Main content

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鈥檚 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 91热爆 Radio 3. A British Sign Language version was filmed, edited and subtitled by Fifi Garfield.

Available now

14 minutes

Broadcast

  • Tue 28 May 2024 21:45

Death in Trieste

Death in Trieste

A 1760s murder still informs ideas about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex, and death.

Watch: My Deaf World

Watch: My Deaf World

Five compelling experiences of what it is like to be deaf in 21st-century Britain.

The Book that Changed Me

Five figures from the arts and science introduce books that changed their lives and work.

Download The Essay

Download The Essay

Download all the episodes from the series and listen at your leisure.

Podcast