Sometimes, it’s only when someone is brave enough to challenge the system that we realise it needs to be challenged. And so it was when acclaimed English conductor Charles Hazlewood formed an orchestra with musicians with disabilities.
“The music industry had shut its eyes to the issue of disability. And when you consider 20 per cent of the British population identify as disabled, that’s a very big minority. It’s also a preposterous waste of talent of people who don’t fit the standard mould,” says Hazlewood, who formed Paraorchestra, the world’s first orchestra of professional musicians with disabilities, in 2011.
Hazlewood explains that the UK’s hosting of the Paralympics in 2012 was an inspiration for the whole project and Paraorchestra subsequently performed with Coldplay in its closing ceremony. That his fourth child, Eliza (now 18) was born with cerebral palsy was another driving force for the orchestra.
Some time later, Hazlewood moved from London to Bristol where he merged his Army of General ensemble of non-disabled orchestral musicians with Paraorchestra to create an orchestra of musicians with and without disabilities.
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“We now have 100 musicians from every corner of the UK and, of the 100, over 50 identify as disabled,” explains Hazlewood. Paraorchestra will perform in Dublin for the first time with Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs and a piece by Mahler with soprano soloist, Victoria Oruwari in the National Concert Hall on Saturday, November 30th.
Paraorchestra is different from a mainstream orchestra in its diversity of music and performance spaces and in the care and attention given to its musicians. “Orchestral activity is fairly brutal, with musicians putting in long hours of work and high performances expected at all times. Alcoholism, drug addictions and mental health issues are common because musicians are pushed too hard,” says Hazlewood, who has conducted many of the world’s great orchestras, made landmark shows for Sky Arts, BBC television and radio and founded Dimpho Di Kopane, an opera company from a South African township.
“We have musicians with very particular needs in terms of physical accessibility, visual impairments and dietary issues so we look after their needs to scaffold them to work at the highest level and we take longer to do things so people aren’t constantly stressed,” he says.
Soprano Victoria Oruwari says “the whole ethos is geared to our needs. Everything else is taken care of so that I can focus on the music. If you have a disability like I do — Oruwari is registered blind — there is so much you have to think about and ask people. But at Paraorchetra, all our needs right down to our quirks are known and accommodated.”
[ As a disabled person, creating art can become a Faustian bargainOpens in new window ]
As the soloist, Oruwari takes her cues differently with tempo changes embedded in the music or the conductor takes a strong breath as a personal signal to her.
Cellist Hattie McCall Davies explains that when she was diagnosed with the hereditary connective tissue disorder, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, while studying at the Royal Academy of Music, she realised she wouldn’t be able for the rigours of rehearsing and touring with an orchestra. “Like many other musicians with disabilities in Paraorchestra, I dropped off the radar when I couldn’t play full-time,” she explains. “Lots of us lost our careers. It was heartbreaking. Paraorchestra has given us our voices back and just because other things are going on, doesn’t mean the standard of the music is any less. We are an orchestra of musicians with and without disabilities which has consistent openness and transparency around access needs.”
Violinist Siobhan Clough was encouraged to learn the violin at the age of four to help her with the hearing loss she acquired as a result of septicaemia and meningitis when she was a baby. “Because of the vibrations that a stringed instrument produces, you can feel what you play. And it was thought then that this would help me communicate better and be more aware of the sounds and different dynamic levels,” she explains. Clough joined Paraorchestra about five years ago and in 2023 became assistant musical director. “The beautiful thing about Paraorchestra is that it’s truly inclusive. We play a diverse range of music in different setting with many different individuals.”
Some of the musicians in Paraorchestra also use adapted instruments. For example, Clarence Adoo, a leading trumpet player who was paralysed from the neck down following a car crash uses Headspace, a virtual instrument using head movements and breath to create synthesised sounds.
The Paraorchestra’s artistic development programme includes courses in composing for and playing assistive instruments (ie instruments adapted in various ways through technology or other means) and talks on professional development and wellbeing by Dame Evelyn Glennie, the solo percussionist who became deaf as a child. Some musicians also avail of personal assistants. The orchestra receives annual funding from the British Arts Council and other funders.
The Paraorchestra also performs a wide variety of music inside and outside traditional concert hall settings. “Our musical appetite is broader than a conventional orchestra so we’ll play Barry White, Kraftwork and Bruckner. An orchestra doesn’t have to be a 19th-century symphonic orchestra with banks of violas and woodwind. It can have analogue synthesisers,” says Hazlewood. Less conventional venues that the group has performed include the streets of Bristol, in a nightclub, and at the Glastonbury festival (2016). Earlier this year, Paraorchetra performed in the BBC Proms at the Bristol Beacon.
Playing in other venues also brings the music to people with and without disabilities of all ages and ethnicities. And some concert hall stages still don’t have accessible ramps for wheelchairs. “Concert halls are wonderful, but there is a culture built up around them which attracts a certain type of person in a certain income bracket. Many of these people aren’t that keen for the great unwashed to be rustling sweet papers in the audience,” says Hazlewood.
“Once we are on stage, the disability becomes irrelevant as it’s all about how good the artists are. The orchestra only survives on the basis of its art.”
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