If you’re reading this, you’ve probably got skin in the game. There are an estimated 90,000 people living with dementia in Scotland – a figure set to increase by nearly 40% over the next 20 years. That’s a lot of carers, family members and friends also living with the impacts of a terrible disease. The search for ways to better support sufferers and their carers is fast moving from a decades long search to a desperate scrabble.
“Music really seems to help people,” says Alison Green, second bassoon with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. For over a decade, Green has been taking small ensembles into hospitals and care homes across Scotland and playing to older adults, especially those with dementia. It’s a work of exceptional kindness and, it turns out, good old fashioned audience pleasing. “It’s just another string to my bow, you could say!” she laughs.
This work in care settings has been under the banner of ‘ReConnect’ – an apt title given alienation from self and others is so characteristic of memory and emotional disease. “Nothing else seems to get into their brain the way that music does,” Green continues. “It’s surprising. When you play well-known tunes people remember the words. They’re happy to clap along or some are happy to take an instrument, a maraca or whatever.”
And it’s an impact which lingers. Green tells one incredible story following a session in a Glasgow hospital. “I left something so my husband went in the next day. The consultant said: ‘it was amazing. The atmosphere on the ward when I did my round last night was really buoyant’. So he noticed the change in the general mood of the patients and it was because of the music that they had enjoyed earlier on in the day. Stories like that just show that it does seem to help.”
This evolved into a programme of concerts, called the Tea Dance Concerts. I’m speaking to Green shortly after they (gently) brought the house down in Kirkintilloch. Those concerts – like the dementia-friendly concert which marks a first at this year’s EIF – draw on the experience of those hospital sessions, bringing a relaxed environment, informal seating, and a welcome approach to noise, interruptions and waning interest to the concert stage. The one difference is the move from informal tunes and improvisation to a set programme. “I say to people, ‘you might not recognise all the music we’re playing but we hope we’ve chosen it so that it’ll give you a nice feeling’. You see by their smiles that we’re getting to them.”
I ask Laura Baxter, Creative Learning Director at the SCO about what success looks like for the orchestra here. “We hope that our dementia-friendly concerts will raise greater awareness of how to support people to live well with dementia and that the concert itself offers an inclusive and joyous musical experience to an audience that often, due to their dementia, live in a silent world,” she tells me over email.
And what next? “The SCO intends to continue fully integrating our dementia-friendly concerts into our regular programme schedule and take these concerts to other locations across Scotland as part of our summer touring programme.”
I wonder what Green herself has learned from her experiences working with people with dementia? “Patience,” she says. “Sometimes [making a connection] can take longer than you think. Just take your time and just allow them to respond in their own time, which can be not as immediate as talking to other people that don’t have dementia.”
“Oh, and an ability to improvise!”, Green laughs. A lifelong classical player, she had to unlearn how to read the notes. “I just thought I couldn’t. But I can, and I’m not afraid of making mistakes. If you make a mistake you just make it work in a different way. You just go off in a different direction.” Hard to think of a more fitting metaphor for the frustrating unknowableness of dementia, and the extraordinary scope for humanity as we navigate it.
Dementia Friendly Concert, The Queen’s Hall, 19 Aug, 3pm