10 Pieces of my Life

Rarely do I see something programmed on the BBC that mirrors closely the working environment that I occupied until I stopped working around 2003.

Up until this point, I had worked in a number of ways that introduced people to unfamiliar art-forms.

Principally, I worked closely within large arts organisations receiving considerable sums from the Arts Council of England.

Perhaps it is quite natural that the investment of significant sums of public money in such ways should be accompanied by the proviso that these organisations should offer an education opportunity so that the widest possible audience should have the opportunity to appreciate the activity offered.

Thus at the age of around 25 I began working within the education department of Opera North based in Leeds, one of only a handful of professional opera companies in the United Kingdom.

Opera North was established as an independent offshoot of English National Opera, to enable Opera of the highest professional quality to tour principally the North of England, occasionally reaching further afield such as to Scotland and even overseas.

For example, in the time that I was working for the company a production of Attila by Giuseppe Verdi was taken to Rotterdam, helping to establish the international reputation of the company which had already achieved a significant National reputation for both its reach across the North of England, as well as a reputation for high quality education opportunities that enabled people unfamiliar with this art-form to attend performances and explore in more detail exactly what Opera is all about.

When I began working for the organisation, I had very limited experience myself of opera, but my work gave me the opportunity to see numerous opera performances as part of the company’s output.

With its base in Leeds at the Grand Theatre, where rehearsals and opening performances took place, the company travelled regularly to Manchester, Hull, Nottingham, and other occasional venues and festivals across England.

Whilst I am not musically trained, not even with an aptitude for music, I found myself working in the creative environment of the education department of an opera company, thanks I suppose to an interest I have always held concerning the empowerment of people.

Whilst this may sound rather strange, I can look back at my entire working life and see that this strand of empowerment has been critical in every aspect of every employment I have undertaken.

For the first 10 years of my working life, I became involved first with housing co-operatives, and then perhaps as a natural progression, with workers co-operatives.

In other words, I have often worked in ways that treat people as equals, and in some respects, the same can be said of creativity.

It is something that people of all ages and backgrounds and indeed capacity can participate in, and in many respects, the fact that I first worked in a department associated with an opera company is simply representative of the fact that I lived in a small northern town that was lucky enough to possess a large opera company.

When this was established in the late 1980s, originally as a linked and strategic component of English National Opera, somebody somewhere must have made the assumption that developing such a large creative organisation would have a transformation and regeneration impact on this city.

Opera North’s orchestra also has its own identity as a symphony orchestra, providing a regular season of concerts at the local town hall.

You cannot have 60 or 70 professional musicians and all of the ancillary staff associated with an opera company and not have an impact on its local economy.

Opera North also had a regular full-time chorus of over 50 people, occasionally swelling to larger numbers when particular repertoire was performed.

Although I began as a novice in my own right, I quickly benefited from the opportunity to be able to see as much opera as the company produced.

Opera is typically produced in small seasons consisting of between three and four different operas, for the sensible reason that professional opera singers are not able to sing every night of the week, and therefore different operas are performed each night of a season so that the principal singers can arrest their voices in between performances.

So in the course of a year it is likely that a company will produce and tour about a dozen different operas.

In each season, there will be a couple of fairly popular operas, which may have two performances each, and one less common opera, which may only be performed one night each week.

Touring Opera is a logistical exercise, often involving two or three enormous juggernauts, which contain all of the sets and costumes for each opera, as well as all of the technical equipment required to light each work, as well as any ancillary equipment such as for enabling performances to have surtitles or subtitles on stage.

Something that I quickly discovered as part of my initial involvement in the work of the company was that I cannot hear classical music of the kind that is performed by the professional orchestras involved with professional opera without appreciating it in perhaps a rather unique way.

Opera is of course made up from an extraordinary combination of story, music, and staging.

It thus involves every imaginable art form from the written word, through the visual arts concerned with staging and costumes, as well as music.

My experience of the kind of music played by a professional orchestra is where I have drawn my parallel with the recent BBC programme entitled 10 pieces.

This took an unusual approach in its attempt at making classical music more accessible to young people in particular, by showing the music of several well-known works performed both live by the orchestra in a studio context, but with specially commissioned film material designed to encourage those unfamiliar with classical music to see it as a form of storytelling.

We will all be familiar with this as a technique, whether we consciously realise it or not.

The classic example of this kind of ways to familiarise people with classical music was used by Walt Disney in his Fantasia.

What I find fascinating is my own particular experience of classical music, and the way in which it seems to speak to me as if I am unable to hear the music without seeing some kind of story.

Synaesthesia, the way in which our brains can experience sensory stimulus that results in additional perceptions, is not as unusual as you might think.

My best friend, for example, associates various words in the form of colours, so that for each of the days of the week, she associates a different colour.

Perhaps other people may have their own experience of synaesthesia, in my own case, one of my strongest interests lies with creative writing, and so it is perhaps not unusual that I should experience the kind of narrative that I have suggested when listening to classical music.

This has served me particularly well in the context of for example introducing the instruments of the orchestra to primary school children, as it is a very familiar exercise to simply play a piece of music to a small audience and discuss the feelings generated from it. This is a good starting point for looking at the way in which something like opera tells a story with many different emotional colours that have been portrayed by the composer in their use of the instruments available to them.

I have been very fortunate to have met and worked with some extraordinarily creative people and I have been privileged to be able to introduce their abilities to a wide variety of people, young and old, as diverse as inmates in prison to people with learning disabilities, all in the name of the art form education that has been the focus of my work.

It is perhaps no surprise that I have been inspired by the people that I have worked with to explore my own creativity later in life, especially now that I have so much more time than most, as a consequence of my disability with multiple sclerosis.

But it was nevertheless remarkable to see such a specific exploration of what I have spent my life exploring in that BBC programme, 10 pieces.

Rarely Seen or Praised

It is so easy to forget how fortunate I am. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis over 10 years ago now, and although I am severely disabled and limited physically in what I can still undertake, there are so many things that I have the time to appreciate.

Time is that most valuable of commodities, which few of us can appreciate unless we have the opportunity to pause in the muddle of our modern lives.

Of course I would not have wished to have my life prevented from achieving its full flowering, but I have had to remind myself that there are worse things.

At least the condition that I live with is no more fatal than everything else that we live with.

And since I live in the United Kingdom I am able to benefit from the fact of a system that protects and preserves those that cannot undertake those things that most of us take for granted.

The apartment in which I live has been made more extensible for my use as a wheelchair user thanks to alterations undertaken under the terms of a special grant, converting my bathroom to a shower room, and giving me a ramped access from the rear entrance.

A superior kind of ceiling hoist enables me to be transferred to and from my electric wheelchair, and I have a team of carers that ensure that I am well looked after.

The bed which I spend considerable time, but not so much that I consider myself to be bedridden, has been installed and is serviced by a special department operated by my local county council.

Recently, the handset that controls the movements of the bed had to be replaced, and the replacement handset has the additional buttons that enables the full function of this extraordinary item to be fully used.

My previous handset only had four pairs of buttons to raise the head, the bed itself, and what is called the leg break.

But the new controls enable the top and the bottom of this electric bed to be raised and lowered independently, a function that glorious in the unusual name of the Trendellenberg  effect, something that will be unfamiliar to most people.

Quite simply, it enables the bed to be raised or lowered so that the person in the bed slips in either direction.

More information about this can be discovered online.

With such an important piece of equipment, it is essential that it is properly maintained, and recently I had cause to discover that an engineer is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in the event of problems occurring that disable search an essential piece of equipment.

I had cause to request that the engineer assist as part of the power supply had become disconnected, and although a backup battery ensures that the equipment will operate on an emergency basis for a fuel hours, the engineer arrived within a few hours to reconnect and have the bed working once again.

Few people have reason to know that such a service operates, and it is one of those hidden benefits of the system that of course we pay for through our taxes. And it is only when we need such services that we fully appreciate their existence.