A Tablet Inclusive – the choir making music for all during lockdown

Recently, there was an amazing item on the BBC evening news. Fergal Keane went to Oxford to talk to families involved in the Soundabout Inclusive Choir. The choir provides a forum whereby people with profound learning disabilities and their families and carers come together to make music.

This initiative was started in February 2019 and the choir would meet together monthly to connect and make music. It was the high point of the month for many in the community. The experience proved hugely beneficial to people who often feel isolated and marginalised by society generally. It gave choir members an opportunity to express themselves and to experience real agency. They were important in their own right and the music they made together was beautiful and certainly made them proud. As choir member Elaine Walker puts it, “our voices may not conform to the perceived aesthetic norms, but we take our turn and everyone appreciates us. Then it’s someone else’s turn and we appreciate them.”

Once lockdown came into force, meeting together in this way become impossible. Soundabout, however, moved with great speed to provide itself with an effective online presence and a real capability to deliver many of its service through the internet. This is no substitute for human contact but is much better than leaving people isolated and ignored.

If anything, since Soundabout went online, involvement in the choir has grown and the intensity of participation increased. It is a lifeline.  Fergal Keane interviewed Sam, a man with severe learning difficulties and a compromised immune system, who exclaimed that singing he felt “more powerful” when he was singing.

Sam, who is a devout Roman Catholic and sings in the choir of his local church, today reported excitedly on the Soundabout Facebook page: “I’ve got some news for you . . . the choir is on the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Birmingham Twitter.” 

In addition to the choir, the organisation’s music practitioners now provide regular online events for children and adults with severe learning disabilities. Participants and their carers are encouraged to engage in multi-sensory music making activities, experiencing sounds and textures of all kinds. Participants and their families can and do interact by sending messages via Facebook’s "chat" function, explaining what they are doing and making requests. They are in charge.

There are daily morning sessions as well as regular longer get togethers a couple of afternoons a week. Last week, eighty people joined in on a journey into the African Bush. Together they imagined themselves on a safari looking for lions and giraffes and experimenting with the sound of the jungle.

Soundabout is a tiny charity, not Church based, and dependent on the generosity of individuals and donors.

With the help of Fr Timothy Radcliffe, OP, it has managed to secure generous support from among others the Sisters of the Holy Cross and the Charles Plater Trust. The organisation’s income, however, like many charities, has taken a big hit and at the same time the demands on it have increased.

Fr Radcliffe said: "Pope Francis, conscious of the isolation often experienced by people with profound and multiple learning disabilities, has urged the Church, at the global and the local level, to be more active in providing support. The Vatican, in describing the Pope’s meeting with persons with autism spectrum disorders, emphasised that its aim was also to uplift. The Pope, recognising the special contribution music can make in countering such isolation, therefore ensured that his meeting with participants took the form of a celebration. Pope Francis, in his address to participants, emphasised: 'Everyone should be committed to promoting acceptance, encounter and solidarity through concrete support and by encouraging renewed hope, thereby contributing to overcome the isolation and, in many cases, the stigma to which people with autism spectrum disorders are also subjected, and often their families too.'

"Soundabout focuses directly on providing such concrete support to children and adults so as to help such people understand better their environment and communicate more effectively with their friends and families."

With luck, the BBC coverage will help in fundraising so that the organisation can survive and grow.

The Inclusive Choir Christmas Service at the parish Church in Iffley, Oxford, before lockdown.

Tim Sheehy, who is retired, is a member of the the Advisory Board of Las Casas Institute, Blackfriars, Oxford. He worked for the CIIR for most of the 1970s and was then involved in administering the immediate precursor of Southern African Community (SADC). In the early 1990’s he established and managed European Commission’s coordination offices for the EU Programme for the Victims of Apartheid, successively in Namibia and then in South Africa.  Following that, set up a Secretariat on behalf of the EU in Amman, Jordan, to support regional economic cooperation with the context of the Middle East Peace Process. Tim Sheehy acted as an adviser to the EU on Zimbabwe for a number of years.