“Infectious diseases shouldn’t be this much fun!”

Grand Union Orchestra playing Song of Contagion at Wilton's
“Infectious diseases shouldn’t be this much fun!”

That’s the verdict of one of the guests at the opening night of Song of Contagion. Having kept us wondering until the last minute, composer Tony Haynes unveiled a rocking good show last night (Tuesday June 13). I’m not musical enough to blow our own trumpet, so I’ll share some of the comments from the audience.

“Ridiculous amount of talent among musicians”
“You should tour Europe. It was awesome and inspiring”
“A tonic for our times. Brilliant, moving and very groovy”
“I really enjoyed the musical diversity, the different moods it brought us to and (cherry on the cake) the fantastic venue”
“What a great spirit we have in London. This is multiculturalism at its best”
“Made me feel enlivened, privileged, lucky and blind to injustice.”

There’s a lot more, but perhaps you should get along to the show between now and Saturday June 17th, and see for yourself!

Contagion on the airwaves: Samba, strings and the story of HIV

Click to listen to More or Less programme

Last weekend, the BBC World Service’s resident numbers nerd Tim Harford dedicated a whole episode of the wonderful “More or Less” programme to Song of Contagion. On air, I heard a few bars of the show’s music for the first time, and got a bit overexcited.

You can also listen to the programme, and to a few bars of the HIV song, here:

Going viral in The Lancet

Thanks to Wellcome Images.

Updated with pdf of essay.

It’s less than a fortnight until Song of Contagion hits the stage. The show we will meet for the first time on June 12th is perhaps less the product of a gestation than an upbringing, delivering an energetic but volatile teenager: unpredictable, yes, but (almost certainly) loveable too.

In this essay in The Lancet, I think back to the teenager’s conception, and muse on why we sometimes make such very bad decisions in global health. If the link doesn’t work for you, download the pdf version here.

For those who want a little of the music, too, there’s this podcast.

The Show takes shape…

“Turn the corner into Cable Street – a sharp breeze from the river catches you, sometimes the scent of the sea…the street remembers”

So begins Song of Contagion, in the atmospheric setting of a classic Victorian music hall, taking you to the very heart of East London, where cholera raged 150 years ago. The cause unknown, wild theories abound, but eventually the problem is solved: fresh water and an effective sewage system are the answer.  Meanwhile Indian voices and instruments describe an equally virulent epidemic gripping Kolkata, in West Bengal; but no such steps are taken there, and thousands continue to die from the disease.

If only all diseases were so simply eradicated. Take the story of HIV/AIDS, told here in a piece I developed from one of the original music workshops described here, using this graph:

GUO musicians animate the lines on this graph, projected behind them. Strings buzz away over drums and bass – the activism of mainly gay men; saxophones portray growing public awareness and media attention, and trombones the initially reluctant government funding for treatment, while a menacing bass drum marks the ever-increasing death rate. Then the trumpets announce a treatment has been found – an expensive one, but the drum beats fade.

Meanwhile, millions of families living with the disease in Africa can’t all be treated until medication is cheaper. Against an African rhythm now, the strings, saxophones and trombones again get to work and the trumpets mellow as the price falls. In some parts of the world, the disease is now being treated, thanks to public awareness and action, but there is still much to be done; as the choir warns us, “easy to turn our backs now – but silence is consent”.

Often only when the media take up the cause is a disease taken seriously; but they are capricious, and need a story – preferably a sensational one…

A mosquito begins to dance over a lilting rhythm from central Africa, where dengue fever is endemic and has been killing tens of thousands for years. However “it’s not going to play if it’s too far away – get lost, I’ve got papers to sell!” is a newspaper editor’s cynical response. Next, with soca and steel pans, she spreads the disease to the Caribbean, but “if the rum is still flowing and tourists keep going, where’s the drama?” the editor says.

Trying a different tack, she sambas off to Brazil, where “…Zika may spoil the Olympics: there’s babies being born with small heads” – “now you’re talking!” the editor said. The mosquito dances off to an exuberant big-band number featuring drums and percussion from all over Africa, the Caribbean and Latin-America.

Now the sound of a heart beat fills the Hall, and its graphic wave fills the screen, a portent of CHD – Coronary Heart Disease. Against this pulse, performers press sweets on the audience, muttering fragments of old music hall songs – “when my sugar walks down the street…”, “I’ll be your sweetheart…”, “a little of what you fancy does you good…”. A ghost of Wilton’s past – an old music hall comedian – appears, hymning a lifestyle promoted by the junk food industry. The heartbeat on the screen begins to stutter, the band becomes ragged and the pulse erratic – “a little … of what you fancy … does you … in”.

Three dramatic stories now follow, vividly brought to life in a series of flashbacks. This is the experience of people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

A survivor of the Bangladesh/Pakistan war recalls being hunted down in the mountains “jolche shorbanash / everything is burning”, while a villager fears for the future of her family; in Angola, a Portuguese conscript soldier wearied of the relentless jungle warfare “as colunas partiam a madrugada / the platoons set off every morning” attempts suicide and is attended by a medical orderly; a refugee from the war in Syria tries to console her child, haunted by the loss of her father and husband.

Their stories are interwoven, and then taken up by four jazz soloists – two trumpets and two saxophones – with the other musicians providing an eloquent instrumental commentary. Overlapping and colliding with increasing frequency, the musical images build to a powerful climax, in which all the singers also give voice: “Horror of war, beyond what words can tell, or a picture-graph…”

The nightmares dissolve into a poignant epilogue – “If music could bind up the silent wound, we would do that; if music could, we would…”  Each of the singers ponders on the grudging support society offers survivors of conflict, especially innocent victims, and the limited power of artists to intervene. The audience leaves the Hall and steps back out to Cable Street; they are asked to reflect on what they’ve heard, the need for action, the power of unity and activism, and the positive effects of intervention.

(Phrases in italics are excerpts from some of the lyrics in the show.)

A more detailed version of this scenario, and information about the performers, can be found here on the Grand Union Orchestra website.

Tony Haynes, March 2017

Superbugs: “Not like Ebola” — but soon will be

Not any longer...
Not any longer…

Last week, nearly every country in the world got together at the United Nations General Assembly to commit to doing something about the spread of superbugs: bacteria, viruses and other pathogens that are evolving their way around the medicines that treat them. It’s an important step, and one the UK has taken credit for, not without reason. At a bunch of side meetings ahead of the big political discussions in New York last week, speaker after speaker said that the threat of antimicrobial resistance (or AMR, for those who want to avoid the mouthful) had been neglected because it was “not urgent, like Ebola”, “not visible, like zika”, “there are no activist groups shouting about it, like HIV.” It could have been an introductory talk for the concept behind Song of Contagion.

What eventually put AMR on the global agenda was essentially the dedication and clever strategising of a single “champion” — Dame Sally Davies, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer. She looked at the evidence: we’re overusing antibiotics in both medicine and farming, they’re developing resistance fast, and there are no new ones in the pipeline because it’s more profitable to develop drugs that people have to take every day. She decided it was important, and rallied the UK Prime Minister to the cause. Then, very cleverly, Dame Sally outsourced a lot of the lobbying to an economist, Jim O’Neill. Bestower of BRICS, Goldman Sachs superhero and (briefly) UK Treasury minister, Jim is listened to by many in the corporate world (and in the all-important Chinese and Indian governments) who wouldn’t take much notice of even the most energetic health official. Lord O’Neill was the public face of a hard-working team that put together a lot of scary info-graphics based on a lot of solid evidence (and some less solid but certainly scary “blue sky” estimates) that captured the front pages of newspapers as influential as The Economist.

We didn’t actually specify “Champions” on the list of parameters that we think influence decision-making about health priorities.

parameters

But thinking more about the “human influencers”, well, they very rarely act as an undifferentiated group. Sally Davies is a technocrat, certainly. But many technocrats before her recognised the threat of AMR without getting 193 nations to sign up to work together to do something about it. She is a technocrat who is also a visionary, a strategist, and a bit of a terrier. She just doesn’t give up until she gets what she wants. So it was with the early AIDS activists. Which raises a question for the musicians engaged with Song of Contagion: what do “champions” sound like?

PROJECT UPDATE:

After a summer researching various options, we’ve come up with a shortlist of disease stories (.docx) that we think provide good illustrations of some of the key factors affecting which diseases are considered “important”. (There’s a one-page summary sheet here(.docx).) AMR is not currently on the list — somewhat ironically, because it is the issue Song of Contagion epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani is working on right now. So that might change…

We expect to gather anyone who’s interested together to start writing lyrics the first week in November — please contact Sheelah (sheelah@btinternet.com) if you’d like to join in. Soon after that, it’s over to the musicians — we welcome all-comers with open arms. There will be a few music workshops and rehearsals over the winter, ahead of a performance in spring 2017.

The HIV band plays on… and on….

My personal Groundhog Day is the biennial AIDS conference, bustling with passionate activits, hopeful researchers, singing orphans. This year’s conference (held in Durban in July) had a greater sense of deja vu than most. After a brief blip of “End of AIDS” optimism at the 2014 conference, even Bill Gates was brought back down to earth: biomedical solutions alone won’t work.

Actually, with 17 million people on effective treatment, we’re much closer to the end of AIDS than we imagined when the AIDS circus last came to Durban 16 years ago. We’re just not any nearer to the end of HIV. As deaths drop off, the number of people living with the virus rises. If you take a squint at the graphs that the musicians are “playing” in the video below, you can see the shape of AIDS deaths (dramatic peak, steep decline — the data are for the US) but also the steep and continuing rise in cost of treatment. Not shown, but even more dramatic, is the rise in the number people who have HIV and are sexually active. So despite the fact that effective treatment reduces the chance of passing on the virus, the number of new HIV infections added to the global pool each year is not falling: around 2.1 million new infections in 2015.

The video comes from Song of Contagion’s very first music workshop; we’ve moved on a bit since then but it does look like HIV will be one of the disease stories we’ll be taking on. (By “we”, I mean the talented musicians shown in this introduction to the incomparable Grand Union Orchestra.)

You can see from their final performances how much work composer Tony Haynes puts in to each piece. Here, with a cast that includes public health nerds and some fine HIV researchers, you can see the very first seeds of what I hope will eventually turn in to one of those classic Grand Union performances:

Help choose Contagion stories: July 11th @ Elizabeth’s

Which diseases will stalk the Hackney Empire next spring? It’s a question we’ve been thinking about since Song of Contagion began. We’ve made a lot of progress to date, with help from many of you. That’s helped refine our thinking, and we’ve a better idea of how the show might work than we did at the start. So we want to ask for a final round of disease input before handing over to the music creatives. We hope to end up with a shortlist that the songwriters and composers can use to start creating the show. If you’ve got ideas, please join Elizabeth for beer, pizza (or other forms of booze and sustenance, depending on how many of you email and say you’re coming) and discussion at her place in north-east London on the evening of Monday July 11th.

Though our discussions so far have been wide-ranging we now want to get focused, not on diseases themselves, but on the different social, political and physical forces that shape our perception of the importance of a disease or illness. We want to choose a handful of diseases which illustrate specific parameters, then develop musical stories in which those parameters can be heard. With input from lots of you, we’ve now come up with a more rigorous list of the parameters which affect our perception of disease. They look like this:
parameters
(click image to download the Word file)

I’m lobbying for a diarrhoea story (Drain Brain?) that starts in 1830 and tells the story of poo-related deaths in London and Calcutta. The British and the Indian music will start off at the same volume because back then, diarrhoea was killing roughly the same proportion of the population in those cities. Then in the 1850s the British music gets deafening — that was the Big Stink and the cholera epidemic that followed. This rattles the Victorians into action, and they start to build drains — represented by the introduction of a didgeridoo as a bass-line to the British music (I’m hoping for a dij because it both looks and sounds like a drain…) As a result, diarrhoea deaths in London plummet. While the dij bass-line carries on, the rest of the British music gets quieter and falls silent. The Indian music, on the other hand, never gets a bass-line. Neither the colonial government nor the many subsequent Indian governments have invested sufficiently in basic sanitation, and tens of thousands of children continue to doe of diarrhoea in Indian cities to this day.
Parameters illustrated: Prevalence, near/far, infrastructure, time.

Other current contenders:
Dengue Merengue (HT Andrew W). Contrasting dengue with zika. Both are viruses spread by the same mosquito, in the same places. Dengue has been quietly killing people for years, and gets virtually no attention. Along comes zika, throwing up pin-head babies at a faster rate than the Brazilians can build Olympic stadiums. Front page news!
Parameters illustrated: visible vs. shocking, cute victims, near/far, press as influencers.

Shell Shocked: the story of mental illness resulting from war and violence. A century ago this was a “pull-your-socks-up” condition. Eventually it became diagnosable (as post-traumatic stress disorder), then pathologised and treated, though arguable only if you are lucky enough to experience it as a soldier from a rich country with a big health-care budget for veterans. The vast majority of civilians in conflict zones are exposed to more shocking violence and loss than intervening troops, but get no care.
Parameters illustrated: Unrecognised to pahtologised, near/far, us/them, Pharma as influencers.

We’ve got a couple more up our sleeves, but you get the picture. We want to hear YOUR suggestions. Please contact Elizabeth with ideas, or if you’re in London, come along at 7.30 on July 11th. If you e-mail info@songofcontagion.com, we’ll send you directions.

Contagion goes digital

On May 22nd, a Sunday, an extraordinarily diverse range of musicians dragged themselves untimely from their beds to keep playing with the Contagion concepts, this time electronically. The workshop was run by Sam Johnson , presiding genius of CM.

sam-johnson-picIt continued to develop the ideas explored by acoustic instruments in the first workshop, developing and applying the musical parameters through digital means and music technology.

Sam began with a fascinating account (lavishly illustrated with familiar and unfamiliar tracks) of the development of recording techniques from the 19th century up to the present day, demonstrating the effect records have on the making of music.

Then, focussing on the role that technology can play in the creative process, Sam took participants – many of whom had limited experience of working with technology to record and edit music – through some of the incredible range of creative options available in processing sound, applying effects, editing and arranging. Some instruments, and some of the musical ideas, associated with the previous workshop were then recorded. This material was then manipulated in response to suggestions form the group to create characteristic profiles of diseases; and finally each participant was given their own workstation to try things out for themselves.

Here’s a grainy video of our discussions around distorting a sitar and a trombone to represent diarrhoea:

(Originally posted by Tony Haynes, May 2016)

What do diseases sound like? First soundings

Horn and table - Grand Union Orchestra

The first exploratory music workshop took place on Saturday 7th May at St Margaret’s House, Bethnal Green. It was run by GUO composer/director Tony Haynes with three Grand Union Orchestra musicians: Claude Deppa, South African trumpeter and percussionist; Yousuf Ali Khan, tabla player and singer from Bangladesh; and Carlos Fuentes from Chile, exponent both of Andean and Brazilian folk instruments and Latin-American music. This group of musicians was specially chosen to reflect the intended global span of Song of Contagion

As well as musicians, many students and global health professionals who participated in the launch workshop on April 23rd returned, and – whether they regarded themselves and musical or not! – joined in all the activities with grace and enthusiasm.

Carlos berimbau Grand-Union Orchestra Song of Contagion

Elizabeth began the day by profiling various diseases and isolating the parameters by which they can be defined (and the relative importance we attach to treating and funding them). Tony then identified ‘musical parameters’ in a similar way; and with the aid of the musicians, demonstrated how variations of a piece of music can be achieved, while the separate elements of which it is comprised – melody, harmony, rhythm and so on – still remain recognisable.

AIDS_story_graphic

To kick off the practical exploration, joining the disease parameters to the musical ones, Elizabeth produced some very vivid graphs, turning statistical data effectively into pictures, which the group proceeded interpret through music, turning them into some very dramatic and colourful musical pieces. or ‘vignettes’. As a result, we now have some emergent ‘repertoire’, but more importantly a number of creative strategies for generating further musical material.

(First posted by Tony Haynes, May 2016)

Song of Contagion is born!

Health charts and muscians atSong of Contagion workshop

The Song of Contagion project launched on April 23rd 2016 in the wonderful Graeae Theatre studios in Hackney. We had a great mix of participants who contributed their ideas around the politics of decision-making in public health. Among the answers to the question: “Why are some diseases more important than others?” my favourite was: it depends where the disease sits on the Cuddly-to-Yucky and the Benign-to-Scary spectra. It’s a concept that’s endlessly rich (and is further developed in this later post)

The jackpot in terms of getting funding and attention is a disease which is really ‘scary’ but in a ‘cuddly’ population: for example HIV in innocent children. The worst case seems to be a disease which is relatively benign, affecting ‘yucky’ populations — by yucky, we really meant populations that aren’t good for photo opportunities or pulling on heartstrings. Chronic conditions in the grossly overweight are hard to get people excited about, for example. Unless, of course, you’re an executive in a Pharma company. Then, you LOVE chronic conditions because they mean people gave to take drugs every day of their lives.

The discussions were rich, varied and lively, and that’s before Tony, Tony and Carlos got the instruments out and set us off on demonstration of the musical parameters.

This part of the journey will continue in later workshops discussing and exploring these parameters through practical, hands-on, creative music-making – in which everyone can play a part, regardless of musical skill or experience.

Much more in a while, but for now, thanks very much to everyone who participated for giving up your Saturday to fill our heads and hearts with endless exciting possibilities.

We look forward to the rest of the journey. It promises to be great fun, even for those of us who would put statistics at the benign and music at the scary end of the spectrum. Please join in at any stage.

(Originally published by Elizabeth Pisani on April 24, 2016)

How Song of Contagion was conceived: Tony’s version

Every baby has a conception story. Here’s Song of Contagion’s according to composer Tony Haynes:

One Saturday evening in late autumn 2014, a distinguished epidemiologist found herself at a loose end in Hackney. On a whim, she decided to drop into a show at the Hackney Empire that looked intriguing. This is what she saw:

A few days later, I received this email:

Screen Shot 2016-06-25 at 23.02.12

It was from Elizabeth Pisani, and she went on “I am constantly frustrated by 1) the mismatch between health needs and health spending and 2) the public health establishment’s unshakeable belief that this mismatch will be solved simply by generating more (epidemiological) evidence. For a while now, I’ve been thinking about using music to look at these issues… It’s a very long shot, but I wondered if you might be interested in collaborating on such a project, or at least having a coffee or pint and discussing the possibilities.”

For a lifelong addict of long shots – not just on the turf, but having virtually founded a professional career on backing long shots! – it was impossible to resist. A few days before Christmas, I met Elizabeth for a coffee in the Empire café.

I was very taken with Elizabeth’s ideas. In spite of her protestations that she has “not a musical bone in my body”, she has a remarkable imagination and an instinctive grasp of how music works. Her notion was to characterise different diseases, through statistics that measured how widely they were spread, the demographic they affected or geographical area they covered, the amount of publicity they received, and whether or not treatment was well funded.

What if each of these factors could be attached to appropriate musical elements – like melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, volume? Through variations in these ‘parameters’ she imagined you would get a series of pieces where AIDS, Ebola, malaria, cholera and so on would sound very different from each other. Then you might arouse public awareness of inequality, touching people directly in a way that – as she put it – PowerPoint presentations cannot.

Putting these ideas into practice

The first step was clearly to start raising money. Elizabeth suggested this project might appeal to the Wellcome Trust, which has an unrivalled reputation for supporting arts projects explaining or inspired by science. We had a great conversation with one of their officers, who immediately saw the potential of the project, and offered very encouraging advice; slightly to Elizabeth’s chagrin, he suggested we should not dwell too much on the statistics – what they really wanted to come out of their funding was new, imaginative art!

So we put in an application, and were delighted to hear in the New Year that it had been successful.

What appealed to the Trust was not only the quality of the artistic ideas, but that built into the project was a participatory programme. From the very beginning young people, students and adults interested in health issues and/or music would be involved in initial discussions and the continued development of the material. It was also clear that there was great potential for music technology to play a part – exploring the parameters digitally, sampling and treating the acoustic instruments and so on. So we enlisted CM Sounds, who work extensively with young producers and creators in this field, as partners.

We also wanted to focus activity on East London. Grand Union is based in Bethnal Green, CM in Whitechapel, most members of our Youth Orchestra and World Choir live nearby, and many of our events take place in local venues like Rich Mix, Wilton’s Music Hall and the Hackney Empire. But more importantly, because of the extraordinarily diverse demographic of the East End, this would mean that there would be people involved with a direct connection to countries and communities around the world who experience disease and how it is treated. This would give the impact of the project further authenticity.

Getting started

At the first workshop (April 23rd in Graeae Theatre studios) Elizabeth introduces the project, questioning why some diseases capture public attention and funding, while others are ignored. Using statistics to illustrate her points, she leads a discussion about fashion, politics, money and other factors that influence decision-making in health. Participants then split into smaller groups to identify what diseases they think are most important, which factors distinguish them; and, if they don’t get the attention they deserve, which factors are getting in the way.

I then show, with the help of Grand Union musicians, how all music is a combination of separate elements – melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, dynamics etc – which different forms of music combine with varying degrees of emphasis. The core of this project is to attach musical features to the statistical factors, so participants again split into smaller groups to discuss which parameters in the profile of a disease might correspond with an appropriate musical parameter, and how a musical ‘picture’ of a disease might emerge.

At the end of the day, we discuss suggestions that have arisen, which diseases it might be most instructive or fruitful to address, the most significant scientific parameters and their musical expression. Elizabeth then goes away to compile appropriate statistical data.

The next workshop (May 7th, St Margaret’s House) is < a href="http://songofcontagion.com/what-do-diseases-sound-like-first-soundings/">entirely musical. Musicians bring their instruments, or they are provided for those who don’t have one. We begin to explore the way the statistical data can be realised through music. This will be mostly improvisational, at first combining and varying the musical elements in different ways, then more rigorously applying them to the disease parameters. The third workshop (May 22nd, CM, Brady Centre) follows a similar process through music technology, transferring some of the ideas and material created acoustically and experimenting with the same ideas digitally

What happens next?

Elizabeth and myself reflect on and digest all the material generated – from discussion points to musical themes – and decide how best to develop it into a coherent and gripping public performance. Grand Union and CM run a series of workshops during the autumn with the GU Youth Orchestra and World Choir and the students from CM. It is likely that some narrative material will be needed, including lyrics, to which workshop participants can contribute; and I shall write some new songs and begin to organise the material into a coherent, large-scale musical structure.

Early in 2017 a show will emerge, and we intend the performance to include also contributions from Elizabeth herself (here is a sample of her performance skills!) and the CM musicians alongside the full Grand Union Orchestra, Youth Orchestra and Choir. This – the latest in a long and impressive line of Grand Union shows – will be presented at the Hackney Empire.

Meanwhile, I shall use my Blog to report from time to time on how the project is developing, with my usual notated musical examples, video and recordings. I’ll cross-post blogs here to Song of Contagion, so do sign up for e-mail alerts.

Originally posted on Tony’s blog on March 30 2016