When Disability and Music Met Maker Culture: The Long(er) History of Accessible Music Notation

In a recent think piece for the new-music media site I Care If You Listen , the London-based writer and director Jessica Bailey advocates for accessible notation practices in classical-music pedagogy (‘Earned, Not Learned: How Classical Music Notation is Not Built for Neurodivergent Students’ https://icareifyoulisten.com/2024/06/classical-music-notation/ (18 June 2024)). As an avid pianist with Nonverbal Learning Disorder, Bailey finds numbers and symbols more challenging than words and letters, and she recounts how forbidding conventional music notation was for her. Bailey developed her own workarounds, but advanced music study was essentially off limits. She now wonders what doors might be opened to her and other neurodivergent musicians through even small adjustments to notation systems. Drawing a connection between the accessible pre-grade piano-method books of her childhood and modern digital solutions like Lime Lighter and the Odla tactile console, Bailey ponders how notation technologies might help us ‘reimagine and re-programme the sheet music model’.