Spring update
Guilt is strong that I haven’t kept the news flowing from this extraordinary year of opportunity. Huge continued thanks to Get a Life Fund! The important part is that I have passed the first three taught modules with a row of B grades and lots of positive comments from the markers. This is a great relief as it was thirty-two years since I had last written an essay – for my finals at the Royal College of Music. The learning curve has been steep, scientific articles, psychological theory, educational research theory, behaviourism and most important of all a start to an understanding of autism and its effects.
Wonderfully my tutors have been very sympathetic to my coming to all this as a musician, and have allowed me to skew my reading and writing in my natural direction! There is so much extraordinary stuff going on out there in the related but possibly not always joined up areas of music therapy, music psychology and music education. I have found many things already that shed light on my work with the children in Parkview Special School. There has been an emphasis on applying the disciplines of self-assessment and appraisal in our work and this is leading me to think how to start to measure the results of the work that I do. I have some very special help coming my way in this later in the month which I will disclose once I’ve been able to discuss it with the person involved!
Juggling playing in the orchestra and working both at the Special school and on study has been a challenge. Last term I tried taking a significant time out of the orchestra to concentrate on reading and writing, this term I’m trying to just take a couple of days each week – both ways have their difficulties!
It would of course have been easier if I didn’t also have a bit of a career as a pianist as well – but there we go. I had my three minutes of glory this term getting the chance to accompany Elizabeth Watts in a Berlioz song in a “Discovering Music” programme for Radio 3!
The big distraction coming up this month is the performance of a work called Sea Pictures. This is a major “inclusion” project which culminates in a big concert in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall on March 23rd. 250 or so children from a number of Special Needs Schools and from mainstream will be singing, dancing, signing and playing accompanied by the Ulster Orchestra. John Lubbock of the Orchestra of St John’s Smith Square and founder of the charity Music for Autism will be conducting. I am the composer of the music, designed to be approachable, atmospheric and child friendly. My partner in crime in these things Ricky Matson, bass player in the Ulster Orchestra dreamed the whole thing up, and another friend, rock drummer poet and composer Johnathan Hicks wrote some lovely children’s songs which the choir of 150 voices will be belting out!
Then there’s the small matter of another assigment to be handed in at the end of April – I’d better sign off and get reading!
Posted by Chris Blake on March 1st, 2010.
