Special Projects

Sulamot-Music for Social Change

It all began with an innocent phone call to the phone company Bezeq International’s support line. A pleasant voice answered the phone: a young man who patiently helped me fix a problem. A conversation developed, and it turned out that the man I was speaking with was a blind musician who played the flute. He was a fan of Richard Wagner and his operas, and while searching for sources about Wagner, he came across a large and detailed book written by my brother—the composer Ami Maayani—on Wagner the man, the philosopher, and the musician. Gidi (the young man’s name, it turned out) arranged for the book to be transcribed to Braille and read it eagerly.

When he remembered that I was a harp player, he expressed a desire to learn to play the instrument. After many years of experience teaching all ages, notably at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University for more than 25 years, I was excited to take on the challenge of teaching the harp to the blind.

During this time I was teaching harp education to master's degree students at the Buchman-Mehta School of Music. I conducted a teaching practicum for my students at the Shorashim school in Tel Aviv for the "Sulamot-Music for Social Change" project, a collaboration between the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Tel Aviv University. This connection to Sulamot (meaning both ladders and musical scales in Hebrew) together with my work with Gidi quickly led to the development of a method of teaching harp to blind and visually impaired children.

Sarah Elbaz, the director of Sulamot, wrote the following about the program:

In 2013, a special program for blind and visually impaired children was inaugurated as part of the Sulamot project. These children usually have phenomenal hearing and a developed sense of tactile touch, typically acquired by musicians through endless hours of work. It’s as if all one has to do is give them a musical instrument. Naturally, the piano is the instrument of choice because the sound is produced from the touch of the fingers on the keys, and the keys are organized in a way that one is easily oriented. But in Sulamot, playing in an ensemble (either in a small group or in an orchestra) is the heart of the program. Our challenge is to teach the children musical instruments that allow them to play in an ensemble.

The instrument closest to the piano is the harp. For the purpose of establishing a harp class, we enlisted Ruth Maayani. Professionally and creatively she finds technical and pedagogical solutions to the challenges of teaching harp to the blind and visually impaired. In order to find one’s way around the many strings of the harp, they are typically marked in blue and red. This, of course, does not help a player who cannot see, so a substitute is required.

At first, Ruth marked the strings with a small plastic sticker on the sound box, but over time, this turned out to slow the playing (one needs to lower his hands into the sound box and return them to the strings in order to play). So, Ruth turned to the harp company Camac and suggested that they create a special harp for the blind. On this harp, instead of the colored strings, these strings protrude slightly to the side compared to the others. The deviation of the string is so small that a person who can see does not feel it at all; only those accustomed to feeling a gentle tactile touch notice this deviation. There is now a high level professional harp for the blind (built in two different sizes to suit the development of a child’s body).

We then formed an ensemble consisting of harp players who can see together with those who are blind or visually impaired. This ensemble first performed in a special concert of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra on a day dedicated to the harp. Today, the children play duets and ensemble arrangements written for them by Olga Moitlis.

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