Music in the Heart

Today as an RA staff, we volunteered as a group at an organization called Club Nova. It's an organization that provides a lifestyle for people in the community with mental disabilities and handicaps. It's called a "Clubhouse Model," where members and staff both participate equally in running the organization. They have three main components of the oragnization: the house, the thrift store, and the apartments. The apartments were recently taken over by the government and are now Section 8 housing, but many of the members still live there. The house has meeting places, offices, a kitchen, and is just in general a place for people to hang out and be social. The thrift shop is pretty self explanatory, that's where I presume they make the majority of their income.

It was an odd experience being around so many people who have disorders and disabilities that are much more extreme that my own, and I think some of my fellow volunteers felt similarly. It was very clear that all of the members had a normal underlying self and personality, but there's was some barrier or difference that changes them in unfortunate ways.

The house had an upright piano wich of course I ended up at during our lunch break! Many of the same RAs from the Pachelbel post were with me at the piano, too. We talked about music theory some, discussing the difference between major, minor, and diminished triads and what exactly a seventh chord is. One of the members came over and talked to us a bit. Because of the barriers, I wasn't sure exactly what he said, but he definitely asked to sit down at the piano. He talked about listening to the radio and how he hasn't had much inspiration for a while. He mumbled something that didn't make a whole lot of sense about tuning and playing in band, so I was slightly skeptical when told me he was going to play me a pop song. He proved my ignorance when he began playing a beautiful chord progression right in front of me, complete with inversions and sharps and flats and everything beautiful. It made me remember that music is a part of all of us, and is a form of communication that bridges lingual and cultural and even disability barriers. I felt that I could experience the person he truly was, despite the differences in the way our minds work.



The video unfortunately doesn't have sound, but perhaps it's still interesting to watch.