Dyslexia and the organ - challenges and opportunities
I have spent much of my career as an information scientist trying to establish why and how employees use IT applications. The objective is to help the organisation to offer effective user interfaces that result in high user satisfaction. With the increasing use of digital organs, such as Hauptwerk, together with the development of global hyperorgans, it seems to me that organs are becoming applied IT systems, and that the lessons gained from the last fifty years with enterprise and public web applications can now be usefully applied to organs.
https://klais.de/m.php?sid=286
As an example, the image above is of a new six-manual Klais organ in St. Peter’s Church, Malmö. Klais highlights on its web site that ‘stop control is completely through touch screens’.
My particular interest lies in ensuring that people with dyslexia can experience the pleasures of playing an organ. Dyslexia is a spectrum neurological condition which is very difficult to diagnose and equally difficult to find out how best to provide support people of all ages with the condition. It is not uncommon – perhaps 1 in 10 adults have the condition.
Research suggests that music education can benefit young people with dyslexia as it helps them focus on auditory and motor timing skills and highlights the rhythms of language. At a more advanced level musicians face particular challenges with (for example) sight-reading, written requirements of music examinations and extreme performance nerves.
Challenges for the performance of music can be addressed to some extent with instruments with a single stave and primarily single note score. Adding a second stave and chords significantly increases the difficulty. An issue for keyboard music seems to be that the score is written vertically but the keyboard is played horizontally, adding to the processing that is being undertaken by the performer in their working memory.
At least a piano has a standard keyboard layout. An organist also needs to be able to scan the stops and make sense of the words they see. Both the scanning and reading processes are problematic. In theory the screen presentation of the stops on a digital organ could be adapted by the player to provide a workable solution, but ability does not seem to be a feature of the software I have been looking at. There are some well-established guidelines for web page design that go some way towards overcoming the accessibility challenges inherent with dyslexia. These should be a feature of digital organ displays.
With so much organ music now being displayed on an iPad there would seem to be potential for the score to be presented in a way that eases the cognitive burden on the player, perhaps with wider separation of the lines on the stave and/or offering player-specified symbol colours, an approach which many with dyslexia find helpful.
The challenges are certainly not insurmountable. For example, there is a very encouraging profile of organist Louisa Denby prior to giving a recital at Bradford Cathedral earlier this year. There is also an excellent guide to help churches include dyslexic adults in the musical elements of the service though it does not specifically mention playing musical instruments. The Musicians Union offers sound advice on working with musicians with neurodevelopmental conditions.
In this post I have focused on dyslexia but there are related issues with (as examples) autism and ADHD. I’ve been invited to give a paper to a conference being sponsored by the Royal Musical Association on 6 September at The City University London on the subject of The Pipe Organ as a Site for Musical and Technological Innovation. My objective is to make sure that the technical innovation does not end up making the organ even more unapproachable for neurodiverse players, and ideally the technology should in fact improve accessibility and facilitate the discovery of the pleasures of making music on an organ.
To the best of my recollection, I have not seen any discussion of challenges and opportunities for organists (and in particular organ teachers) in either professional journals or in meetings and workshops. Given the current and highly important visibility of mental health I find that concerning.