Replay now: Playing in an orchestra at the BBC Proms as a blind musician

Please note this transcript is automatically generated, so may contain errors.

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Hello and welcome to the Sound Without Sight podcast. In this episode, we welcome recorder player James Risdon, whose work has led him from Bach to Bowie, and the Middle Ages to minimalism.

He recently performed with Paraorchestra and the Breath at the BBC Proms.

James speaks about his experience as an orchestral musician, focusing on the Proms concert, including the techniques he used to learn his parts, combining braille music and audio, his experiences of navigating rehearsals, and of course, performing in

the Proms itself, including some audio clips. This podcast was recorded live, as part of the Sound Without Sight monthly meetup for September 2025, featuring questions from our community.

Well, Jay and I talked about this. My motivation wasn’t really just to talk about me. You’ll be glad to know this is not really about me and how wonderful it was to play in the Proms.

Although, of course, like many people, I grew up watching the Proms on telly and thinking, wow, that’s amazing. I’d love to do that one day.

Never, ever thinking I would have the remotest opportunity to play in an orchestra or be a soloist and be part of this amazing classical festival. So it really came out of the blue, and it’s a complete joy.

But my real motivation is, I suppose, to, yes, relive some of the memories and share some of those, and share a little bit about how I went about the process of preparing to play in the Proms and the process itself on the day and rehearsals and all

that kind of stuff. But actually, my main purpose is to do something to inspire young blind musicians and their parents and teachers, and just show that actually with a bit of preparation, a bit of hard work and a bit of thought and the tools to do

the job, of course, it is absolutely possible for a blind person to play in an orchestra. And that’s not something that I grew up thinking.

So I hope that that’s a little small way in which the world has maybe changed in the many years since I was at that age.

So what I’m going to cover, so I’m going to talk a little bit about, I’m just going to set the scene and the context really for playing in orchestras, because I think that’s important. So a little bit of background. A bit about Paraorchestra.

So for those of you who don’t know what Paraorchestra is and who it is, I’ll talk a little bit about that. Then I’ll talk about the music and how I went about learning it.

We’ll cover some practical considerations, things like seeing conductors and getting on and off stage, and those kind of things. Then just a final couple of reflections.

So I suppose the first thing to say is that there aren’t many of us who have actually done this.

2:43

Orchestral Playing Challenges

So this is quite a rare thing. I think I’m possibly unique now in having been a former Paralympian and playing at the Proms. I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel like there are many blind people who have played in the Proms.

There are a couple. So my good friend Takashi Kikuchi, viola player, played last year with Paraorchestra. Kate Risdon, my sister, played seven years ago, also made her Proms debut at the age of 47, which I think must be a bit of a sibling record.

She played with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Resound, which is a small chamber group embedded in the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. I’m pretty sure there are others.

I’m pretty sure Matt Wadsworth might have played in the Proms, but I haven’t specifically asked him. Matt is a blind theorbo player and has done a huge amount of orchestral playing in his very long and illustrious career.

Some of you may remember the name Nobuyuki Tsuji. He appeared in 2013, but not in the orchestra, actually a soloist in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto, and that’s available on YouTube.

It’s well worth a listen, not least, for the rousing reception at the end. It’s an absolutely uplifting experience to hear the end of that concerto, even online through some dodgy PC speakers.

And going back years, there are actually lots and lots of accounts of blind musicians, usually playing a soloist with an orchestra, but it’s certainly not something new.

If any of you want some background reading to give you an idea of some of the concert programs and the amount of music that blind musicians were learning and performing regularly, I’d recommend a book called A Blind Musician Looks Back by Alfred

Hollins, who was a very famous blind organist and composer at the tail end of the 19th century into the 20th century. Some of the detail in there is absolutely fascinating.

There are, of course, a few differences between being a soloist and being an orchestral musician. I suppose being a soloist, it’s really the All About You show.

Most soloists are playing concertos, and most concertos are written to show off you as a soloist and a musician, and you, your instrument, quite often to breaking point on both. But to some degree or other, you are the subject of that show.

And therefore, much of the artistic direction in terms of tempo, how fast you play, rubato, how much time you take, and how the phrasing is done, and coming in and all that kind of stuff is led by you.

And the conductor is in many ways the sort of mediator between you, the soloist and the orchestral musicians that he or she is directing. So that’s really the soloist role.

An orchestral musician, I think of sort of three Cs, combining, complementing with an E and coordinating. You are really one part, one small part of a huge machine. Might be 10 people in a sort of chamber, early music orchestra.

It might be 110 people if you’re playing a big symphonic piece. But you are basically one part of a huge machine, one part of the music.

And your job is really to play your part with as much accuracy and as much combining and coordinating with the other musicians as possible. It’s not really about you.

Obviously, you need to play your part with feeling and musicianship and all those kind of things. But actually, you are an ingredient in a much bigger cake. And that’s very much how I felt in this gig.

It isn’t really about me as a recorder player. Obviously, there are some more soloistic moments where you come to the fore and can be expressive and have the limelight for a fleeting moment.

But a lot of the time, you’re in a mix, a big orchestral mix. So it’s a very different discipline. It’s a very different thing to learn.

And I’ll come on to that in a bit. It’s a very different process having done both. I enjoy both, but I would say the orchestral musician is just a different discipline.

And of course, I suppose the other thing to say as blind musicians, most orchestras don’t really require you to play by ear or respond to what you hear or improvise.

And those are all skills which many of us who are blind musicians have sort of grown up either through circumstance or natural talent, or just that’s what we’ve done for a lot of our time.

So those aren’t things that most orchestras really want you to do. They want you to turn up and play what’s written, and they want you to do it when the conductor says.

I think it’s interesting to dwell on, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot really in the context of some of my professional work. Orchestral playing is really a mainstay of many sort of amateur and serious and professional musicians.

There are many, many hundreds of orchestras in the country, even around London. If you do a search for orchestras around London, you will find in the hundreds.

So many people who have played an instrument to a sort of intermediate, advanced level, many people who have, almost everybody who has studied music, have played orchestral concerts. It’s just a part of what you do.

So in the course of even your formation, your training, you will play dozens and dozens, probably hundreds of gigs. I estimate by contrast, I probably played about 10 or 15, maybe 20 professional orchestral gigs.

That’s quite a deficit and quite a lot to catch up. And so being a blind musician is still quite a rare thing. And it did lead me to have sort of a pinch me moment.

Gosh, is this really happening to me? What have I done to deserve this? Or have I ended up here?

I wouldn’t say imposter syndrome. That’s a sort of new term. I don’t feel that because I’m confident in what I can do, but I do feel sometimes I don’t have as much experience as some of the sighted professional musicians alongside me.

So I feel like I’m working much harder to catch up and to be on that level. I did, however, play for about eight years in a youth orchestra when I was a teenager at a school in Worcester.

And I’m just going to share one very quick anecdote because I think it demonstrates beautifully that inclusion, and we are talking about inclusion here because it’s with the Paraorchestra and Paraorchestra, as I’ll mention, is about inclusion.

Inclusion isn’t a new thing. There were examples of inclusion happening decades ago. It just wasn’t really something that people talked about or considered, but it was something that happened.

So some of you may know there’s a famous orchestral overture by Mendelssohn called Fingal’s Cave or Hebrides Overture. It’s very famous. You can Google it.

There’s a clarinet solo. I was playing the clarinet in the middle of it, and it’s almost impossible to tell from the conductor how fast it should be played because the music slows down and there’s no pulse.

So it’s very difficult to place your first note and to know how fast it should be. And the conductor very sensibly said to all the other musicians, well, Jim, she used to call me Jim, Jim’s the only person that needs to see me and he can’t.

So I’m actually just going to stop conducting and you can just listen to him.

And that was a really beautiful sort of shift in power because rather than me trying to work out what she was trying to do and sort of always feel like it was a bit of a compromise, it actually put me in the driving seat.

So for that few seconds, I had complete control of this symphony orchestra, which was quite a cool thing. So learning dots, learning music for orchestral work is not always easy. And there’s a good reason for this.

As I said, you’re not the limelight, it’s not all about you.

So a lot of what you might be playing is not melodic, it’s not tunes, it’s not sort of the top line in whatever you can hear in an orchestra because that gets shared out among all the different families and instruments in the orchestra.

You might be playing something that’s quite a filling part. I’m just going to ask Jay to play a file here to illustrate this. I’d like you to listen to this.

It’s the viola part of a very, very famous piece of music. I’d like you to imagine learning this as opposed to a tune or song that you might play normally. So Jay, let’s have a listen to this Mozart.

That’s great. Thank you. That sounds quite daunting to me.

It sounds like lots of notes, lots of patterns, something sort of sounding like they’re repeating, but not quite. It’s actually the viola part to Mozart’s 40th Symphony at the opening. You’ll know it when you hear it probably.

That’s the piece that Tekashi played in last year’s Prom. And I think it’s absolutely testament to Tekashi’s incredible mind and memory and capacity to learn music that he took on that challenge last year. It’s an incredible feat.

But it just shows you that actually what we’re dealing with here is sometimes on the face of it quite minimalist stuff. And only when you hear things in the context of what else is happening, does it all make sense.

So I’m going to leave that thought there and I’m going to come back and talk about the music in a second.

11:35

Paraorchestra Proms Project

But before I do, I just want to mention a little bit about Paraorchestra because there might be some of you outside the UK who don’t know what Paraorchestra is and who it is.

So Paraorchestra, obviously a combination of the words para, meaning beside or equal, and orchestra, taken very much, I suppose, in the same vein as the Paralympics.

And indeed Paraorchestra was established in 2012, the same year as the London Paralympics.

And it was a sort of personal and musical conviction and passion of one man, Charles Hazelwood, who was a renowned conductor, TV presenter, broadcaster, composer. And it came out of very personal reasons.

He has a daughter who’s disabled and he tells the story still now because it’s a very powerful story that he looked around the orchestra as he was conducting and didn’t see many disabled people represented, and obviously began to wonder where they

all were. And through his single-minded determination, he formed a group in 2012 and eventually landed the opportunity to play our first gig at the closing ceremony of London 2012 Paralympic Games, which was absolutely incredible.

There’s some clips on YouTube still, you can Google it. But it’s quite something that our first gig, as well as rearranging the Paralympic anthem between us, was accompanying Coldplay in one of their songs. Absolutely incredible.

And it sort of set the tone for what Paraorchestra became. It’s always done quite big splash moments. I think of them quite big shows, new things, innovative things.

It’s not like a regular orchestra that does sort of 250 gigs a year, playing programs all around, you know, a couple of times a week. Paraorchestra does mainly project work.

And I think what sets it apart, well, many things, but are the fact that it works in so many different genres. So Jay mentioned Coldplay, Minimalism, David Bowie, all the way through to Mozart.

And we did a rock album a couple of years ago with covers of all sorts of things. We’ve done an electroacoustic album with Hannah Peele. So the variety of music and the variety of settings in which Paraorchestra works is incredible.

It’s been established for 10 years as a charity based in Bristol. It’s already launched a Christmas single years ago.

It’s got two albums, one of which top the classical charts briefly, two Proms concerts now, and earlier this year, a Royal Philharmonic Society Award.

So it really has grown very successfully into an organization employing a good dozen or more people now. And with around 80 musicians on its books, around half of whom identify as deaf or disabled or neurodiverse.

I suppose the other thing, it doesn’t run like most orchestras because it does other stuff. So Paraorchestra is very determined to change the landscape for disabled musicians and artists.

So it has a very comprehensive stream of continuing professional development, which is not something that most orchestral players enjoy.

So there are funding streams, opportunity to pilot work, to trial projects, to run research and development projects, go and see other artists.

So anything that goes into planning your next project or developing your skills and your professional toolbox, Paraorchestra is really determined to help that as well as obviously giving people employment in the music business through its own work.

So it’s a very forward-looking organization, I think. And this prom sums up much of what Paraorchestra feels like it’s about. So let’s get into the concert itself.

One of the reasons Paraorchestra is not a regular orchestra is because Charles often talks at the beginning. Most orchestras come on in their suits, the conductor turns to the orchestra and they start playing. Charles isn’t like that.

So, Jay, do you want to play the intro for Charles and just give people a flavor of the beginning of this concert?

And we often get greeted with a rapturous sort of welcome from followers, and it does sort of set you up when you’re playing in the orchestra.

It does sort of set you up to sort of think, wow, this is quite something and what a thing to be part of it. It does, every single concert feels like a big occasion. So let’s just bring ourselves into the atmosphere of the concert.

So to tell us more, I am delighted to welcome our conductor, Charles Hazelwood.

Hello.

Charles, thank you so much for joining me.

And tell me why you have this absolute conviction that the Breath and Paraorchestra were destined to work together.

Oh, that’s a very good question. We first saw the Breath play live in Manchester last year. Now, many of you will know their records, which are fantastic.

But my goodness, nothing prepares you for when you see them live. And it’s like in that moment, my heart skipped several beats, my life began again. And I thought these guys and us are like a marriage made in heaven.

So here we are doing a thing about a year later.

Most orchestras don’t start their gigs with such enthusiasm. Charles has just boundless enthusiasm and communication skills. And one of the first projects I did with Paraorchestra was a TED Talk in Brussels.

And he has not lost any of the absolute conviction in this work and this power to communicate about music. And that really does make these concerts quite special, in my view. They’re great to be part of.

So what was this project?

17:09

Music Learning Strategies

This project was 12 songs, a collaboration with the Breath. I absolutely recommend that you check them out. An amazing band, just two of them.

Rihanna, Connelly and Stuart McCallum. Vocals, Rihanna plays flute and shrewty box and percussion, and Stuart’s a guitarist of many guitars. They make an incredible sound, but I just find their music absolutely captivating.

And even before I had a note of music for the project, I listened to their songs and just fell in love with the sound world and the riffs, and the character of these folk songs.

They’re not really folk songs at all, but they’re inspired by folk, I guess. What happened as well for Paraorchestra, we were a 36-piece orchestra combining strings, woodwind, brass, and a few other surprises along the way.

We commissioned a guy called Oliver Vibrance to write arrangements of these songs, but they’re really reimaginings with full orchestration, and they really lift the songs into a new world.

The parts that we were given, I have to say, were pretty complicated and pretty full. There was quite a lot to do, lots and lots of detail. I had 12 songs to learn about two months.

You could say, well, that’s about 60 days, 12 songs that doesn’t feel like even with a few days off, that’s four days per song. And I think someone posted a question about, how do you balance learning this and preparing and other things in life?

And that’s a really serious consideration. So before you start to sit down and memorize all of this, I’m not 17 anymore, I’m 47. My brain isn’t as quick as it used to be.

And so learning a whole program like this now does feel a little bit daunting because I know, A, my brain isn’t as elastic as it was. But also, life just fills up, doesn’t it?

I’m lucky enough to have a family and a day job and other gigs coming in between this. So it was a little bit daunting.

And so rather than thinking about, well, I’ve got four days to learn each song, I set myself a task of like, well, within about 10 days, I want to be really familiar with how these songs sound. I want to know which title is which.

I want to know, roughly, I want to have an idea in my head of what each song sounds like. And if you play me a song, I want to know what it is, and I want to know roughly what I’ve got to do, and if I can hear any recorder parts in them.

So what I was sent are music XML files, which you can turn into braille. And I used for this project, the Samoy Braille converter. I could have equally used Goodfeel.

The results that they give in braille are pretty comparable for this project.

But I really would like to put on record a shout out to the Daisy Consortium, the Samoy Braille organization and Sarah Morley-Wilkins, who project manages a lot of this work.

The tools that have been developed and the ease with which now they can be used, and the fact that they are free of charge is absolutely life-changing and career-changing.

So the fact that I could be sent XML files and within really just a matter of a few key presses, five minutes, I can have a BRF, a braille-ready file on my computer ready to look at is exceptional, and that wouldn’t have been possible when I was

growing up. So I’ve talked about the XML files. So what I tended to do, my workflow ended up being listening intently to each song two or three times, and then reading along while I listen. I use Calliope as a media player.

I found it recently. I think it’s a really accessible, neat audio player, and importantly for me, what it allows me to do is play and pause really easily, but also rewind very easily and quickly to a suitable place.

Much of what I want to do is listening and rewinding, and I’ve found this the first media player I’ve actually had. There are probably many others, but it’s the first one I found that makes that really easy.

One of the things about the Braille, I’ll just talk about the Braille and what I did. Braille by default had all the bar numbers down the left, which is fine.

There were no rehearsal markers in this music, but what it did do is put all of the time signatures and other directions centered on a new line.

But all the things like verse and chorus and instrumental and middle eight and intro and outro, all those markers, which are really important, were sort of embedded in the music.

And although I think there’s probably a way I could have automated this so that that was different, I didn’t want to waste my time getting in broad in software, and I much prefer reading music dots.

So I edited the files in Duxbury, my Braille editor, so that all of the things like verse and chorus were centered and really, really easy to find with the correct bar number. The time signature changes are not really important for this.

There are time signature changes from sort of 4, 4 to 5, 4 or whatever else, but they’re not really a significantly important thing. So I didn’t want those cluttering up the page.

So yeah, the first job is to really identify the scale of the task at hand. How much have I got to do in each piece? What’s the nature of the part?

Is it solo? Is it coloring? Is it texture?

Is it patterns? Like we just heard, is it percussive? Is it rhythmic or is it melodic?

Is it free? So does any of it repeat? How do my parts fit in the overall structure?

Am I playing in the intro and then the first verse and then nothing else? Or am I playing in the outro or where am I? So what recorder will it be on?

Are there changes? It was actually scored for three different recorders, but I ended up using a few more just because some bits landed more naturally on different recorders, different pitches.

So what I wanted to do first in the first 10 days or so is get a really good overview of where each song was, recognize each song and also then have a really good overview of what I need to do, because that then tells me how much work have I got to

do, and where do I need to focus my efforts. Listening and reading together is really, really powerful. The audio alone would have been absolutely hopeless. I could not have learned this from audio alone.

I could have only learned it approximately.

The braille alone would have been incredibly challenging and very, very time consuming, because I wouldn’t have had the context of knowing how my part fitted with anyone else, and I wouldn’t have had any audio cues.

I’m going to illustrate this with the opening to a song called Antwerp, and you’ll hear in this piece that it’s very, very free to start with, and there are lots of little interjections, little stabs, they’re called, instrumental stabs.

In many instruments, there’s strings and winds, percussion. Only later, you’ll hear halfway through the guitar enters with a very rhythmic two-bar riff. In the audio files I was in, I was also sent audio files from the notation files.

This didn’t exist, so that part was blank and silent. It’s a really good indication of how stuff sounds different live than it does in a mock-up file that you might get.

So you’ll hear from this that it would have been impossible to learn this without notation, but also pretty impossible to learn it from notation alone without hearing what else was going on. So this is Antwerp, the beginning of. That was Antwerp.

Gives you a little flavor of some of the more tricky things to memorize certainly and count and learn. So what I did, I made a word file and I put any kind of questions or queries for the composer in here.

Any bits I thought were going to be really hard, any bits where I thought I might need a cue at the beginning, and sort of just made a mental note of a few questions, which I got answered and I’d done all that within about a month.

So we’re talking from the beginning of June now to the beginning of July. Some of the parts were really melodic and some parts were just coloring.

Some parts like the one I’m going to show you next were very on their own, very minimalist and quite difficult to hear. So this next piece is a bit from a song called Too Many Have Gone. It’s an instrumental section written for bass recorder.

Now, one of the slightly frustrating things is that you probably can’t hear the bass recorder. But it’s really important that it’s there because it dovetails with clarinets and violas and cellos.

So if I’ve got it wrong, it would have been actually quite confusing to other musicians and not particularly helpful. But actually in the overall mix, it’s not very high. It just adds a little bit of warmth and color.

But my part on its own sounds a little bit sort of like… And then a long rest and then more. In a not very regular pattern, none of this was sort of, you do four of these, and then three of these, and then four of these.

It wasn’t ever as regular as that. So it just needed learning. And the way I did this was to format the braille into phrases so that each of my phrases started on a new line, even if I didn’t need one.

And sometimes by doing that, I could recognize that, oh, this is a mirror image of these two bars, or a sort of mirror image with a bar’s rest in the middle, or this is a seven bar riff and it happens twice.

So by dissecting the braille a little bit and looking at it, you are sometimes able to deduce a pattern or a way of memorizing it and a way of visualizing it.

So when I play this, I’m actually visualizing the braille passing under my fingers, which is quite hard to explain to sighted people, but I’m sure many of you who read braille will understand. So, Jay, can we hear the…

Too many have gone in bass instrumental. And then I’m glad to say you arrive at the end of that instrumental miraculously in the right place and you can move on. As you can hear though, it’s really stunningly beautiful music.

Well, I think so anyway. And one of the things about learning music from scratch is that learning good music and nice music and music that you want to play is so much easier than playing music that you don’t really feel for.

And I have to say, many of the 12 songs contained earworms that became very consistent companions to me for the two months I was preparing this gig. And they still are, in fact.

Some of you have asked, and I was going to talk about it anyway, about seeing the conductor, because this gig was absolutely conducted.

Conductors not only bring you in and bring you off, but they also convey a little bit about how the music is to be played, whether it’s quiet and understated or big and bold, whether it’s very staccato or very smooth and legato.

So some of that you just have to know, and you just have to learn from the score or it might come out in discussion. In terms of coming in, a lot of it depends on counting and knowing where you are in a piece of music.

And sometimes that’s easy to do, and sometimes it’s a little bit more difficult to do. And there’s nowhere more difficult than at the beginning of a piece, when there’s no pulse that you can hear.

And I’m going to illustrate this with another song called Cleona’s Wave in a second. This is scored for flutes, recorder and strings. And you’ll hear it’s the most beautiful, evocative, sort of ethereal melody.

You can try and work out what time it’s written in. You probably won’t because it changes all over the place. And the rhythm is actually quite sort of detailed.

And there are lots of triplets and notes tied over bars and all that kind of thing. It’s quite rhythmically precise. So playing it in time when you can’t see a beat is a real challenge.

And the way that we got around this is to have my neighbor, Clowness’ Lloyd Coleman, tap me on the shoulder. So he gave me a bar in, or tried to give me a bar in, and then kept tapping the pulse on my shoulder as we were playing.

I’ll talk a little bit more about that after we’ve heard this, the opening to Cleona’s Wave. There we go. It sounds so beautiful and effortless, sort of a silky thread hanging it all together.

But behind that was someone tapping me on the shoulder. It’s very low tech, there are probably higher tech ways of doing it.

I know there have been various projects at various times to have some kind of Bluetooth receiver or some kind of wearable haptic device. So I’ve had someone offstage with a microphone and an earpiece in my ear and being queued.

But for this, we went low tech and had someone next to me. And it worked absolutely fabulously in rehearsals and all was going fine. It worked pretty much all right in the concert.

It’s probably something that needs to be refined and without getting into too much detail, the shoulder is not the most sensitive part of the body. And probably the thigh would be more sensitive.

I can’t say I was too worried about being tapped on the thigh by colleague. But actually, my motivation for using the shoulder was I wanted it to be discreet. And I had not actually realized how many people could see it from the audience.

So it was a lesson to me as a blind person that actually, what I think is quite discreet and quite subtle, actually seemed to be quite visible to most of the audience. And in a way, that’s nice. It’s nice to see inclusion happening in front of you.

But I’m always quite keen to sort of see if you can sort of hide some of the mystique. So we might refine that in the future, but it worked pretty well. It’s 20 to 8, so I’m going to stop there.

And sort of, I mean, there’s a couple of other things I was going to mention, but that’s the sort of majority of what I’d hope to sort of say.

One other thing, actually one other thing before I, well, so while you’re queuing up your questions, when I started with the Braille, I just to get a sense of what I had to do in a piece, I would put all of my entries on a new line and make sure that

it had a bar number, regardless of where it was. When I got to know the pieces a little bit better and did a bit more listening, I realized that actually what would be more helpful is to show, for example, where a chorus might start or where a riff

might start. Actually, what I’m playing might not start at the beginning of that, it might be two bars or three bars into it.

I then went through the process of reformatting stuff, showing the bar number of where the chorus and the riff or the pattern might start and showing maybe a bar’s rest at the beginning of the line before my part.

What this helped me do is actually work out where I fitted into the song structure. That was a really helpful moment. There’s one example I can think of which was really helpful.

In one part of another song, I nominally had a chorus and then nine bars rest before I came in. Nine bars is a lot to count, isn’t it? It’s quite tricky.

What happens if you miss the first bar and where are you in that cycle? Actually, what I realized is it was eight bars of a riff, an eight bar riff, and then I came in on bar two of the next riff round.

So once you know that, you can just listen to the baseline. You don’t have to count. Counting is quite stressful and prone to error.

But if you listen to a baseline and know where you are in that cycle, it’s much easier to make sure that you come in in the right place. So that was one example of how I reformatted my scores as I got to know the music.

And you’ll see it’s quite labor intensive, some of this. And it might sound like a lot of work that other musicians won’t have to do. And that is of course true.

But for me personally, I find that tinkering with all of these things and getting really deeply involved in the pieces in quite granular detail is actually the way I get inside them and learn them. And it helps me visualize them when I’m playing.

So that’s an example of how I went about the memorizing process. I’m going to stop. I can hear there are a few hands up already.

So I know Jay and Sam and Tilly will take questions and I’ll do my best to answer them. But thank you so much for listening. And I hope some of that’s been of interest.

Thank you so much, James.

34:35

Q&A Reflections

Yeah, really, really interesting. So yeah, we’ve got one hand up from Ella. We’ll come to you in just a second, Ella.

Firstly, I wanted to go to just a couple that we had in advance. So one from Scarlett Humphrey. So slightly apart from the concert, do you feel that starting an instrument at a young age is important?

And do you feel like getting through graded exams helps you as a musician? Or do you feel like you can develop as a musician at any age?

Gosh, loads of really great questions. Thanks, Scarlett. I don’t necessarily think you have to start young.

I know there are examples of people who came to their instrument much later than you might imagine, maybe in their teens or even later. So I don’t think that’s necessarily a big thing.

You obviously hear about the sort of Wunderkinds who started at the age of four and gave their first concerto performance at the age of six. That’s very eye-catching and headline-grabbing, but I don’t think it necessarily has to be that way.

In terms of doing grades, well, I should absolutely hold my hands up here and say that in my day job, I work for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. And our main thing that we’re known for most is music exams.

So I suppose I’m contractually bound to say that music exams can be really good for you and they can give you a guided and structured path to learn your instrument and develop your all-round musical skills.

But if you ask me if they’re absolutely necessary, then of course, no, you don’t have to do an exam to get to a standard.

If you want to do auditions and that kind of thing, often going through the hoops of an exam to tell other people where you’ve got to in your musical training is sometimes necessary and helpful. But in and of themselves, no, I don’t think they are.

But actually, more than taking the exam, what they are good for is preparing yourself to perform something to someone, whether that be an examiner or a video or doing a practice performance to some friends and family or whatever else.

So the discipline of preparing for an exam is a little bit like the discipline of preparing for a concert. So in that way, I think they give a lot of transferable skills.

So one now about practice. I know you covered this slightly, but so Nayoung Lee is asking, how many hours do you practice daily?

I guess it’s a question about balancing, I guess, your skill on your instrument with learning music, and those are two different things really, aren’t they? Learning music and practicing your instrument. How do you strike that balance?

That is a really good point, and I think it’s something that all of us who are blind musicians will absolutely identify with.

Thank you Nayoung for posing the question. I actually saw the question last night and have been thinking all day about how to answer it.

Yeah.

Obviously, there are two things. You need to practice on your instrument because you need the facility on your instrument to play whatever is put in front of you with, if not ease, then you’ve got to be able to know that you can do it.

That’s an important part of any concert. I suppose like any professional musician, it’s about the combination of keeping your skills and what I would call your match fitness to use a sporting analogy up to date.

Yes, practicing long notes and breath control and scales and articulation and tone projection and all of the technical aspects of playing, absolutely. You still need to keep those practiced. They’ll be different for different musicians.

So brass players in particular do a lot of work just keeping their ombouchure and their lips in good shape. Pianists will do lots of finger exercises. Woodwind players like myself, it’s really about the apparatus of playing.

So it starts with your diaphragm, your breathing, your articulation, your finger work. And all of that goes, I suppose, for granted. You take that for granted.

And I suppose the more subtle answer is that you know, as you get more experience, what you need to do in order to be match fit and ready for any particular concert.

So as it happens in this particular concert, there was nothing massively technical that was too difficult to play.

There were bits which were, if I can say a little bit fiddly, because they were in strange keys for the recorder, and just little bits of passage work and little figurations which were a little bit tricky.

And you just have to have them under your fingers and play them enough so that you can just do them naturally on demand. But it wasn’t quite like playing a sort of rap man enough piano concerto, which I imagine is sort of technically terrifying.

But the second part of your question, really important, you have to balance the time that you spend doing all the things I’ve talked about and learning the music.

And as blind musicians, that obviously means that you don’t have twice the time in your life. If anything, like I said, I’ve got a family, I’ve got work, my time for practicing is an absolute premium.

So I have to really balance that time taken to play and the time taken to practice. And what I tend to do is do the two in hand in hand.

So as I’m learning, I will learn little passages, little patterns or figurations and I will practice them there and then and get them under my fingers, even before I’ve learned that in the context of the whole piece.

Thanks so much, James. Yeah. Great comprehensive answer there.

So we’ll go to Ella now. You have your hand up, Ella. You should now be able to unmute.

Hi, Ella.

Hello. So I mainly not so much to ask a question, but to just to talk about just comment a little bit, because you mentioned like specifically orchestral playing.

And while I am not a professional, I do play violin and viola in a community orchestra, and I was also in youth string ensemble.

So I would say I do want to say for me, I feel like there is a difference between being in a string section and being in a wind section, in that as a violist or violist, and just because attacks on string instruments are quite gentle, versus attacks,

say, on a trumpet or horn, which are very sharp, woodwinds are in between. But really, with strings, I find that if I, because I’m in a section of 10 or 12 people, it’s like, okay, well, if I am just a tiny bit late or coming in or just cutting off a

tiny bit early, no one is really going to notice. So I don’t really stress about people needing to tap me on the shoulder or anything, because basically, I practice with YouTube so much, and so I know where my entrances should generally be, and if

things are a little not perfect, I don’t stress about it too much, because basically, I know it’s not going to be really noticeable. I’m on the ball 99 percent of the time anyway.

But if this was a wind player, if you’re the only one on your part in an orchestral context, this is where I think it does become a little bit more, you will need more explicit cues or you will really need to know.

In this moment, I need to come in now because especially with say a brass section, if you are a fraction of a second late or cutting off a fraction of a second early, it’s really obvious. Same with woodwinds.

But whereas with strings, it’s just, yeah, I find that part. But I also just practicing with audio, I mean, I don’t memorize viola parts.

It doesn’t take me necessarily much longer to memorize the average viola part compared to the average violin part necessarily, because I practice with YouTube all the time.

Like I practice with the recordings and I’m listening a lot and reading along. And so basically I can tell, okay, well, this instrument is playing the melody and I have this and it just makes total sense. So I kind of just go through it that way.

But also just, especially for classical music, it’s being aware of things like sonata form or ABA form or rondo form. These things can really help too. So I would say just memorizing the piece.

But anyway, that’s, well, I would say one more thing about strings, Bowings.

I have not really found a great solution to this other than if there’s a Bowing that I’m doing wrong, someone just has to tell me that is one thing about strings, is that you can’t be totally sure if your Bowings match everyone else, you just have to

find your bowing yourself. Anyway, that’s basically all I have to say.

Ella, some amazing points there. Thank you. It’d be really interesting to talk to you more about your experiences of doing all this.

But it sounds like we’re doing a lot of similar stuff. I can’t talk about Bowing. I don’t even know which way to hold a viola, to be honest.

But I’m sure Takashi, who I mentioned before, would tell you a lot about this. Your last point about knowing where you are in a piece is just really important and hearing the cues around you.

And quite often in a rehearsal, I’ll just talk about this, Jay, because I know someone else asked about managing rehearsals and what the rehearsals look like. Quite often for me, it’s knowing what else is happening around me.

And although I had some mock-up files from Sibelius, so sort of MP3 exports of the music notation, they sound nothing like what you get in the room.

And what I found is that, and I find all the time I do this, things that you hear, that you practice with, cues that you practice with, sort of disappear in the room because we were amplified, so we had fold-back monitors.

And obviously the sound that we get in the orchestra is very different to the front of house sound that you’re hearing on these recordings. So a lot of the cues sort of disappeared and I couldn’t hear them.

And then a lot of things sort of emerged out of the sound world that I’d never heard before.

And I was sitting next to clarinets and flutes and I heard things which, I, to be honest, hadn’t really heard because Sibelius sort of homogenizes the sound a lot.

So the rehearsal time for me is very much about orientation and listening like crazy to what else is happening. And sometimes Charles will say, can we just run the second chorus from 64 or whatever? And I say, Ashley, can we go back like four bars?

Because I need to really nail the transition into this because actually hearing the downbeat of the chorus might be really important for me.

So being able to know myself where my pinch points are and where the difficult things are is really important because you don’t get many runs of this in a rehearsal.

So you need to be really on top of actually prioritizing where you’d really like to have another pass. And because Paraorchestra is so inclusive, I know that I can always say, can I just ask a question about what happens here?

And can I just hear this or can we just run this? And generally, there’s time to do that. But you can’t do that for every single place where you might have a question.

So you do need to be incredibly prepared and flexible. So yeah, it’s a challenge of knowing what you’re doing, but also then what else is going on around you.

Brilliant. Thank you very much. So we’ve got two hands up.

Yeah. We’ve got a question from Adele as well, and then we’ve got a couple more that were submitted in advance. But I think we’ll go to Alexandru first now and then Ian after that.

Hi, Alexandru.

Hey James.

Hi. This is Alexandru from Romania.

Nice to see you. How are you?

Great. Thank you. I just wanted to touch a little bit on getting on and off the stage, if you will.

From experience, it usually used to be one of my colleagues, Clarnet or friends from within the orchestra. What about you? I also experimented, for example, with landmarking the stage with ropes and stuff like that.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, it’s so uncommon that, yeah.

That’s a great question.

Thanks, Alex. It’s really good to see as well. I do this differently in different contexts.

I know Matt Wadsworth, who I mentioned earlier, when he does solo recitals, I’m sure he used to tell me that he strung up a little string from the stage door to the back of the chair where he would sit, and he could follow that, and it was very

discreet, and it didn’t really get in the way of what people were looking at on stage, and it meant that he had confidence to get on and off himself, especially if he was doing a solo gig. For these concerts with Paraorchestra, we tend to, certainly

the ones that I’ve been involved with, and I’m not involved in everything, but when I’ve been involved, we’ve done a very relaxed, informal gradual going on to stage. So we don’t do a big, now let’s welcome Paraorchestra on to stage, and we all emerge

from a back door, because actually logistically, it’s really difficult. You might have people who have physical difficulties. You might have people in wheelchairs. We often have a split stage.

We have an awful lot of electronics and microphones and monitors all over the place. So actually getting on and off stage just takes a bit of time.

And so rather than making a big deal of it, we tend to come on in a sort of 10-minute window and get set up. So what I do is get a sighted guide to take me on.

That might be someone that Paraorchestra have put in place for me because brilliantly, and in the model of absolute exemplar support, they provide me with a sighted guide for projects.

And that’s partly so my life is made easier and I can focus on what I’m doing.

But actually, in a stage environment, there are actually lots of instruments, and like I said, lots of wires and equipment, and it’s just not safe for me to be trampling around there on my own. So that’s great. So I get a guide on to stage.

I usually go on relatively early because I like to get my instruments set up next to me and I like to get, if I have music with me just for reference, I like to get that on a stand to the side. I like to know where my microphones are.

So I just like to get on stage. I don’t like to be rushed. But if I’m doing a gig in a sort of ensemble, and there’s no microphones or anything like that, I usually just ask someone if I can take an arm and go on stage with them.

And we rehearse it in advance. The crucial thing is that whatever you do, you rehearse in advance and the person guiding you knows what they’re doing. So it’s no good saying it two minutes to seven, oh, can you give us an arm on stage?

Because I don’t know where I’m going. That doesn’t work because you’re going to terrify the person guiding you. It’s going to look a shambles and the audience is going to be left thinking, oh gosh, I hope he’s in the right place.

Or why did that person turn him around? He’s not facing the right way or does he know there’s a step next to him and they’re not listening to you. So whatever I do in whatever context, I like to make sure that we’ve rehearsed it.

Even with someone I’ve played with for 15 years, we will quite often organize what we do going on and off stage as the last thing we do in the rehearsal. Because to be honest, you don’t want that stress, do you?

You want to know that that’s just going to happen. You don’t want to be worrying about it when you’ve got a whole head full of music.

Amazing. Thank you very much. Makes sense.

We had that same question from Bill as well, so thank you.

Yeah, thanks Bill. Good question.

We’re going to go to Ian now.

I’m just so impressed. I think it’s incredible. I take my hat off to you, sir.

Well, that’s very kind of you.

Well, I should explain, James gave me a few recorder lessons.

But talking about age, actually one thing I would mention, I think it was Scarlett saying about a good time to learn. And I’m 60 and I’ve just, jazz, James, no, I tried having to go up the recorder.

And I’ve also just started trying to learn the fiddle, which I appreciate is probably a bit of a challenge at 60. But I think it’s never too late. It’s not always about becoming professional, is it?

It’s actually just playing music because you enjoy it.

Yeah, it’s really important. You can learn music for any number of reasons, and learning an instrument because you want to know how the instrument works.

If you can’t see, you might not know what a fiddle looks like particularly, until you actually have a lesson and hold it and know how it works. So I think there are many reasons for learning an instrument.

The one thing I would say with age, in my experience, is that although I feel like my head is just full of day-to-day stuff, and all the concerns of everything in life, I feel like I know myself better, and I know more about music every day.

Every day is a school day, and you always learn something, whatever you do. I feel like I’m more aware of how I learn and what I need to do.

So even though when I got the parts for this, I was really quite daunted, and I actually so daunted that I didn’t tell anyone. Imagine getting your debut concert in the Proms, and you’re just absolutely too scared to tell anyone.

I didn’t put it on social media or tell anyone for a good few weeks, until I was confident I could really do an amazing job, which hopefully I did, but I was daunted, even at my age and experience.

But I think deep down, I knew that I had the skills to be able to do it.

All I needed to do was carve out the time and the constant time, and give myself time to learn and forget and relearn on all those things, and I knew that I wanted to be done a couple of weeks out. I think with age comes a bit of wisdom, hopefully.

I think had I been asked to do this when I was 18, I really would have struggled. I don’t think I had maybe the musical experience to do it, but also the self-awareness of knowing how to learn.

I think that’s a positive thing about maybe doing this in later years.

Thank you, James. Brilliant. Thank you.

No worries.

I’m going to bring in Adel now. Just while you’re unmuting Adel, I’ll read out the question that you submitted in advance.

You were asking about how Paraorchestra compares to a symphony orchestra, I guess, in terms of the makeup of the orchestra and what instruments are in it, that kind of thing.

In many ways, Paraorchestra flexes depending on the project that it is doing. Sometimes it might look like a very regular symphony orchestra. Last year when they played Mozart’s 40th Symphony, you had a string section, a wind section, timpani, brass.

But it can also look very different. We’ve done gigs where we’ve had three or four percussionists, three or four guitarists, synthesizers, and many other different instruments. I did one project where we had lots and lots of bass instruments.

So we had bass trombone, contrabass clarinets, octo bass string instruments.

So it’s really, really flexible, and rather than having full-time musicians who play in the orchestra all the time, the membership for each project changes depending on what’s needed. So for this project, we did have a string section.

We had woodwinds, but in the woodwinds, we had flute doubling, bass flute. We had obviously me on recorders. We had two bass clarinets, one doubling regular clarinet.

And we also had some small pipes. So the brass section had cornets, euphoniums and trombones. So it’s really, really varied.

It’s not really possible, I guess, to say what a standard Paraorchestra looks like, because there isn’t one.

We’re just going to go to George now. So George, you should be able to unmute yourself.

Good evening. So yeah, I’m George. I’m from Romania and I have actually two questions.

I’m going to keep it short. The first one would be, so I’ll give you a little bit of context. I finished the conservatory last year.

I got my bachelor’s degree into jazz piano, but I switched basically, and I’m going to start studying musicology. Because of that, I’m going to say I will try to do some studies and more research about blind musicians, blind composers and performers.

Maybe you know that there were some even in the classical period. There was this pianist called Maria Teresa van Paradis, who actually played in front of Mozart, one of his concertos.

Yes, yes, indeed.

And based on the reviews, she must have been great. I mean, but my question would be, do you think we as blind people could adapt or would that be any chance for us to be a part of a regular, let’s say more mainstream orchestra?

Because unfortunately we don’t have Paraorchestras in our cities.

Yes, that’s a great question. Thanks, George. And congratulations on your studies and good luck with the next lot of studies.

It’s great to hear. I suppose I started by saying I want to inspire people to know that it’s possible. So yes, I think fundamentally, I think it’s absolutely possible to play in an orchestra.

There are a couple of caveats or conditions, I suppose.

The one is that I imagine that there is, well, I know that there is some music that is more easy to learn and memorize than others, and I know that there is some music that’s probably more easy to play if you can’t see a conductor than others.

So if you were to ask me, could you play a Mozart symphony with a complete orchestra of blind musicians, or could a blind musician take up a place in a regular orchestra and play sort of classical works from that period, then absolutely.

I don’t see why not. If you’re asking me if they could play lots of contemporary 21st century repertoire, or even some big things like Rite of Spring or Shostakovich, I think that would take a lot more work and preparation. I think it’s possible.

But the reason I think that it wouldn’t be possible to do it full-time in a regular orchestra is because most orchestras are geared up to play lots and lots of pieces on rotation with not very much rehearsal.

And I think the problem is not necessarily whether it’s possible to play in an orchestra, but whether there’s an orchestra geared up to accommodate a blind person playing in their ranks.

And I think the problem would be that you simply can’t learn the volume of music quickly enough to take a full-time place.

What I think would be possible is to say, actually, for three concerts a year, I’m going to join you, and I’m going to learn the parts for this program.

And in fact, there’s a good friend of mine, Liz Hargest, who’s a flautist here in the UK, who for many years played in her local symphony orchestra and would do, I think, a concert a year or program a year, and she would learn a symphony.

And she would then sit alongside the other first flute and play the symphony together. And it’s an incredible achievement. It took a lot of work.

And I think it’s just not possible to scale that up to do it full time. But thanks, George. That’s a great question.

It’s a really interesting area, isn’t it? Because we talk about inclusion, and I think ultimately you can be as inclusive as you like, but there is a limit to how much you can learn and how much you can actually do.

So while this is possible, I don’t think it’s ever going to be the case that a blind person has a full time orchestral career. But whether it’s possible to do a lot more, absolutely.

OK, thank you, James. So we’ve got one final hand up from Matthew, then we’ll go to two final questions from Tilly that were submitted in advance.

I mean, this was fabulous. Thank you very much for just being so candid. I think it’s quite often when I hear career conversations and things like this, there’s an element of bravado about it, and there hasn’t been that state.

It’s been really nice to hear. Oh, that’s very kind. I can relate to a lot of what you’ve said in a singing context.

The thing that particularly stuck out to me was how much reformatting of your braille you did.

I also do this, and I wondered not necessarily the tooling that you’re using to produce the braille music, because I imagine that’s probably in flux at the moment.

But that specific bit, that last mile of actually inserting all of those new lines and making sure that when you insert the new lines that the page numbers stay in the right place. I do it in notepad and it’s a pain.

So what program are you using to do that last mile? What’s the process of that last bit?

That’s a great question. So I basically use SMB to create the music file or I might use Good Feel. To be honest, use them basically interchangeably.

I save a BRF file and bring it into Duxbury. So I’m using Duxbury. I got into using Duxbury actually when I was the music officer at RNIB before Jay.

Years and years ago, we were supporting a student in the National Children’s Orchestra.

And me and Sally Zimmerman, who was my boss at the time, were doing a lot of music creation and trying to think how a young blind musician had a hope of learning all this stuff. It’s quite daunting for me.

I was thinking when I was producing it, crikey, I’m glad this isn’t me learning all this. And we did quite a lot of work on how to format stuff so that in a rehearsal setting you can go to where you need or to show musically what’s happening.

So if you’ve got a phrase that happens four times or it’s repeated, rather than just having it in a different place, I’m quite a visual learner, so I like stuff that happens the same.

I like it to look the same on the page, and that might mean that it’s kind of indented the same, or it might mean that it’s not split over a page break, one of my absolute bug bears.

One of the things I did was I don’t need bar numbers all the way down on every single line because they’re not really important.

I only need bar numbers where they’re important, where I know from experience that the conductor is going to go from because that’s what I need to find in the rehearsal.

So when I’ve got a bit of recorded music that starts, I take out all the bar numbers by indent the music so that I can see this is a chunk of music. This is a chunk that I’ve got to learn and it goes all the way from bar 64 through to 82.

And I can see that absolutely at a glance. And it just means that in a rehearsal setting, I’m almost as quick as anyone else.

Thank you. And it’s good to know that Duxbury is reliable at doing that. I’ve been put off doing it in Duxbury.

Oh! Yeah, if it’s reliable enough to do it.

I mean, I’m not an expert. I mean, there are people in the world who know an awful lot more about styles and automated things and can probably write macros to do all of this really quickly and easily. I don’t.

So it’s quite fiddly. I’m lucky that it’s a single line instrument. It’s not a piano score.

I don’t have words. I don’t have chord lead sheets or anything like that. So I’m dealing in the probably the most simple form of braille music.

And it’s very easy to sort of configure it. What I do find though is by doing this work, I might have a score that goes from say three pages, which is a pain, even on double sided, onto two pages. So it’s one piece of paper that I can turn over.

So I just tend to find that it just means I carry around slightly less paper, but also it’s just neater and tidier. And it helps me visualize it if it’s neater and tidier.

Yeah, brilliant. Thank you.

No, thanks for asking. It’s a really interesting. We could talk all night, but I don’t think anyone else wants to listen to us all night, talking about Braille formatting.

But it is a significant part of the workflow, I think. And sighted musicians don’t tend to worry about this.

They can play from scores which are covered in highlighter and pencil and Tip-X and all sorts, and seem to be able to see the wood for the trees. I can’t do that. I need a tidy score for a tidy mind.

That’s how I need it.

Thanks so much, James. Okay, to wrap us up, Tilly was asking actually about your album. What was the inspiration behind your solo album, and do you have plans to release another one in future?

Oh, crikey.

Thank you, Tilly. It’s a long time ago now. The inspiration really was very simple.

I have to say it was kind of partly artistic because I had an idea for a sort of album or a concert program that I didn’t think had been done before.

So for those of you who don’t know a quick plug, it’s called Echoes of Arcadia, and it’s sort of blending music from the very early days of the recorder, so 17th, 18th century and trying to find pieces from 20th and 21st century repertoire that

complement them, that go alongside them. So it was a sort of Echoes of Arcadia.

And I hadn’t seen it done before, but actually more pragmatically, I suppose, I realized that having a recording and a CD and an album was a bit like having a calling card, and I didn’t have one.

And I think in order, quite honestly, to be taken a little bit more seriously and to maybe get a bit more work and to look a bit more professional and to have something to sell after concerts, I needed to do a CD.

And to be honest, no one was going to come and ask me to do one. And at the age of whatever I was then, 34, 35, I thought the only way to do it is to plan it and do it myself. So it was from invention to recording to production.

I didn’t record it, obviously, and I didn’t do the CD, but I did all the work to get it done and paid for it all, and it was an entire cottage industry. But it’s very kind of you to mention, people still listen to it and say kind things about it.

And at some point, I’d love to do another one. But since then, I’ve had children, and obviously the cost of living has gone up. And so having available budget to do a CD like that is not quite as easy as it was 10, 12 years ago.

So I need to think about how I might finance it. But yes, I’ve got ideas for a couple of albums. And one day, I’d love to get around to doing them.

But it’s a great process. I love recording. I’ve done a bit of recording with Paraorchestra as well.

And I love the process. But it’s a lot of work to do your own CD. I actually recorded it in two separate takes.

Most people do a CD recording in three days because they get it all done in one go and it’s cheaper. I did one half of it in January and the other half in March because I couldn’t find time to get a whole CD rehearsed up in one go.

So I split it in half.

That’s really interesting to hear. I was also wondering if there is any way that people can keep up to date with your latest work and any way they can support you in what you’re doing, like if you have a newsletter or anything.

Thank you. You’re too kind, but you’re exposing the complete lack of time and energy I have put into my own publicity and marketing. Because I hate talking about myself despite doing tonight, and I’m not very good at doing all that kind of stuff.

I do have a website, jamesrisdon.co.uk. It’s probably the best place to find me. You can certainly e-mail me through there at jamesrisdon.co.uk.

I crop up on Facebook from time to time and LinkedIn, I find quite an interesting platform. I had lots of lofty ambitions to do a newsletter, and I just haven’t got around to doing it.

Mainly, my excuse is that actually doing the work just seems to take me a lot of time and all my energy.

And so by the time I get to having an evening, I think actually I’ve got work to do and I can’t really afford the time to put together a newsletter. And that’s been the reality for the last 10 years.

I think probably I should just give up on the idea of doing a newsletter and just rely on other means. But yeah, thank you for asking. It’s very kind of you.

Thank you very much.

Well, James, I think we’ve covered everything.

We’ve given you a proper grilling. Thank you so much for giving up your time this evening.

Not at all. It’s a great pleasure. And yeah, I don’t like to talk about myself, but I quite like talking about the process and all of the stuff that goes into it.

So thank you all for listening and thank you for your very insightful and thoughtful questions and kind comments and I hope some of it’s been interesting. But thanks for having me.

It’s been really good fun to relive some of these moments and hear some of those clips. I’ve got a clip. Can we play out a little clip?

Yeah. There’s a track on there called Land Of My Other and this is a beautiful track and it’s the bit that makes me feel nostalgic for the evening because we have only performed this once so far.

So you’re going to hear a little bit of Rihanna playing the Irish flute and it goes into a theme of an instrumental and it’s a beautiful folk theme that fits really well on a high recorder and it’s just a really joyful, uplifting piece of

instrumental writing that brings back lots of happy memories. So let’s play out with that. It’s called The Land of My Other.

James, thank you so much.

Thank you.

To George’s comment earlier, I hope we can get a resource out of this that helps more orchestras feel like Paraorchestra. Thank you so much and good night, everyone. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Sound Without Sight podcast.

Sound Without Sight is a community-driven online hub, collating resources and opportunities to enable blind and partially sighted musicians and audio engineers to break down access barriers.

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You can do so at soundwithoutsight.org/donate. The music you’re listening to was composed by André Louis and members of the Sound Without Sight community.