We’re now in the third full year of operations for Wye Valley Music in Mind.  We continue with our monthly programme at Severn View, a Local Authority Care Home run by Monmouthshire County Council, and with the Music Memory Café, here in St Briavels.  This year we’ve turned our attention towards community health in a wider sense.  We’ve now held a community dementia awareness session, designed to open a general discussion about dementia, to look at some of the practical ways we can help prevent or reduce our risk of dementia and to introduce some facts to counteract the fear and stigma that all too often surround this subject.  We’ve also held a one-day, intensive First Aid course and two Basic Life Support courses (this is emergency ‘crash’ First Aid for when someone goes down in front of you): together these have provided nearly 30 people with instruction in emergency CPR.  And next year we hope to be able to start offering individual music therapy sessions as well.  We are fully funded up to spring next year and we are now looking ahead for financing to take us to the end of 2025 – all donations, very gratefully received.  

But, as with previous years, it’s the more intangible aspects of the work we’re doing that leave the most lasting memories.  It’s the attendee who chose to join us at the Music Memory Café the morning after her husband had died, saying that there was nowhere else she’d rather be: we were able to hug her, cry with her and sing her husband’s favourite song.  It’s the Severn View resident who serenaded us with Abide with Me as a ‘thank you’ for our concert; it’s the resident who is distracted by a well-known opera aria long enough to hum along with it and stop forever-panicking that she’s missed her bus.  

I’ve mentioned before that the science behind all this, behind the interplay between different parts of the brain and the ways in which we hear, remember and respond to music, is still somewhat in its infancy, but anecdotally we all know that music evokes emotions and memories in ways that are constantly astounding.  Try this thought experiment for yourself: you’re walking down the street on a beautiful sunny day, windows open all about you and sounds of music drifting down towards you.  And then you hear a tune that takes you back…  And suddenly [click] you’re 16 again – you know exactly what you wearing when you first heard this song, who you were with, who you were snogging at the time…  Your body might still be in St Briavels in 2024, but your mind is in a whole different place in a whole different year.  I came across a quote the other day which seemed to sum this effect up perfectly: music’s superpower is “the storage and transmission of feeling across time.”  In other words, music makes time-travellers of us all.  And it’s this power that we hope to keep harnessing for as long as we possibly can. Thank you very much.