff members including speech therapists and one head teacher, and with a director of OpenUp Music and the head of the local Music Education Hub. While a Conversation Analysis (CA) approach was used to explore small extracts of interactions which included the young people, we also used a broader ethnographic approach.

Resources

• Opening up music making for young people with complex and multiple needs (PDF, 864kB)‌: policy briefing
• Music making for all: Working well in open orchestras (PDF, 1,825kB): a booklet for people starting out using Open Orchestras approaches in schools