{"id":2272,"date":"2020-03-12T10:00:52","date_gmt":"2020-03-12T09:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/?p=2272"},"modified":"2020-03-26T14:10:59","modified_gmt":"2020-03-26T13:10:59","slug":"beyond-messiaens-words-the-post-verbal-world-of-dementia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2020\/03\/12\/beyond-messiaens-words-the-post-verbal-world-of-dementia\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Messiaen&#8217;s Birds: The Post-Verbal World of Dementia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Article Summary by Dr. Stuart Wood<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Beyond Messiaen\u2019s Birds <\/em>was inspired by a realisation I had during an arts-based research workshop. The discussion was around how music therapists or other music practitioners make connections with people who are living with dementia. As I tried to put into words how we try to find music for any situation, I landed on the phrase, \u201cwe hear the everyday world as if it is already music\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Of course we all then thought of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=h_ik4VMcLkA\"><u>John Cage<\/u><\/a>, and the whole artistic tradition of found sound and before that, found object. It made me see that musical practice in dementia care is a form of found performance, in which our responses as practitioners are musical hearings and enhancements of the natural sounds in a dementia care environment.<\/p>\n<p>From a different discipline, there is a line of composers who have built musical works from direct transcription of the everyday. Famously this is associated with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sgNeH9_8l0w\"><u>Messiaen<\/u><\/a>, who made exquisite pieces from the assembly only of bird song transcriptions. Others too, in different ways, have made use of this method: not of creating sound effects depicting nature or machinery but of writing down exactly what has been said or sounded, using musical notation, and seeing how their aesthetic ear makes sense of it. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VUDMWEzZ9qU\"><u>Enescu<\/u><\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=XnTmtjO6IKI\"><u>Ravel<\/u><\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=U9MTxLCv_nw\"><u>Reich<\/u><\/a> for example have all given seminal musical works based on this kind of verbatim musical transcription.<\/p>\n<p>So this paper being published in BMJ Medical Humanities explores that ear as a research method in dementia care. It reports on a Wellcome funded art-based ethnographic study called Aeriel in which I took recordings of interactions from personal care and mealtimes in care homes, then wrote detailed musical scores transcribing only the sounds I heard: like voices, crockery, taps, radios and kitchen trolleys. The subsequent discussion offered insights into how we might think about the \u2018post-verbal\u2019 in dementia care, and how clinical understanding might be enabled by a musical research methodology.<\/p>\n<p>Listen to Dr Stuart Wood discuss the article below.<\/p>\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-2272-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2020\/03\/Wood-Stuart-Beyond-Messiaens-Words-The-Post-verbal-World-of-Dementia.m4a?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2020\/03\/Wood-Stuart-Beyond-Messiaens-Words-The-Post-verbal-World-of-Dementia.m4a\">https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/files\/2020\/03\/Wood-Stuart-Beyond-Messiaens-Words-The-Post-verbal-World-of-Dementia.m4a<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>Read the article at the <a href=\"https:\/\/mh.bmj.com\/content\/46\/1\/73\"><em>Medical Humanities<\/em> journal<\/a>.<!--TrendMD v2.4.8--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Article Summary by Dr. Stuart Wood Beyond Messiaen\u2019s Birds was inspired by a realisation I had during an arts-based research workshop. The discussion was around how music therapists or other music practitioners make connections with people who are living with dementia. As I tried to put into words how we try to find music for [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2020\/03\/12\/beyond-messiaens-words-the-post-verbal-world-of-dementia\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":345,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15028],"tags":[15044],"class_list":["post-2272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal-announcements","tag-research"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Beyond Messiaen&#039;s Birds: The Post-Verbal World of Dementia - Medical Humanities<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u201cWe hear the everyday world as if it is already music\u201d: Dr Stuart Wood discusses how sound and music enables music practitioners to connect with people with dementia in today&#039;s Medical Humanities article summary.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2020\/03\/12\/beyond-messiaens-words-the-post-verbal-world-of-dementia\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Beyond Messiaen&#039;s Birds: The Post-Verbal World of Dementia - 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