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ABLE Voices Ep 79: Ben Lunn
10 Plays6 months ago
We are inviting disabled artists and arts educators to be guests and guest hosts on ABLE Voices. Today's guest and our next guest host is Ben Lunn. Ben Lunn is a music composer, conductor, musicologist, teacher and associate artist for Drake Music and Drake Music Scotland. As a composer, Lunn’s music reflects the material world around him, connecting to his North-Eastern heritage or how disability impacts the world around him or his working-class upbringing. Alongside this, he has become renowned for his championship of others, which have seen him creating unique collaborations with musicians from across the globe and developing unique concert experiences and opportunities for others.
The ABLE Voices podcast is produced and edited by BIAAE Operations Coordinator, Daniel Martinez del Campo. The introduction music was written by Kai Levin and the ending song was written by Sebastian Batista. Kai and Sebastian are students in the Arts Education Programs at the Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education.
For more information about our programs visit us at https://college.berklee.edu/BIAAE
Follow us for more weekly updates at:
Instagram: @BIAAE
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BIAAE
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Transcript
Introduction to Able Voices Podcast
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Music
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Able Voices Podcast.
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I'm Dr. Rhoda Bernard, founding managing director of the Berkeley Institute for Accessible Arts Education and the assistant chair of the music education department at Berkeley College of Music.
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And I'm proud to present this podcast featuring disabled artists and arts educators.
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We are inviting artists with disabilities to be guest hosts for the Able Voices Podcast.
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Today's guest host is Ben Lunn.
Meet Ben Lunn: Composer and Educator
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Ben Lund is a music composer, conductor, musicologist, teacher, and associate artist for Drake Music and Drake Music Scotland.
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As a composer, Lund's music reflects the material world around him, connecting his Northeastern heritage or how disability impacts the world around him or his working class upbringing.
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Alongside this, he has become renowned for his Championship of Others, which have seen him creating unique collaborations with musicians from across the globe and developing unique concert experiences and opportunities for others.
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He has won accolades from the Scottish Music Awards in both 2023 and 2020 for his work with Hebrides Ensemble and Drake Music Scotland.
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In 2022, Ben became the first Northeast composer to be selected for the Royal Philharmonic Society's Composer Scheme, which sees him paired with music in the round.
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As a musicologist, Lund specializes in Baltic music, Horaccio, Raduliscu, political ideology and composition,
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and composing a disability.
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He has had the honor of lecturing at some of the world's leading academic institutions, and his articles have been published across Germany, UK, US, Russia, Lithuania, and collected by the Arvo Hotcentra.
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In 2021, Ben also helped found the Disabled Artists Network, an organization which is bridging the gap between the professional world and disabled artists.
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Welcome, Ben.
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We are delighted to have you as our next guest host of the Able Voices podcast.
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Thank you very much for having us.
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It's a pleasure to be here.
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Great.
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I'd like to start off by asking you to tell us your story as an artist.
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How did you get your start as an artist and how did you get to where you are
Ben Lunn's Musical Journey Begins
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today?
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Hi.
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So I'll
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try and keep it as concise as possible but my entry point into music was through brass banding originally so ultimately because my family was not wealthy enough to afford lessons in the traditional pedagogical sense which is namely through the schools I was only able to gain access via brass banding where the local brass band had a really entrepreneurial sort of youth band system where what they would do is they would
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find people who are enthusiastic, hand them a mouthpiece, and then once they found the mouthpiece that the individual can actually make a sound on, give them that instrument instead of just giving everyone the smallest brass instrument and so on.
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And then from there, you learn enough notes to then play a hymn tune.
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And then once you've done that, you're into the youth band and then you sit there and essentially just playing along and learning with everyone.
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And then from there, you'd go up into the senior band and as they say, the rest is history.
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And that was me initial entry into music entirely.
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And it was really positive in the sense of one, it was affordable.
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It was also just very, it has a lot of connections to the work and class history and so on.
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But also it did open up a whole world of different kinds of music because of the kinds of arrangements that were done.
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The curious relationship that Brass Bandit has with composers is very interesting.
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Namely, there's a big body of works by living composers, but also it's a very different trajectory to what's happened, let's say, within classical music.
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And yeah, so that just gave me that backlight
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base of knowledge and interest and it was after a few years through that I was then able to sort of study it at secondary school within the sort of traditional system and it was during that point I started to start to discover that I have an interest in composition and that a potential way I could go though I didn't have any formal lessons at all and this is common in many places around the world where the opportunity to actually learn to compose doesn't really exist until
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university level, if not slightly later.
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However, when I was 18, I essentially just tried my luck and applied to music colleges around Britain, predominantly the Northern College, the Birmingham Conservatoire and the Welsh College.
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And I was very fortunate to be given a place at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, where I studied with a wonderful man called Peter Reynolds.
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And that sort of gave me really a good, solid base to be a composer because it was
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regular lessons every week so it was once a week i would then see him for an hour just for the art of composing which gave us a really solid base to work from he also i was also very fortunate to have a teacher who had a ridiculously broad knowledge so if i've sort of found interests of things say in medieval music he was sort of a few steps ahead of us on that front um obscure composers from central europe or from eastern europe or just from western europe he was very aware of them um he had
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at a point studied with Morton Feldman as well.
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So there's lots of different styles and so on that he had known.
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And he was just, yeah, a really, really wonderful soul who I certainly wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for him in that instance.
Exploration of Baltic Music
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But one of the big ones that happened around that point was he introduced me to music in the Baltic, which I was deeply fascinated by.
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One, because there's just tons of it.
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And that's when you have a region, which is like three different countries, there's
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It sounds silly to say there's lots of music in it, but genuinely the amount of music is really quite surprising.
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But also it was interesting because of the nature of the history of the region, its response to musical development is very, very interesting where you can see it constantly engaging with trends that have happened elsewhere on the continent, but it does it in its own unique kind of way, which then sees very particular schools of music appearing, which has its own kind of life that doesn't exist elsewhere.
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And that's really, really fascinated us.
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And so I made the bold leap
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to go study in Vilnius and that's in the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and admittedly that was just me sort of throwing caution to the wind a little bit but also I simply chose that because I had more friends in the city who were still there whereas my friends in I didn't have quite as many friends in Riga or Tallinn at that time or the ones who I did have from those places were elsewhere in Europe and so I then plonked myself there for me
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for me masters for the entire time just trying to absorb as much as I could and then eventually I graduated and then came back to Scotland because I had a began a relationship with the Hebrideus Ensemble as a training artistic director and then other things sort of built in over time that's where my relationship with Strict Music Scotland happened as well as eventually doing my PhD at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire sorry the Royal Scottish Conservatoire
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That's what it is.
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It used to be called the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, but it changed its name.
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So yeah, I've recently just finished my PhD and handed him corrections.
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So that's nice to have that out of the way.
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But yeah, that's all the sort of the steps that went through to get to me being here in North Lanarkshire in Scotland.
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What an amazing journey, both physically and musically and personally, right?
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I just have this image of you starting out in the brass band and they just like handed you a mouthpiece.
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And who knew at that moment that you would be where you are today?
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I mean, you really had the good fortune of incredible teachers.
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And opportunities that came your way.
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And you were driven by this incredible passion for music.
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And it's pretty remarkable.
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I mean, your bio, you are extremely accomplished.
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It's a pretty remarkable journey all back in the brass band.
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I love that.
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And I love that there were people who opened up worlds for you.
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that you didn't even know Baltic music if it had not been for this one teacher.
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If you'd been studying with somebody else, that whole path of your life wouldn't have happened, which I just think is really, it's these wonderful moments, right?
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So my next question for you is we would love to hear about your experience as a musician and composer with a disability.
Navigating Autism and Music
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So it's quite an interesting one.
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One, because I was diagnosed autistic very, very young.
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It was when I was four,
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So I've been officially autistic for over three decades now.
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And so one is quite interesting in the sense of you get to sort of see how society's evolved, its perceptions of it all and so on.
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But it meant that I was, my connection to it is very, very different to people who say who are diagnosed later in life, who sort of go through that process of looking backwards and making sense of their life.
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Whereas actually I've always known it's part of us.
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However, the relationship has been up and down because at the end of the day, when you're a teenager, you're moody when you're an autistic teenager.
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you're a moody autistic teenager.
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It's the same kinds of things.
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And so it's not always say like a really happy relationship of just personal acceptance.
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Things sort of happened and moved through.
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But what was interesting with, particularly with brass banding in comparison to other circumstances and so on is it's a music making that even though it's highly competitive because of the airy contests and national contests and so on, it's not exam heavy.
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And also on that as well, within brass bands, there are 26 members.
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And so then that means that each instruments tend to have multiple people playing those instruments and then doing different parts.
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So you then have, let's say you have, what's it?
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It's eight cornets off the top of your head.
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That many cornet players, that means the best in the group will obviously be at the top.
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But if you're not particularly talented, you still have an ability to contribute to it.
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So that means that everyone is able to play their parts
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engage improve and all this other kind of stuff without it having to jump up to a high level and being stuck there whereas obviously the experience for brass players in orchestras is you count 90 bars rest and then you have to come in immaculately because you're one of three people and then that's it and so the pressure is very very different in that kind of instance and so it meant that all the way through it was always about community the local area and all this other kind of stuff was very much tied into what's doing it and it's not
00:10:48
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about getting your exam grades and getting ready for the next stage and so on.
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So that's, it was quite interesting that there wasn't that same kind of pressure about it.
00:10:56
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Though, as I said, it was highly competitive because we're doing the area contest and you go off to a particular place and then you all go and play a particular piece and then you get judged and those who do very well get rewarded, those who don't go home slightly hammered and just down in a dumps about it.
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And so that's one of those things.
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And then when it came to
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Composition is quite another interesting sort of element.
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One, because while I was in Wales, I was perfectly accepted at that point that, yes, I'm autistic.
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It's part of me.
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One, because I've just grown that much more.
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And also, when you suddenly go from a position of living with your family and then you're living a few hundred miles away from them, there are things where you suddenly go, right, I'm not quite as...
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able to live as an individual in that kind of instance, you sort of have to learn new skills and or you realise there are certain things about you that are a bit behind your peers, but that happens to everyone.
00:11:54
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But obviously, when you're disabled, you sort of notice it a bit more in that kind of instance.
Experiences in Lithuania
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So there's that kind of growth that came with it.
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But what was both startling and eye opening was living in the Baltic in particular, one, because it was
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Interesting sort of discovering their internal systems about it.
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Namely, I was not considered disabled while I was there at all.
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I did not, even though I have full diagnosis and had the documents and so on, I was able to show it to them.
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I did not qualify.
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I did not even qualify as being considered autistic in Lithuania, which is very interesting.
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So I had sort of two years where I could pretend I wasn't autistic if I wanted to.
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But ironically being there, it really underlined just how disabled I was because as I'd been diagnosed quite so young and because my hometown had gained city status when I was very young, it suddenly had a lot more money for once.
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And so things like speech and language therapy were much more readily available.
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And so a large portion of me, youth from the ages of four to about 16, was in and out of speech and language therapy sessions.
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And because of that,
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I have a lot of words in English.
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I have a lot of conversations.
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I know good conversation starters and all these other kinds of skills and ways of just sort of navigating day-to-day things.
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The problem is that as soon as you are in a different language and you have less words, your ability to navigate that disappears.
00:13:16
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And it's suddenly then realizing all the other background worries, anxieties, all these other things that sort of impact your ability to navigate conversations suddenly reappear.
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And so,
00:13:27
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even though officially I wasn't recognized as disabled, I recognized I was even more disabled than I had given myself credit for.
00:13:34
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And so it was around that point that I then was much more active about engaging in it.
00:13:38
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And also because I'd sort of, it was at that point when you sort of reflect, reconnecting to it, you realize that when you try to distance yourself from being disabled, you actually end up pushing other disabled people under the bus a little bit because you're then going, yes, I'm disabled, but I'm not like those disabled.
00:13:53
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And that's sort of something I had sort of
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come to terms with.
00:13:57
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And so when I came back to Britain, it was very much wanting to try and not only engage with that side more actively, but also to see where I could sort of help as much as I could.
00:14:06
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And this is where things like say the disabled artists network and other bits come into practically trying to do good in that instance.
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Wow.
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I love the irony there that you weren't officially classified as disabled, but because of the language barrier and other cultural differences, the disability was more prevalent for you than it had been.
00:14:27
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I think that's fascinating for people to hear.
00:14:30
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I understand that you have some music for us to listen to.
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Can you tell us a little bit about what we're about to hear?
00:14:35
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Hi, so this is one of the songs from a song cycle I wrote in 2021.
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And this is a commission from Durham Brass Festival, which is a lovely festival which happens every year in the wonderful historic city of Durham.
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And it's just after a wonderful thing called the Durham Miners Gala.
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And so there's this wonderful big celebration where all the mining communities come to Durham.
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And then the week after, it's just lots and lots of brass music.
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And it's really nice.
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And I got commissioned to write a piece for it, which connected to the Northeastern Sunform.
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And so within the cycle, I found also gifts.
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reconnected to say poetry from the region things in the local diet written in the local dialect and set them to music for a mezzo-soprano and brass quintess and it's I'm really just quite chuffed at it it's a very little suite of things where it's what's eight minutes in total and
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It just shows very different sides of North East in the sense that you've got some very silly songs.
00:15:34
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So you've got the lovely Durham Jail, which is one that's essentially talking about a dude who's just his experience living in Durham Jail for a few months.
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You've got one where it's sort of looking more at the class politics based on poems by Paul Summers.
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Then there's also the very famous folk song called When the Boat Comes In, which is very, very well known, though often people don't sing the right lyrics to it.
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But it's a very popular song.
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It's quite nice to sort of start the cycle with that.
00:15:57
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And then the last one is this lovely quote from Tony Benn talking about the Miners Gala.
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And it's just this lovely optimistic thing.
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And it's just the whole thing is just a very nice snapshot of me, native neck of the woods.
00:16:08
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And it's just quite nice to do it in such a short, lovely happy burst.
00:16:11
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Fantastic.
00:16:12
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And which movement will we be hearing?
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It is the last movement.
00:16:17
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Awesome.
00:16:17
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Thank you.
00:16:26
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THE BALCONY THE WHOLE OF HUMAN LIFE
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peace to old miners in wheelchairs and the panners for about peace and hope.
00:17:08
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There were times I
00:17:13
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Wow, thank you so much for sharing that with us.
00:17:15
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I know our listeners will really appreciate your music.
00:17:19
Speaker
Speaking of our listeners, I know that they are very curious to hear what advice you would give to a young artist with a disability.
Advice for Young Disabled Artists
00:17:30
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So it's...
00:17:31
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There are many things to sort of think about.
00:17:33
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One is when we look at the past, it's very good to sort of consider it because ultimately lots of artists always go through that process of working out where their place is within it all.
00:17:45
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And disability is quite a curious one because it is one of those ones where for some disabilities, it's very hard to sort of retroactively connect them.
00:17:53
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And others who were disabled, but also the way we talk about it is very, very different.
00:17:58
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And so there's all of these thoughts which
00:18:00
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make for very interesting sort of discoveries as you look backwards.
00:18:02
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And what you'll find is there's a greater body of disabled composers and or musicians who exist, which is always a very lovely heartening thing.
00:18:13
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But also it's very telling about how they sort of live and how sort of disabilities shape them, not necessarily a tragic or heroic overcoming the kind of things.
00:18:24
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It is just very much certain elements just sort of force them down a certain path.
00:18:28
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So for example, the English composer John Stanley is a great example where he became blind very, very young.
00:18:35
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And as a result of this, he ended up being an organist, which one sounds slightly amazing in that instance, but when you sort of consider socially that the organ is an individual instrument where you are the leader, so everyone has to follow you and you just have to have the geography yourself.
00:18:52
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Then suddenly you realize that actually for a blind musician, that is a really interesting
00:18:58
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direct way in.
00:18:59
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So that gives some more interesting sort of insights into how you can sort of think about how we live now, what elements within current society shape us in that way.
00:19:07
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With that in mind as well, there's a lot more disabled artists around than we maybe think about.
00:19:13
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In particular, there's a lot more within the realm of literature and theatre.
00:19:17
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That is a very, very strong element.
00:19:19
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And you can see within the US, thanks to the likes of Helen Keller, there's a great history of that.
00:19:24
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as well as also within Britain, we have our own particular sort of world of it, thanks to John Milton and various other different figures.
00:19:29
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So there's a lot more, a greater sense of community than we necessarily give ourselves credit for as well.
00:19:34
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But admittedly, like lots of artists, lots of good things we're about, but we're very bad at telling each other we exist.
00:19:39
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So there's a little bit of legwork to get on on that front and so on.
00:19:43
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And then ultimately, there will be some things that you just have to work out how to balance for yourself, because at the end of the day, we do have to
00:19:50
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acknowledge that we are disabled so there are just a certain amount of things we can't do at the same pace as everyone else either because we can't get to the places or because the process of say networking and all these other different factors which is sort of the background things which impact the ability to work will have its impact on us in the long term and so it's a matter of not necessarily limiting your imagination or anything like that but it's just more about
00:20:15
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having to sort of reflect and think about what things can you change so then you are working at your best most.
00:20:21
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So if that's simple things like say you do something creative one day, you then have a day of rest, or if you then you have a team of people around you to help, all these kinds of things, if you can get that kind of network around you, you're setting yourself up for a very, very good way into the future.
00:20:35
Speaker
What tremendous advice.
00:20:37
Speaker
I love your point about community, and I know that's connected to your work.
00:20:41
Speaker
And that gets me, that's the segue to my last question, which is, tell us what you're currently working.
Current and Future Projects
00:20:47
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So it's a slightly steady period at the minute because we've done quite a lot with the Disabled Outers Network and with Great Music Scotland.
00:20:58
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And we just need a bit of time to sort of reflect and think about how we're moving forward and so on.
00:21:03
Speaker
But we are in the process of working with a lovely choir called the Hjólmæki Choir, which is based in Iceland, where we are looking to take three composers out to Iceland to work with the choir there, learn how to write choral music for the group, have a professional group to work with, and it'll be performed in Harpa, which is the lovely building where the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra are based.
00:21:27
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We haven't finalised all the details yet, namely
00:21:30
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I still need to make sure which composers I'm going to take through for that one.
00:21:34
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But this whole process came about thanks to working together with a wonderful composer and conductor called Stefan Sands, who I had worked with as part of Nordic Music Days, where I had commissioned him to write for a wonderful disabled musician called Clair Johnson, as well as an American singer called Colin Levin.
00:21:52
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His song for the two of them was simply outstanding.
00:21:56
Speaker
Sol, Stadtu, Kir.
00:21:58
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And it is really, really magical.
00:21:59
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And he sort of fell in love with the way we're working and wanted to do more.
00:22:03
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And so things sort of spun off from there.
00:22:06
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We've also very recently produced an album, which is the very first album in the world of works by disabled composers.
00:22:14
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We were the first ones to do it.
00:22:15
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It had not happened prior to that, which is very interesting when you sort of consider all the wonderful work doing, say, promoting women composers.
00:22:22
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black composers all the various other different groups around the world but disabled hadn't been covered so we've managed to have that out it is available on nmc and i'm very chuffed with it because it is a very big variety of british disabled composers showing very different ways of working and so on and yeah and so it's there's been really big victories that we've managed to do and it's just trying to find just the right balance forces to then think of the next things as well as also
00:22:49
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trying to find more disabled composers and musicians for us to support and push forward as well.
00:22:53
Speaker
So it's a nice calm at the minute for us to just try and find who we have around and what we can do to help them.
00:23:00
Speaker
Tremendous.
00:23:01
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Thank you.
00:23:02
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That's really fascinating.
00:23:04
Speaker
And that album sounds amazing.
00:23:07
Speaker
Thank you so much, Ben, for spending this time with us today.
00:23:10
Speaker
We are really looking forward to the upcoming episodes when you will be our guest host.
00:23:15
Speaker
Thank you.
Podcast Credits and Contact Information
00:23:23
Speaker
Able Voices is a production of the Berkeley Institute for Accessible Arts Education, led by me, Dr. Rhoda Bernard, the founding managing director.
00:23:32
Speaker
It is produced by Daniel Martinez del Campo.
00:23:35
Speaker
The intro music is by Kai Levin, and our closing song is by Sebastian Batista.
00:23:40
Speaker
Kai and Sebastian are students in the arts education programs at the Berkeley Institute for Accessible Arts Education.
00:23:48
Speaker
If you would like to learn more about our work, find us online at berkeley.edu slash B-I-A-A-E or email us at B-I-A-A-E at berkeley, that's L-E-E dot E-D-U.