Sweet sounds

The second session of the year with my autistic musicians was one of those lucky ones when everything turns out for the best through no fault of my own…

We started off in the meeting room, students milling round the educators, as we exchanged snippets of information about our students. The boy who makes a sound like a chainsaw patrolled the room felling forests and an educator confided in me that she has been taking headache pills since the start of the year because of him. The girl who loves keys raced in excitedly demanding my keys, and the boy who always says oui set off at a smart pace to the music room. The director gave me a piece of paper with authorisation to buy our own synthesizer. We were off to a good start.

The girl who loves keys opened the boot of my car with the magic word abracardabra…and my keys. She took possession of the keys for the rest of the session.

I loaded in the sundry instruments I had brought. One was a toy microphone with a built in acoustic reverb. The noisy boy screeched into it and started to adjust the noises he was making. Slowly he became silent and chewed the plastic cord sticking out of it. I sighed with relief into the quiet.

The boy who always says oui approached the harmonium with gleaming eyes. He is large, corpulent and usually slow moving without much co ordination. He has only one word…oui!

I looked at his hands hanging by his sides like large bunches of bananas and wondered how he was going to play the tiny keys of the Indian harmonium. Very gently, he placed his whole hand on the keyboard and a rich cacophony oozed out. His round face, usually impassive, shone as though someone had switched on a light. I showed him how to curve his unwieldy fingers and separate them, and he very precisely used his forefinger to touch every single note in order from top to bottom of the keys.

The second group saw me with a new student who is non verbal.

The boy who wraps his arms around his head emits a background hum which is not as wearing as the chainsaw boy. He is very sensitive to sound, so it surprised me to see him often in the company of the girl who leaks music, since a lot of her leaks are very high pitched and can be piercing. They look like brother and sister, both about 18 with rather angelic features and pale curly blonde hair. I led them both to the music room together with the boy with the red hair. We sang our songs very quietly, and slowly, so slowly, his arms unwrapped them selves from around his head and he started to listen. I reached into a bag of goodies that Mysweet had brought back from Edinburgh. I pulled out a tiny plastic whistle with a little bird that fluttered inside its clear bowl, changing pitch with the force of the breath applied. He blew into it enchanted as the bird chirruped and flew.