The Essay: A Different Way to Listen

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The Essay: A Different Way to Listen: Nigel Braithwaite

Nigel Braithwaite

A Different Way to Listen

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, A Different Way to Listen, Nigel Braithwaite

Hard of hearing musician Nigel Braithwaite takes a wry look at his musical career.

Horn player Nigel Braithwaite takes a sideways look at how music has helped him through progressive deafness and traumatic brain injury.

A five-part series of essays that explore the dichotomy between being a deaf professional and working with music. Each essayist tells their own story from across the deaf spectrum, including a sign language performer with a passion for musicals, a violinist who switched to classical piano after a cochlear implant, and a flautist who uses visual art to describe music to deaf children. From horn players to punchy performance artists, all of the essayists consider music from a deaf perspective with illuminating results. 

Horn and Wagner tuba player Nigel Braithwaite looks back at his musical life and gives a humorous take on his time as a semi-professional musician.  How did he continue to play in the face of mitochondrial disease which robbed him of his ability to hear the very low notes in which he specialised as a player? How did traumatic brain injury affect his ability to find his place in an orchestral setting? What else could possibly go wrong? A semi-professional musician throughout his whole life, he tackles his travails with honesty and humour, musing on what it takes to get through life’s challenges and how key musical tracks along with his family and friends have got him safely through. 

A Different Way to Listen is produced by Sophie Allen and Emma Glassar with Mark Rickards as Executive Producer. It is a Flashing Lights Media production for BBC Radio 3. A British Sign Language version was filmed, edited and subtitled by Fifi Garfield.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Five essayists explore the dichotomy of being a deaf professional working with music.

From horn players to punchy performance artists, five essayists explore the dichotomy of being a deaf professional working with music - with illuminating results.

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