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Using music as a vehicle of social change
When planning this recital, it was always clear to me that it had to have an underlying purpose, cause, or Raison d'être.
I have anyway, throughout my personal life and professional career actively lobbying, advocating and working towards freedom
and equality of disadvantaged and marginalised groups of people who - most of the times- don't have the education, means or
ability to do it for themselves. Working in psychiatric hospitals, prisons, centres for children with autism and brain paralysis,
Alzheimer's patients hospital units, refugee and asylum seekers' support services I have become very sensitive to notions
of vulnerability, freedom deprivation and exploitation.
It should hence not have been a major surprise to read that 27 million people worldwide live in trade slavery; a large
percentage of these people are children, who simply have no choice, either because their parents have sold them off, or because
they live in fear and abuse by their masters or simply because this is the only way of life they know of and can't begin to
imagine how their lives could possibly be any different.
This recital aims at making a real difference to the lives of those you can't speak for themselves .....
But I was indeed truly and utterly shocked when I accidentally bumped upon the "Disposable People" exhibition at
the Royal Festival Hall recently. It was just simply something I could not begin to imagine and which immediately made sense:
my music had to be the instigator of a change, something its creation would make sense due to besides just the aesthetic pleasure
of the audience experiencing it at the time of the recital. And furthermore, I needed to be sure it would add value in a substantial
and not currently materialised way.
The decision was then made: this recital will support the inauguration of a Trust for the music education of children
rescued from situations of trade slavery. An initial research has revealed a number of organisations already dealing with
rescuing people from trade slavery situation. However, above and beyond that, you need to be in a position to offer these
people with a real and sustainable choice to a "normal", productive future. This is why the focus of this Trust
is children, since this is where an important start can be made, at an early stage, while still the realisation of the exploitation
and the associated traumas and bitterness and cynicism that follows has not yet been polarised. And music, because it is both
a deeply therapeutic vehicle that can help heal the experience of abuse as well as give the opportunity to more people with
undiscovered talent and calling to express it to the world.
Freedom and Slavery : two sides of the same coin
Since the beginning of the 20th century and increasingly more into the 21st century, each and every one of us has some unique
opportunities to expand and develop beyond restrictions of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, class, which
have been major impediments for people in previous centuries.
We should not undermine the psychological effect of slavery judging it from our privileged and narrow perspective of having
been given abundance of choice - and expected to exercise it - from a very young age. Slavery creates emotional dependence
on the "perpetrator" inducing the "victim" into a condition of learned helpingness and thus negative security
in those appalling, but familiar conditions. It also lowers self-esteem leading thus to justifications of the reasons why
this is the best possible situation for the "victim" slave as a psychological defense and survival mechanism. This
justification is, that is, the only way for the person living under slavery to remain alive and functional and ignore the
natural instinct for pursuit of the basic need for freedom and self actualisation.
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