Liam O’Dell: Deafness and Beethoven discussed by deaf artists at the Barbican

Inside a greyish rehearsal room in London’s Barbican Centre, Associate Music Director of Paraorchestra Lloyd Coleman comments on the general public on the street outside the multi-purpose venue.

“It’s a fair bet that if you went out into Silk Street, outside here at the Barbican, and ask any member of Joe Public what they think of the name Beethoven,” he says, “even if they don’t know a single piece of his, it’s a fair bet that they will say, ‘oh, he’s the deaf one, isn’t he?'”

It’s a connection the moderator explored in the panel discussion as part of the Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender on Sunday, celebrating the work of the legendary composer on his 250th birthday.

Lloyd was joined on the panel by speaker, musician and educator Paul Whittaker, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra Resound founding member Siobhan Clough and award-winning poet Raymond Antrobus. The conversation was interpreted by Kate Collier.

Before the conversation began, an audio recording of Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, was played to all in attendance. The letter to his two brothers, read by actor and writer Stephen Fry, describes the musician’s anguish at his deafness and the “doubly sad experience of my bad hearing”.

Using this as a prompt for the first question, Lloyd started by asking the panel if they have picked up any references to Beethoven’s deafness in his music.

“I don’t pick up on a direct reference to deafness in Beethoven’s music, no,” Paul replied, “but I’m of the view anyway, and have been for years, that Beethoven’s deafness is actually irrelevant.”

He continued: “There’s plenty of people who over the years, have written some fairly bizarre theories about Beethoven, the weirdest one among them being he sawed the legs off his piano, and put it on the floor so that he could feel the vibrations.

“Now, I don’t know about you, but if you put a piano on the floor, and you lie down and play it, it’s painful. Why did Beethoven want to ruin a perfectly good piano?”

He concluded by saying that before Beethoven’s hearing went, “he had actually learnt his craft”, adding that he knew how to compose music, so he didn’t need to hear it.

Meanwhile, Siobhan said what she found interesting was that “he seemed to miss out the higher octaves [and] the higher notes” and that it was something she may have identified without realising.

Turning to Raymond, Lloyd asked the poet about the most common misconception surrounding deafness he had come across. He talked about the assumption “that a hearing person won’t be able to communicate with a deaf person”.

“Every conversation I’ve ever had – everything I’ve written about, definitely – is not about deafness,” he explained. “The thing I’ve been moved by is about communication, and about connection.”

Lloyd replied by saying that one of the things he loved most whilst reading Raymond’s 2018 book, The Perseverance, is a sense of “filling in the gaps”.

“We both, in our early years, didn’t have hearing aids,” he said, “and we were missing a lot of language. I speak from my own experience: I could hear melody and music a lot more easily and freely than language.”

When asked about his own experience with music, Raymond went on to reveal that he was brought up in a “very musical” household.

“My parents lived separately,” he explained. “They both loved music, but they both played music very loudly.

“So my Dad had this homemade sound system, with these huge speakers, and he was playing rocksteady and reggae.

“So a lot of it is about the vibrations, it’s about the heartbeat, it’s about the sound,” he said.

Elsewhere, performers Paul and Siobhan were asked by Lloyd how they first got into music, with Siobhan saying that she started playing violin at the age of four.

She said: “I started wearing hearing aids when I was very young. I discovered that the bedroom noise meant that I couldn’t actually hear what I was playing, so as soon as I realised that I stopped wearing aids and I haven’t worn them since.

“The amount of people that told me I shouldn’t be playing violin is crazy, but it’s about understanding what you do. So for me, when I play the violin, I tend to dip the violin quite heavily into my neck, to pick up on vibrations and things like that.

“It’s just understanding your craft and being able to compromise,” she added.

Meanwhile, Paul talked about his different approach to playing music, explaining that while most people would go away and listen to a piece of music in order to analyse it, he would play to the text and learn the score.

“Once its there on the page, it’s fine,” he said.

On the topic of performances, Raymond was asked about what performing gave him in relation to his deafness as opposed to simply writing. The poet responded by sharing an anecdote of when he did drama at around six or seven years of age.

“I always made more of an effort, I think, to memorise the scripts and try to pick up on people’s cues,” he continued, explaining that he wasn’t in the habit of wearing his hearing aids at the time. “Now I had this role of modelling the perfect human being. There was something in that that said, ‘well I can’t wear my hearing aids, then’.

“The cue for that opening scene for me to say my first line, was a bang. I can’t hear high-pitched sounds at all, so every night, I was having to guess, and every night, I had one particular actor […] say to me, like, ‘what’s wrong with you? Urgh!’, and that, that shame, that anger made me realise, ‘okay, I can’t do this. I quit.’ I stopped doing everything.

Raymond went on to say that he came to poetry as something he could do alone, as “there was no real opportunity to let other people down”.

“So I think, writing particularly the last book I wrote, writing more about that, and realising that the root of a lot of my shame and embarrassment goes far beyond […] It’s given me more company. I’ve found company in finding other deaf artists, and reading deaf literature.”

Before Raymond brought the event to a close with a reading of two new Beethoven-themed poems, Paul was asked by Lloyd for a takeaway from the discussion.

Alongside expressing his fascination for “how much people physically participate in making music rather than passively sitting there”, the speaker quoted something he had been told by a colleague he used to work with.

“Music is not the prerogative of the hearing world,” he said.

Photo by Mark Allan/Barbican.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and blogger from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.