Music Practice for Visual and Hearing Impaired Communities

Supported by MusicAIRE – An innovative recovery for Europe, an action co-funded by the European Union to support the music industry, the MUSICAR Project is an initiative of Metropolitana which runs from February to November 2023 and aims to contribute to full access to the arts for people with blindness or low vision and Deaf people through the promotion of music theory teaching and ensemble music practice in these communities.

In partnership with professionals and entities with proven experience in these specialties of music education, the proposal assumes an exploratory and prospective intent of good practices. Among complementary and diverse actions, it first includes awareness-raising and specialized training for music teachers, and then theoretical and practical classes for blind and deaf students.

Everything culminates in a public concert that will bring together the participants, the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa, and guest musicians on the stage of the São Luiz Theater on November 29th.

The project’s name, MUSICAR (wich means MUSICKING in English), resonates with the concept theorized by New Zealand musician and pedagogue Christopher Small, who sees music as an eminently relational phenomenon whose essence lies not in the work as an object but in the action – in what each of us does with it.