State of Affairs
I work for a community children’s choir organization that enjoys a reputation for excellent, innovative performances at venues all over the world. Our choir programs have quadrupled over the last fifteen years and we have gone from an artistic and office staff of four, to ten. While there are many admirable things about this notoriety, I have noticed a population that is underserved in our organization.
I teach a program called Hummingbird, and for the last two years we have averaged sixty children in this program, divided into three levels and running over five to six weekly rehearsals. The children are between the ages of four and six years old, and there is no audition to enter the program, unlike the four training choirs above mine which operate for children seven through eighteen years of age. I should clarify that we don’t refer to these appointments as auditions, but rather “assessments”, to determine best placement and while I have no reliable statistics, I would estimate that we accept a percentage of children into our choirs somewhere in the high nineties. It’s rather rare for a child to be turned away, and usually in those situations the conductor offers support and recommendations to the family, often along the lines of finding the child some one-on-one help and an invitation to return for reassessment after this has been accomplished.
It has long been my suspicion that a type of pre-audition process occurs in families that bring their children to our choir. Often the type of description we hear from parents around the assessments is that the child “loves to sing”, and “Sings all around the house”. We much less commonly hear thoughts along the lines of “My child knows nothing about singing, and I thought they really should, so here we are”. We are beginning to see alumni bring their own children, so this is one area of exception; what was important to the parent is now important for that parent’s child. Overall however, families who present their children for membership already have their own opinion about whether the child is predisposed to musicality; this makes our job fairly easy.
Because Hummingbird is crafted for such young children (and we have also conducted classes for families and tots as young as 18 months old), it’s my feeling that this “pre-audition” phenomenon is not as prevalent. With children so young, more families are in the mindset of “music is a vitamin that all children should take”, or at least be exposed to until it’s determined if it’s an activity with which the child wishes to continue. Therefore, we are starting to see children enrolling in the program with some diagnosis of special needs. There was *Kara, with predominantly physical disabilities due to her hemispherectomy to treat epilepsy. There was *Melinda, who had crano-facial deformities and was born lacking her left ear. *Kayla arrived at the program nearly completely non-verbal due to ASD; she made incredible strides and will now enter our hybrid training choir, Kantisto. *Carlos rampaged through our rehearsal one evening, struggling with aggression and behaviour disorders that had not yet been diagnosed. Two children were specifically enrolled in Kolibro because of their language delays. Their parents had accurately assessed that music and movement is an excellent group activity to encourage such issues.
*Names have been changed
Our goals for Hummingbird include making it accessible to any child in the age range of four to six. Therefore, necessarily, children with special needs are welcome. As the mother of a special needs child, I’m especially attuned to parents who walk in my door and say, “There’s something about my child you should know”. I am not trained in any kind of special needs education, but I will listen to a parent, apply my experience where necessary and try to learn about the challenge so that the child will have the best chance of success in our program.
The Problem
As children move up in the ranks of the choir, it appears that there are less and less accommodations available, to allow a child with special needs to continue to progress through the levels.
After Hummingbird comes Earlybird, for children aged seven to nine, although attempts are made to stay flexible for younger children with advanced skills, or a child who simply needs more than two years in this earliest training choir. At this time, no assessment is needed for a child to move from Hummingbird into Earlybird; it is based on the recommendation of the conductor (myself). However, to move from Earlybird to Explorers beyond that into Pipers, and finally to Songbirds, requires an assessment. There are distinct musical capabilities that must be demonstrated, and much deliberation goes into ensuring that a chorister is ready for the challenges of the next choir. In short, children who reach the level of Songbirds are truly exceptional musicians. Is there a place here for the special needs child?
Stepping back momentarily, a more general, community-based question might be “Does musical inclusion mean that disabled musicians must be performing alongside non-disabled, or is the goal of inclusivity attained with segregated community music organizations?
The Literature
Community music making solely for disabled individuals is not uncommon by any stretch of the imagination.
· Baldwin (2017) described five performing ensembles in communities across the US, specifically for youth and adults with special needs.
· In Alabama, Debra Jenkins formed and operates an after-school dance program for kids with special needs.
· There is currently a large choir made up of those with disabilities in the Niagara region of Southern Ontario called Momentum.
· The organization Disability Arts International maintains listings of many arts organizations, studios, companies, etc. that feature or are directed by people with disabilities. Their specific focus however, is on professional performance art, as opposed to community based or participatory music.
From an integrative approach, we see:
· In Germany, there is a pop music group called Station 17 that is made up of disabled and non-disabled members (Elflein, 2009).
· In 2015, there was a beautiful video produced out of Hungary that featured a severely disabled nine year old boy singing a Hungarian folk song, to the accompaniment of a professional orchestra and choir (Tiszai, 2016).
· The work of Tiszai (2016) also describes a number of community music projects whereby disabled and non-disabled musicians performed in concerts or flash-mobs.
· In “ Re-voicing: Community choir participation as a medium for identity formation amongst people with learning disabilities”, author Hassan (2017) describes a choir that was formed of disabled and non-disabled individuals, with the express purpose of providing a music soundtrack to a movie on the topic of hate crimes against those with disabilities.
We can see here examples of organizations who operate with only disabled musicians, and projects or groups that integrate disabled people with non-disabled. Do disabled musicians “need” non-disabled musicians to legitimize their performance?
This leads to the question, should all community music organizations be obligated to open their doors to all abilities?
The Purpose
Originally when I conceived of the idea for this project, my mind went directly to the end of the process—to a solution or set of actions that would perhaps shift the “perfection performance” mentality of not only the staff of the children’s choir and conductors, but the children as well. I imagined performances by the younger training choirs for schools or organizations catering to special needs youth or adults. I imagined a buddy program that would allow individuals with special needs to attend rehearsals with the older training choirs, or even Songbirds and receive choral instruction, perhaps even leading to some kind of performance. I imagined partnered fund raisers, where the choir would be featured at a fundraiser for a day program for adults with special needs, and likewise the program would hold a fundraiser in support of the choir.
However, I am seeing a number of foundational issues that would need to be addressed before any kind of concrete action could be attempted.
Factual foundation: While I do have a very long history with my organisation (Artistic staff member since 2001, also a chorister from 1986-1993) many things that I have described here are simply my observations, suspicions and intuition. Before any action plans can be instituted, these observations need to be supported with reliable facts. I propose that these facts be gathered through a quasi-research based model of document analysis, focus group round-table discussion, and individual or family interviews.
Dialogue: Strongly related to the factual foundation building, is the concept of dialogue. We will not know how the families of special needs children, who have been a part (or still are) of our organization, feel about how well their children have been accommodated unless open, receptive dialogue is promoted through the quasi-research process.
Through these two guiding principles, the organization may be encouraged to come face to face with the privilege we are inadvertently promoting.
Quasi-Research Groups
The Artistic Director, Artistic staff and Executive director are accustomed to meeting together and share a common functional goal therefore they would form one research group. The Community Board may meet with the Artistic and Executive Directors but the Office staff and Artistic staff do not. Therefore the Community Board would be a second research group. The third group I have identified are the current and past families of children with special needs who have been members of the choir. As they would be interviewed individually, there is no need to separate this group into current and past.
Research Questions for the Artistic Director, Artistic Staff and the Executive Director:
· What has been your experience so far with children with special needs in the choral setting?
· What aspects of the choral program do you feel may be difficult for a child with special needs to navigate? Consider the following broad categories of disability:
o Physical: Eg. Wheelchair bound, assistive device needed (cane, walker, braces), speech impediments, hearing or visual impairments
o Intellectual: Eg. Cognitive delay, sensory disorder, learning disability
o Behavioural: Eg. Social dysfunction, anxiety, depression, aggression, ODD
· Is there any type of disability that you see as being completely incompatible with the vision of our choir?
· Do you feel the choir should be inclusive to children with special needs?
· What would be your concerns, should the choir begin to attract more children with special needs?
Research Questions for the Community Board:
· Do you feel that our choral organization is currently inclusive to children with special needs?
· Do you feel that our choral organization holds an obligation to be inclusive to children with special needs?
· What would be your concerns, should the choir begin to attract more children with special needs?
Research Questions for the families of past members with special needs:
· Before your child joined our choir, did you have any thoughts or impressions concerning the organization’s abilities to be inclusive to your child?
· Between what dates was your child a member of our choir?
· Of which choir level(s) was your child a member?
· Why did your child join our choir?
· Did you have any concerns about how your child would manage before they began attending rehearsals?
· Were any of those concerns verified or dismissed?
· What measures did you take to facilitate awareness about your child’s special needs among the artistic staff?
· How did the staff respond?
· Why did your child leave our choir?
· In hindsight, do you feel that our choir took satisfactory measures to adapt their programming to include your child?
· Do you feel that the choir is adequately concerned with issues of inclusivity for children with special needs?
Questions to the families of current members with special needs:
· How long has your child been a member of our organization?
· Before your child joined our choir, did you have any thoughts or impressions concerning the organization’s abilities to be inclusive to your child?
· Of which choir level is your child a member?
· Why did your child join our choir?
· Did you have any concerns about how your child would manage before they began attending rehearsals?
· Were any of those concerns verified or dismissed?
· What measures did you take to facilitate awareness about your child’s special needs among the artistic staff?
· How did the staff respond?
· Do you have any concerns about how your child will manage if they choose to continue progressing through the higher levels of the choir?
· Do you feel that the choir is adequately concerned with issues of inclusivity for children with special needs?
These research questions would be posed to the Artistic Director, Executive Director and Artistic staff, and the Community Board in the form of round-table discussions. They would likely be recorded, and the researcher (myself) would take notes as well as transcribe all the discussions.
The research questions for the present and past member families would happen as private interviews, with just parents/caregivers of the choristers. If the chorister is of an age that they can discuss their own feelings concerning inclusion in the choral atmosphere, then some questions would be directed at them along the lines of:
· Were there any adaptations made for you as a member of the choir?
· How did this make you feel?
· Did you feel that your disability was well understood by the staff and other choristers in the choir?
· Did you experience any episodes of discrimination because of your disability?
· Did you feel fully accepted as a member of the choir?
· What advice would you have for the leaders of the choir, in order to make the organization more sensitive to the needs of those with disabilities?
The results of these round-table discussions and private interviews would be collated into a report and presented to the Community Board, Artistic director and Executive director with the hopes that an action plan could be established. I realize this may be a rather simplistic forecast of only one possible outcome. It is quite possible that a consensus may not be achievable; the choir has, after all been in operation for many years. As I wrote about in the opening, there is a world-stage reputation that I suspect will be the biggest issue that could be faced during this process.
References
Elflein, D. (2009). A Popular Music Project and People with Disabilities Community in Hamburg, Germany: The Case of Station 17. Popular Music, 28(3), 397-410. Retrieved July 19, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/40541514
Disability Arts International, https://www.disabilityartsinternational.org/about-us/
Hassan, N. (2017). Re-voicing: Community choir participation as a medium for identity formation amongst people with learning disabilities. International Journal of Community Music, 10(2), 207–225. https://doi.org/10.1386/ijcm.10.2.207_1
Jenkins, D. Dreaming with Your Feet, https://debranjenkins.wordpress.com/
Magyarország az én hazám, (9 year old boy performing with orchestra)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BnWnfuFKig
Tiszai, L. (2016). Music Belongs to Everyone: Moments of Progress in Community Music Therapy with Musicians with Severe Disabilities. Voices : a World Forum for Music Therapy, 16(3). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v16i3.853
Momentum Choir, https://momentumchoir.ca/
I work for a community children’s choir organization that enjoys a reputation for excellent, innovative performances at venues all over the world. Our choir programs have quadrupled over the last fifteen years and we have gone from an artistic and office staff of four, to ten. While there are many admirable things about this notoriety, I have noticed a population that is underserved in our organization.
I teach a program called Hummingbird, and for the last two years we have averaged sixty children in this program, divided into three levels and running over five to six weekly rehearsals. The children are between the ages of four and six years old, and there is no audition to enter the program, unlike the four training choirs above mine which operate for children seven through eighteen years of age. I should clarify that we don’t refer to these appointments as auditions, but rather “assessments”, to determine best placement and while I have no reliable statistics, I would estimate that we accept a percentage of children into our choirs somewhere in the high nineties. It’s rather rare for a child to be turned away, and usually in those situations the conductor offers support and recommendations to the family, often along the lines of finding the child some one-on-one help and an invitation to return for reassessment after this has been accomplished.
It has long been my suspicion that a type of pre-audition process occurs in families that bring their children to our choir. Often the type of description we hear from parents around the assessments is that the child “loves to sing”, and “Sings all around the house”. We much less commonly hear thoughts along the lines of “My child knows nothing about singing, and I thought they really should, so here we are”. We are beginning to see alumni bring their own children, so this is one area of exception; what was important to the parent is now important for that parent’s child. Overall however, families who present their children for membership already have their own opinion about whether the child is predisposed to musicality; this makes our job fairly easy.
Because Hummingbird is crafted for such young children (and we have also conducted classes for families and tots as young as 18 months old), it’s my feeling that this “pre-audition” phenomenon is not as prevalent. With children so young, more families are in the mindset of “music is a vitamin that all children should take”, or at least be exposed to until it’s determined if it’s an activity with which the child wishes to continue. Therefore, we are starting to see children enrolling in the program with some diagnosis of special needs. There was *Kara, with predominantly physical disabilities due to her hemispherectomy to treat epilepsy. There was *Melinda, who had crano-facial deformities and was born lacking her left ear. *Kayla arrived at the program nearly completely non-verbal due to ASD; she made incredible strides and will now enter our hybrid training choir, Kantisto. *Carlos rampaged through our rehearsal one evening, struggling with aggression and behaviour disorders that had not yet been diagnosed. Two children were specifically enrolled in Kolibro because of their language delays. Their parents had accurately assessed that music and movement is an excellent group activity to encourage such issues.
*Names have been changed
Our goals for Hummingbird include making it accessible to any child in the age range of four to six. Therefore, necessarily, children with special needs are welcome. As the mother of a special needs child, I’m especially attuned to parents who walk in my door and say, “There’s something about my child you should know”. I am not trained in any kind of special needs education, but I will listen to a parent, apply my experience where necessary and try to learn about the challenge so that the child will have the best chance of success in our program.
The Problem
As children move up in the ranks of the choir, it appears that there are less and less accommodations available, to allow a child with special needs to continue to progress through the levels.
After Hummingbird comes Earlybird, for children aged seven to nine, although attempts are made to stay flexible for younger children with advanced skills, or a child who simply needs more than two years in this earliest training choir. At this time, no assessment is needed for a child to move from Hummingbird into Earlybird; it is based on the recommendation of the conductor (myself). However, to move from Earlybird to Explorers beyond that into Pipers, and finally to Songbirds, requires an assessment. There are distinct musical capabilities that must be demonstrated, and much deliberation goes into ensuring that a chorister is ready for the challenges of the next choir. In short, children who reach the level of Songbirds are truly exceptional musicians. Is there a place here for the special needs child?
Stepping back momentarily, a more general, community-based question might be “Does musical inclusion mean that disabled musicians must be performing alongside non-disabled, or is the goal of inclusivity attained with segregated community music organizations?
The Literature
Community music making solely for disabled individuals is not uncommon by any stretch of the imagination.
· Baldwin (2017) described five performing ensembles in communities across the US, specifically for youth and adults with special needs.
· In Alabama, Debra Jenkins formed and operates an after-school dance program for kids with special needs.
· There is currently a large choir made up of those with disabilities in the Niagara region of Southern Ontario called Momentum.
· The organization Disability Arts International maintains listings of many arts organizations, studios, companies, etc. that feature or are directed by people with disabilities. Their specific focus however, is on professional performance art, as opposed to community based or participatory music.
From an integrative approach, we see:
· In Germany, there is a pop music group called Station 17 that is made up of disabled and non-disabled members (Elflein, 2009).
· In 2015, there was a beautiful video produced out of Hungary that featured a severely disabled nine year old boy singing a Hungarian folk song, to the accompaniment of a professional orchestra and choir (Tiszai, 2016).
· The work of Tiszai (2016) also describes a number of community music projects whereby disabled and non-disabled musicians performed in concerts or flash-mobs.
· In “ Re-voicing: Community choir participation as a medium for identity formation amongst people with learning disabilities”, author Hassan (2017) describes a choir that was formed of disabled and non-disabled individuals, with the express purpose of providing a music soundtrack to a movie on the topic of hate crimes against those with disabilities.
We can see here examples of organizations who operate with only disabled musicians, and projects or groups that integrate disabled people with non-disabled. Do disabled musicians “need” non-disabled musicians to legitimize their performance?
This leads to the question, should all community music organizations be obligated to open their doors to all abilities?
The Purpose
Originally when I conceived of the idea for this project, my mind went directly to the end of the process—to a solution or set of actions that would perhaps shift the “perfection performance” mentality of not only the staff of the children’s choir and conductors, but the children as well. I imagined performances by the younger training choirs for schools or organizations catering to special needs youth or adults. I imagined a buddy program that would allow individuals with special needs to attend rehearsals with the older training choirs, or even Songbirds and receive choral instruction, perhaps even leading to some kind of performance. I imagined partnered fund raisers, where the choir would be featured at a fundraiser for a day program for adults with special needs, and likewise the program would hold a fundraiser in support of the choir.
However, I am seeing a number of foundational issues that would need to be addressed before any kind of concrete action could be attempted.
Factual foundation: While I do have a very long history with my organisation (Artistic staff member since 2001, also a chorister from 1986-1993) many things that I have described here are simply my observations, suspicions and intuition. Before any action plans can be instituted, these observations need to be supported with reliable facts. I propose that these facts be gathered through a quasi-research based model of document analysis, focus group round-table discussion, and individual or family interviews.
Dialogue: Strongly related to the factual foundation building, is the concept of dialogue. We will not know how the families of special needs children, who have been a part (or still are) of our organization, feel about how well their children have been accommodated unless open, receptive dialogue is promoted through the quasi-research process.
Through these two guiding principles, the organization may be encouraged to come face to face with the privilege we are inadvertently promoting.
Quasi-Research Groups
The Artistic Director, Artistic staff and Executive director are accustomed to meeting together and share a common functional goal therefore they would form one research group. The Community Board may meet with the Artistic and Executive Directors but the Office staff and Artistic staff do not. Therefore the Community Board would be a second research group. The third group I have identified are the current and past families of children with special needs who have been members of the choir. As they would be interviewed individually, there is no need to separate this group into current and past.
Research Questions for the Artistic Director, Artistic Staff and the Executive Director:
· What has been your experience so far with children with special needs in the choral setting?
· What aspects of the choral program do you feel may be difficult for a child with special needs to navigate? Consider the following broad categories of disability:
o Physical: Eg. Wheelchair bound, assistive device needed (cane, walker, braces), speech impediments, hearing or visual impairments
o Intellectual: Eg. Cognitive delay, sensory disorder, learning disability
o Behavioural: Eg. Social dysfunction, anxiety, depression, aggression, ODD
· Is there any type of disability that you see as being completely incompatible with the vision of our choir?
· Do you feel the choir should be inclusive to children with special needs?
· What would be your concerns, should the choir begin to attract more children with special needs?
Research Questions for the Community Board:
· Do you feel that our choral organization is currently inclusive to children with special needs?
· Do you feel that our choral organization holds an obligation to be inclusive to children with special needs?
· What would be your concerns, should the choir begin to attract more children with special needs?
Research Questions for the families of past members with special needs:
· Before your child joined our choir, did you have any thoughts or impressions concerning the organization’s abilities to be inclusive to your child?
· Between what dates was your child a member of our choir?
· Of which choir level(s) was your child a member?
· Why did your child join our choir?
· Did you have any concerns about how your child would manage before they began attending rehearsals?
· Were any of those concerns verified or dismissed?
· What measures did you take to facilitate awareness about your child’s special needs among the artistic staff?
· How did the staff respond?
· Why did your child leave our choir?
· In hindsight, do you feel that our choir took satisfactory measures to adapt their programming to include your child?
· Do you feel that the choir is adequately concerned with issues of inclusivity for children with special needs?
Questions to the families of current members with special needs:
· How long has your child been a member of our organization?
· Before your child joined our choir, did you have any thoughts or impressions concerning the organization’s abilities to be inclusive to your child?
· Of which choir level is your child a member?
· Why did your child join our choir?
· Did you have any concerns about how your child would manage before they began attending rehearsals?
· Were any of those concerns verified or dismissed?
· What measures did you take to facilitate awareness about your child’s special needs among the artistic staff?
· How did the staff respond?
· Do you have any concerns about how your child will manage if they choose to continue progressing through the higher levels of the choir?
· Do you feel that the choir is adequately concerned with issues of inclusivity for children with special needs?
These research questions would be posed to the Artistic Director, Executive Director and Artistic staff, and the Community Board in the form of round-table discussions. They would likely be recorded, and the researcher (myself) would take notes as well as transcribe all the discussions.
The research questions for the present and past member families would happen as private interviews, with just parents/caregivers of the choristers. If the chorister is of an age that they can discuss their own feelings concerning inclusion in the choral atmosphere, then some questions would be directed at them along the lines of:
· Were there any adaptations made for you as a member of the choir?
· How did this make you feel?
· Did you feel that your disability was well understood by the staff and other choristers in the choir?
· Did you experience any episodes of discrimination because of your disability?
· Did you feel fully accepted as a member of the choir?
· What advice would you have for the leaders of the choir, in order to make the organization more sensitive to the needs of those with disabilities?
The results of these round-table discussions and private interviews would be collated into a report and presented to the Community Board, Artistic director and Executive director with the hopes that an action plan could be established. I realize this may be a rather simplistic forecast of only one possible outcome. It is quite possible that a consensus may not be achievable; the choir has, after all been in operation for many years. As I wrote about in the opening, there is a world-stage reputation that I suspect will be the biggest issue that could be faced during this process.
References
Elflein, D. (2009). A Popular Music Project and People with Disabilities Community in Hamburg, Germany: The Case of Station 17. Popular Music, 28(3), 397-410. Retrieved July 19, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/40541514
Disability Arts International, https://www.disabilityartsinternational.org/about-us/
Hassan, N. (2017). Re-voicing: Community choir participation as a medium for identity formation amongst people with learning disabilities. International Journal of Community Music, 10(2), 207–225. https://doi.org/10.1386/ijcm.10.2.207_1
Jenkins, D. Dreaming with Your Feet, https://debranjenkins.wordpress.com/
Magyarország az én hazám, (9 year old boy performing with orchestra)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BnWnfuFKig
Tiszai, L. (2016). Music Belongs to Everyone: Moments of Progress in Community Music Therapy with Musicians with Severe Disabilities. Voices : a World Forum for Music Therapy, 16(3). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v16i3.853
Momentum Choir, https://momentumchoir.ca/