This is a project to encourage mothers to bond with their babies through shared music in the Neonatal Unit at Gloucester Hospital, UK What has made this effective? Playing without a written score: focus of attention is on the audience, the environment and our relationships; focus on the dynamics of the room, response, baby movement; […]
This article says everything about our own thinking although it’s based on heart research. I’d add two things: not for nothing did we call our programme “Early Start – Music by Heart” and when it comes to producing clinical proof of the effectiveness of music on babies, I’m not sure that’s going to be that […]
After struggling with the shameless ways some people promote their work online, I have come to accept that there is a legitimate place for promoting myself. I speak as someone with a very British reluctance to do anything in public that I didn’t deem perfect, and over the years (my Carolan’s Dream video in 2006 […]
Recently I visited Derby Children’s Hospital for some practical music-making as part of the Opus Music in Healthcare course. Within the Children’s areas there is plenty of visually very witty design to make the environment as fun and stress-free as a hospital can be. For example, the big lifts are decorated floor to ceiling. Go […]
Fantastically pleased to have won a cup! This was in the Adult class for people who make their living from / largely from music, and I spent quite a while considering various options for pieces, because my music is often either my own arrangement, or pieces I’ve written, or pieces by others that I’ve learned […]
This extract was extremely influential in my thinking about how folk music differs from formal music I only today found this piece of paper again, and googled a phrase from it, thus was able to find that it is part of a paper by Teshome H. Gabriel. Actually, he was looking at Third World Cinema, […]
I’m delighted to have been accepted on the Opus Music in Healthcare 5-day course. The first two days have already been great – looking at different ways to vary the music we play, and getting us as a group sensitive to each other and to the change of pace required in a hospital setting – […]