We’re now in the fourth full year of operations for Wye Valley Music in Mind.  We continue with our monthly programme at Severn View Park, a Local Authority Care Home in Caldicot run by Monmouthshire County Council, and with the Music Memory Café, here in St Briavels.  We also continue with our information sessions – later this month we’ll hold another community dementia awareness morning, looking at providing people with a better understanding of what dementia is, of how to reduce your risk of getting dementia, and of who to turn to for local dementia support.  And we’re now busy working to set up a dementia session in the local primary school, for pupils whose grandparents or other family members might be living with one of the many different types of dementia.  

But, as ever, our main focus is the music, and here we’ve got two new projects to announce.  The first is a music therapy programme, working with individual residents at Severn View who are becoming too frail to attend our monthly group sessions.  This began last month and will run for 12 consecutive weeks, to maximise its impact, and we’re now looking to secure funding to continue and expand it next year.  The feedback so far is very positive: one resident, who now has very limited expressive language, is able to sing along confidently to all her favourite songs; another resident, who used to play the piano, has been picking out her known tunes on a keyboard and even improvising little tunes on the accordion.  This programme supports a newly qualified music therapist, who we have worked with throughout her training, and these sessions give her a chance to cement the skills she has learnt and to help her start building a viable career.  We feel that these ‘legacy elements’ – enabling recent graduates and young musicians to pursue their chosen professions – is as important a part of our programme as the work itself – so we’re thrilled it seems to be going so well.

The second project will be here in St Briavels, at the Music Memory Café, and will start next year.  We’re very excited to be working with a young composer, Charlotte Baskerville, who is a PhD student, writing her doctoral thesis.  She will be collaborating with individual attendees to create mini-musical biographies of them – of aspects of their lives, glimpses of things they’ve done, places they’ve lived, snapshots of memories and experiences – and these will all be woven together to create a special one-off concert towards the end of the year or early in 2027.  It will be, in a sense, a celebration of the power of community music, created by members of the community – and we’re delighted to be able to facilitate it.  And, of course, to contribute to a piece of academic research into community music-making.  I look forward to being able to tell you more about it next year.  Thank you very much.