Project aims to unlock memories and sensations for participants while creating nine-track CD, recorded at Glyndebourne
Project aims to unlock memories and sensations for participants while creating nine-track CD, recorded at Glyndebourne
On a stage once presided over by Luciano Pavarotti, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Renée Fleming, people living with dementia are recording songs of their own composition.
With the microphones of Glyndebourne opera house capturing every note, their voices rise and intertwine. Not echoing old, familiar tunes but shaping entirely new pieces expressing their feelings, hopes and fears – emotions that, when the music stops, their brains can no longer convey in mere words.
“The public perception of people diagnosed with dementia is that everything is finished,” said Hazel Gaydon, events manager for the Raise Your Voice charity. “But what our excitement is embedded in is the fact that we’ve found musical creativity can trigger original words and tunes based on present and future thinking.”
With the support of Glyndebourne, the Royal Academy of Music, the Alzheimer’s Society and Arts Council England, the charity has spent the past year helping those living with dementia and their carers to compose original, new music for a nine-track CD, Murmuration.
It is the first time any of them have written songs – and the process has unlocked sensations and memories everyday life could no longer reach, the music capturing the remaining threads connecting them to the world around them.
