We had a session with Megan Steinberg a composer and researcher from RNCM, Manchester who works with accessibility in musical performance and composition. She led us through different definitions of disability, accessible design and how to incorporate these into scores and live settings.
She brought up that typically disability is seen as an illness that affects you for over a year but some people such as the deaf or neurodivergent community do not see it as a disability rather a cultural group. She introduced us to the more modern social model of disability (late 20th century) whereby people are disabled by barriers in society as supposed to the medical model – acceptance that a person is disabled by their health condition.
“Disability is not a brave struggle or courage in the face of adversity. Disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live.”—Neil Marcus 1988
She describes her practice as universal composition, a term derived from universal design:
- Person centred
- Personalised scores
- composer-performer collaboration
- awareness, training, openness to learning
- experimentation
- universal not one size fits all
An example of this I was intrigued by was creative captioning. I am often amazed by the power of words in aesthetics not just meaning as I don’t see myself as very good with words. In this music is described in writing almost poetically then for a deaf musician to interpret and improvise to.
We then did an exercise where we imagined a hypothetical situation where we did the score design for:
A flautist who has a visual impairment
Tactile score using different materials ?
A pianist who has anxiety
Breathing meditative listening to a guided creative captioned scene/ feeling to improvise to, the voice of someone familiar through headphones, perhaps live leaving gaps to perform, counting? having personalised calming visual aids, glass of water, tea, juice, influence the music? Stress toy, fidget toy, colour in the keys, sat in darkness project coloured lights onto the keys for the pianist to follow in improv. Comfortable clothes and temperature
Combined, they sit together both aiding each other, they listen to the creative caption score in their ears and improvise together and with the score voice, listen to each others breath, decide on a sound motif to work around before, communicate using that familiar motif during that performance – accompany each other, touch, the pianist covered by flautist, sat facing away from audience