Just The Tonic, Series 2, Episode 2: Music in Hospitals and Care, with Sir Richard Stilgoe

Introduction (0:00)

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0:00 Katie: Hello, and welcome to Just The Tonic, the podcast that shines a light on the positive impact the arts can have on our lives. I’m Katie Derham, and I’m delighted to be back with another series featuring people and organisations who are dedicated to making sure the arts are accessible for everyone. Now, in our first series we heard from the likes of Sir Mark Elder, conductor of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra and champion of music in the community…

0:30 Sir Mark Elder: It’s a lovely fact that when people sing together, little by little their heartbeats become the same.

0:37 Katie: We heard from Charles Hazlewood, conductor and artistic director of Paraorchestra, the amazing orchestra featuring disabled and non-disabled musicians…

0:45 Charles Hazlewood: I’ve been conducting orchestras around the world for about 30 years now, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of musicians who identify as disabled I’ve found in any of those groups over that long period of time.

0:57 Katie: …and John Altman, composer of music for the latest James Bond film and long-time supporter of The People’s Orchestra.

1:04 John Altman: Although it wasn’t a conventional orchestral line-up, it didn’t faze me at all. The great thing about it, of course, is everybody is there because they want to be there.

1:12 Katie: Now, if you missed the first series, I will forgive you! You can catch up by searching for Just The Tonic with Katie Derham wherever you usually get your podcasts.

1:22 It was tough for us all not to be able to experience live music during lockdown, but it was particularly tough for those in hospital and in care homes. Organisations like Music in Hospitals and Care provide a lifeline for patients and residents. Here’s charge nurse Samantha Philp, activities coordinator at the Eden Ward in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital.

1:42 Samantha Philp: There is definitely a difference between listening to, say, a CD and having a live musician on the ward. Quite often it’s something that the patients maybe haven’t been able to engage with in a long time.

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2:05 Katie: And we’ll be hearing more from Sam later, and from star of stage and screen Sir Richard Stilgoe.

2:10 Sir Richard Stilgoe: I had a musical granny. She was a church organist, and she had just the best ear of anybody I’ve ever met. I would sing her a nursery rhyme and she would play it on the piano, and I thought, “God, that’s clever – how do you do that?” And she said, “well, you listen”. That’s actually all the music education anybody needs, really.

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TPO's Heroes and Villains concert (2:35)

2:35 Katie: But first, let’s hear from The People’s Orchestra, who I feature most episodes – the fantastic community orchestra and choirs based in West Bromwich in the West Midlands. They’re playing a big part in the Birmingham 2022 Festival, the cultural celebration based around the Commonwealth Games, which take place in Birmingham this summer. We asked our intrepid reporter Jamie Parker, project administrator at The People’s Orchestra, to catch up with players and singers at their recent Heroes and Villains concert. Here he is with Tina from the Halesowen Show Choir.

3:05 Jamie Parker: How have you been finding the concert so far?

3:07 Tina: Really enjoyable, really good. All the rehearsals we’ve done so far have been amazing leading up to this point. We haven’t heard the orchestra till today, so that’s been amazing to hear, and obviously we’ll be singing with them later, so that’ll be amazing. Can’t wait – really enjoying it.

3:25 Jamie: Is this your first time performing with us?

3:27 Tina: Yeah, it’s the first one I’ve performed with the show choir in Halesowen. I’ve not been there very long – I’ve only been there since November last year – and we’ve all just gelled beautifully. We all get on so well, and it’s just a wonderful group. It’s on a Monday evening – most people are like, “oh, it’s Monday” – but every single one of us looks forward to our Mondays, and we have a wonderful time singing together. So it’s just lovely, really enjoyable.

3:52 Jamie: What has been your favourite thing about the concert so far?

3:55 Tina: A bit of everything. The audience reception has been lovely – they’ve all been very receptive, and the rounds of applause have obviously been really natural, and you can see they’ve genuinely enjoyed the music. And it’s a wonderful feeling to sing. Your endorphins get going, you feel like your brain’s working, you genuinely do feel like your heart and soul are in sync with the rest of the people you’re singing with, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you get goosebumps. That’s just the most wonderful feeling.

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4:30 Katie: And Tina brought a very special supporter along with her. Here’s Jamie with audience member, Tina’s husband Nigel.

4:36 Jamie: How are you enjoying the concert? What parts have stood out to you tonight?

4:40 Nigel: It’s been absolutely fabulous. I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been such a long time since we’ve heard live music, and the choir and the band have been absolutely fantastic.

4:52 Jamie: Have you been to a People’s Orchestra concert before?

4:54 Nigel: I’ve never been to a People’s choir concert at all. It’s really refreshing. I’ve been to a symphony orchestra – I did particularly enjoy it, but it was a bit too highbrow for me, to be honest. This is something different. I’ve really enjoyed it – it’s the choice of music; it’s a bit more bouncy and lively, not that classical feel to it. So yeah, I’ve really enjoyed it.

5:15 My wife, Tina, has been in it for six months or so, but just singing makes such a huge difference to her health. She’s suffered from poor health now for a number of years, and joining the choir just makes such a big difference. She comes back on such a high, and that just supports her. She’s a nurse by profession – she sees all sorts of horrible, nasty things – and this just releases that stress.

5:45 Katie: And here’s Jamie with Sang, who isn’t just a player – she sings too.

5:52 Sang: I’m an alto sax player in the Rusty Players Orchestra, and I also sing in the Central Birmingham Show Choir.

5:58 Jamie: Is this your first time performing with us?

6:00 Sang: Well, it’s quite a special occasion for me, because I’ve never actually played the saxophone in a concert in my life before today. I started playing about two and a half years ago. One of the things I always wanted to do was play in an orchestral ensemble of some sort, and there wasn’t really anything around for somebody who was a beginner. So a friend pointed me towards the Rusty Players Orchestra, and the rest, as they say, is history. I started at Rusty Players, then sadly we went into lockdown, but we continued online, and I’ve been coming ever since, and it’s been really, really good. I was very nervous, as you can imagine, but The People’s Orchestra players have been brilliant – they’ve really made me feel welcome, and they’re really, really good. So that’s really helped.

6:45 Jamie: The People’s Orchestra has been making music and changing lives for 10 years, and this is our 10th anniversary concert. What do you make of that?

6:54 Sang: I love the way that The People’s Orchestra has so many other branches to it, in terms of overall wellbeing and support, and the help in terms of work and welfare and all of that. It’s really a great package. And the fact that there’s the offshoot of the Rusty Players has been brilliant for me. As a musician who’s very new – and also for all my fellow Rusty Players who are quite anxious, or haven’t played for a while, or are new players – to make us feel so welcome has been absolutely fantastic.

Music in Hospitals and Care: Samantha Philp (7:30)

7:30 Katie: Thanks to Jamie, Tina, Nigel and Sang, and I look forward to hearing more from The People’s Orchestra in future episodes.

Music in Hospitals and Care is a charity that I’ve been involved with for years. It’s a fantastic organisation which improves the health and wellbeing of children and adults through the healing power of live music. The patients on Eden Ward – an all-female older people’s mental health ward in Edinburgh’s Royal Hospital – are delighted that they can experience live music again after lockdown. Here’s their activities coordinator, Samantha Philp.

8:02 Samantha: There is definitely a difference between listening to, say, a CD and having a live musician on the ward.

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8:15 I think primarily it’s just so much more special, and quite often it’s something that the patients maybe haven’t been able to engage with in a long time.

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8:30 We’ve had a couple of musicians come in, and they generally play an instrument and do some singing. We had a musician called Charlie who came in and played some music for us all. He would take requests from the patients, and we’d all have a wee singsong. The impact that had was very noticeable, and it was great for morale for everybody.

8:54 Having a musician visiting the ward to play for patients makes all the difference. It allows the patients not only to react to the musician, but also to build relationships. Quite often it is more difficult to engage with some patients than with others – you’re in a strange environment – and one of the things I think the music does is provide a common ground for people to be able to understand each other. You do see reactions from patients, or them coming out of their shell more, after having been part of the music session. It’s just such a great opportunity for us to get to know them better and understand them more, but also for them to get to know us a bit as well. As staff members, it gives you that opportunity to bond with them in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise, in a purely clinical staff–patient relationship. It sort of equalises. Music has this ability to do that, and it’s really helpful.

9:58 Katie: In the last series we heard about the rise in social prescribing, where healthcare professionals in the NHS can now refer people to a range of non-clinical services to support their health and wellbeing. And for Samantha, this is vital in mental health.

10:10 Samantha: Absolutely. I think it’s something we see more and more in the NHS: the idea of treating patients holistically. Especially in mental health, engagement in meaningful activities such as live music is seen as incredibly important in recovery – as much as medication or therapy would be. This is an element of treatment. The difference in the patients’ recovery – how well they recover – it’s stark, the difference that is there. And I think it’s something that can only improve as people become more aware of the benefits of music and the arts in treating mental health.

Sir Richard Stilgoe (11:00)

11:00 Katie: Thanks to Samantha, and also to musician Charlie Gorman from Music in Hospitals and Care.

Now, you may remember Sir Richard Stilgoe from his numerous appearances on TV, and from his award-winning work with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber as lyricist for the brilliant musical theatre productions Cats, Starlight Express and The Phantom of the Opera. But there are more strings to his bow. He describes himself as songwriter, broadcaster, builder, grandfather and digger driver – he owns a JCB, and it is clearly his pride and joy. He’s a fellow vice president of Music in Hospitals and Care, and he’s founder of the Orpheus Centre, which uses the performing arts to empower young adults with disabilities. Richard’s music has brought joy to so many people over the years, and I began by asking him when he realised that music brought him so much pleasure.

11:50 Sir Richard Stilgoe: Six or seven, I would think. And particularly, I had a musical granny. She was a church organist, because she was one of five daughters of a vicar, and the only way of running the parish was if they all had jobs. And she had just the best ear of anybody I’ve ever met. I would sing her a nursery rhyme and she would play it on the piano, and I thought, “God, that’s clever – how do you do that?” And she said, “well, you listen. That’s a higher note than that note, isn’t it? So it’s further up the piano.” And that’s actually all the music education anybody needs, really. You can do quicker and slower as well – but once you’ve done higher and lower, and quicker and slower, you’ve cracked it.

12:26 Katie: If only it were that simple! My goodness me. Obviously your musical career has led you to work on some extraordinary shows and create some amazing works, and that has led you into the happy position of being able to help people through your foundation as well. I’d just love to hear why you felt it was so important to bring music to so many other people.

12:50 Richard: I don’t think of it as helping people, for a start. It is helping me just as much as it helps people. One of the great things about music is it’s a sharing thing, always. You don’t give music to somebody else.

It will have happened to you as well: if you broadcast at all, you get invitations to places you would otherwise never go to in your life. Quite early on I got a letter from the Tuesday Crowd, who were a group of disabled pensioners in Wandsworth, and they said, would I be their patron? I was quite young, so I thought, “well, that’s very flattering”, and I went along and met, for the first time in my life, lots of old people in wheelchairs – because in my youth, people in wheelchairs you never saw. They were hidden away, in different places. The world is a better place now.

13:40 But anyway, with these old people, after a bit, conversation flagged. But there was a piano in the corner of the church hall where they met, and I had been a pub pianist for a long time, so I knew the old songs they knew. I played some of those, and they joined in, and suddenly the room comes alive. They start to sing, and after they’ve stopped singing, they talk – and they talk and they talk for 10 minutes, because music has kind of oxygenated the brain, revived all sorts of memories of when they weren’t old people in wheelchairs. And that never left me, that memory. I stayed with this group off and on – every now and then going and playing the piano – for 40 years. And after about 20 years, they confessed that the woman who’d written to me and asked me to be patron had got it wrong, and had meant to write to Leslie Crowther (name unconfirmed)!

14:35 So that was very formative and useful – just that connection, quite simply, with what music can do. Later on, when I started doing this more complicatedly, I was working with a neurologist from Belfast who was a keen musician, and he did a lot of explaining about where music is in the brain – which is kind of round the back and low down, where damage doesn’t get to it. If your speech isn’t very good, or your walking and your talking aren’t very good – the motor systems up at the front of the brain – somehow music is never harmed by that. And storytelling, the imagination – that’s all down in that bit of the brain as well. So when working with people who have problems with speech and mobility, don’t work with the bit of the brain that doesn’t work very well; work with the bit of the brain that is undamaged – the storytelling, the musical bit. Very often, with some of the people I work with at my Orpheus Centre, the songs they will write about what’s worrying them, and about their life experience, are astonishing – whereas if you asked them to talk about it, you’d get nowhere.

15:45 Katie: Can you give us any examples of when music really did unlock something for a patient?

15:51 Richard: Particularly – let’s call him Ed. Not his real name – always, with these things, you say “not his real name”, don’t you? Anyway, he was male, and we’ll call him Ed. He came to write his first song at the Orpheus Centre with me. He had Down’s, and he was somewhere on the spectrum as well. I said, “what do you want to write about? What sort of style do you want?” And he said, “rap”. I said, “OK – not my signature skill, but we will do what we can. What do you want to write about?” And he said, “my dad never comes to see me”. And I said, “OK – is Dad meant to come and see you?” He said, “yeah. Dad left when I was born, and he’s meant to come and see me every Friday, and most Fridays he doesn’t.”

16:40 So quite quickly, he and I got down the chorus: “Hey Dad, you never come and see me / Hey Dad, where you been?” And then we added some verses, and we finished the song. Every Friday we used to do a concert, when mums and dads would come, and since Friday was the day that Ed’s dad was meant to come and see him, I rang up Ed’s dad and said, “you come to him every Friday, don’t you?” “Oh yes,” said Ed’s dad, lying through his teeth. “He’s doing a song at the concert – come and listen.”

17:10 So Ed’s dad turned up, and there is Ed, with a band behind him and a microphone in his hand – which gives you power, doesn’t it? We sat Ed’s dad in the front row, and Ed stood about four feet away from him, looked him straight in the eye and went into his rap. And Ed’s dad tried to move his chair as far back from the stage as he possibly could – but by gum, he didn’t miss many Fridays after that! No way could Ed ring up his dad and say that stuff. But doing it on stage, with the lights on him and a microphone in his hand, all kinds of things can happen.

17:49 That’s a simple thing; there are other, much more complicated ways. There is a woman called Rosie Johnson (spelling unconfirmed), who used to be a violinist in the Welsh National Opera orchestra [unclear], and she had a horrendous car crash that made her paraplegic. But none of the music left her. It takes a long time, but Rosie can write you a string quartet: you suggest a note, and if it’s the right one she winks with her right eye; if not, she winks twice [unclear]. So it has to be a musically literate person working with her, because she is still musically literate, and she can still write music. And the other thing she can do, when you put some musicians together to play that music, is smile.

18:40 Katie: Both of us are involved with Music in Hospitals, and the impact of a simple song on somebody’s recovery after an operation is really very powerful, isn’t it?

18:48 Richard: You put the power back. Being ill, being disabled, is very disempowering. People – particularly people in hospitals – used to be absolutely fine and doing stuff, and suddenly, whatever disease they’ve got, whatever syndrome they have, means they can’t do stuff any more. Except suddenly they can sing again. And for that three minutes, you’re a powerful person again, and part of something meaningful.

19:10 Katie: But there is more to it, isn’t there? As you were suggesting with your neurologist friend, there’s more to the impact music can have in terms of coping with pain, and with the speed of recovery as well. There have been some interesting studies, haven’t there?

19:20 Richard: It sounds airy-fairy until you do the science, but actually there’s lots of science now showing that this has a proper physiological effect. And of course we’ve talked mostly about the psychological effect; there’s also the social effect. If a nurse’s job is to look after you, but the two of you sing a song together, the relationship between you and that nurse – the relationship between you and the visiting parents or friends – becomes different, because you’ve shared this song.

19:51 Katie: I think people don’t realise how extensive these organisations are. There are hundreds of musicians who go into hospitals and care homes, aren’t there, via organisations like Music in Hospitals. They do extraordinary work.

20:02 Richard: A number of times I have heard a musician, after one of these sessions, say, “I remember now why I wanted to be a musician”. It works both ways – that’s why it works. If the musicians just arrived and gave, and the patients took, that wouldn’t work; people would get bored with it. The musicians leave thinking, “hey, my skill is a really useful skill – this is a great thing to be able to do”, and they feel better than they do when they’re on the back desk of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, playing a Haydn symphony for the 30th time.

20:30 Katie: Encouraging the growth of social prescribing… Somebody like you, and like me, who are both terribly interested in the power of music and the arts – I keep quite a close eye on this. Do you feel that people are moving in the right direction, in terms of acknowledging that this sort of work makes economic sense – that it’s more than just a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have – and that doctors are now acknowledging this?

21:05 Richard: Yeah. The two words you just used, “social prescribing”, didn’t exist a few years ago – the idea that doctors and health professionals actually say music is a good thing. And of course, in the long run, everything is economics. There’s nothing more short-sighted than cutting down music education, because if you cut down the number of musicians, you’ve got a society that’s not as well. It’s not something on the edge, music – it has been central. You can imagine, right at the beginning, when people started, they will have made noises and blown through bits of bamboo long before they developed any sort of meaningful speech. It has always been one of the most basic communication tools, and always will be.

21:50 Katie: There have been positive moves in the way we are appreciating the power of the arts and of music. But when you stand back and look, from the perspective of having been in the business for some time now – are you confident in the future for young people and the music industry?

22:10 Richard: Yes, in some ways. I think it’s great that, whereas I grew up – and even you grew up – at a time when music was very much segmented, and there was classical music and popular music and jazz and folk… There’s still a bit of that silo thinking, but most young people now have a really good, eclectic mix of music on their iPods – well, that was about five years ago; whatever they listen to music on now. They will listen to all kinds of it without being judgemental about it. That’s a huge step forward. But the amount of formal music education that goes on in schools is far less than it used to be.

22:50 It’s a huge worry that more and more professional musicians come from fee-paying schools, where there was lots of music. I went to a gig in our village over the Jubilee. There was a choir and a band from two academies, and they were just terrific – but if they hadn’t been academies into which a generous person had poured a lot of money and a lot of effort, those schools wouldn’t have had any music in them. Everybody should, because if you’re a child who isn’t terrifically good at academic subjects, sometimes music or sport are the other things that give you a life.

23:30 Katie: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.

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Close (23:35)

23:35 Katie: Huge thanks to Richard Stilgoe, to Samantha Philp, and to Jamie Parker, Tina and husband Nigel, and Sang from The People’s Orchestra. In the next episode we’re going to be hearing from them at rehearsals for their big performance at the Birmingham 2022 Festival, and we will also be talking to the fantastic Lesley Garrett. She’s joining me to tell me more about her role as ambassador for the charity Help Musicians.

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24:00 If we’ve inspired you to join a band or an orchestra or a choir, do search online for music groups in your area, or get in touch with Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Wales, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland or Creative Scotland. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and follow us on social media for updates – we’re on Twitter, we’re on Instagram, of course we are – and if there’s someone you think we should have on the podcast, just let us know. We’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening.

24:30 Just The Tonic with Katie Derham was produced by Jill Davis. It’s a Peanut and Crumb production, supported by The People’s Orchestra and by Arts Council England.

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