NEW: THE STORY BEHIND THE MUSIC Adrian's Autobiography
In the late 1990s Adrian Snell semi-retired as a professional composer / singer-songwriter to train as a music therapist*. This was a bold move by an artist whose albums and concerts attracted audiences of tens of thousands across Europe. Adrian now works as a Music Therapist and Arts Therapy Consultant for children and adults with special needs at Three Ways School, Bath, and regularly visits a school in Korce, Albania.
Three Ways School has 165 children and young people between ages 4 and 19 with a considerable range of special needs - learning difficulties, physical disabilities and behavioural problems. It is an extraordinary community and many of the students are profoundly responsive to sound and music within a therapeutic, relationship building context. The school is continually exploring and developing ways in which all the senses can be harnessed to enable the students to access the curriculum, and gain confidence etc.
Videos of the work Adrian does at Three Ways School are avaliable on the video page. You can see photos in the Music Therapy Photo album
Beyond Words is a moving documentary about Adrian’s annual Music Therapy visits to Albania, where he regularly visits an orphanage and The Street Children’s Day Centre. The beauty is that the principles behind the music theraphy way of working, communicating and relating, are the same wherever in the world we may be, and the language of music and love bypass the need for speech.
Beyond Words is both deeply moving and uplifting. As the audience is drawn into the world of music therapy it experiences how it is possible to communicate through the rhythm of breath, and make joyful music with a child with cerebral palsy.
A short clip from Beyond Words, 2012
By Rachel Bunce Films
* Adrian is a fully trained Music Therapist holding the post graduate diploma in Music Therapy (Dip. Mus. Th.) awarded by the University of Bristol through the Faculty of Medicine.