London's Southbank conference to discuss The Beethoven Question

The Musical Brain is organising a two-day conference on 27 and 28 October at London’s Southbank Centre titled The Beethoven Question: Can Art Make Life Worth Living? The event will have live speech-to-text transcription on both days.

Can art make life worth living? Beethoven certainly proclaimed as much, declaring that his encroaching deafness would have led him to end his life had it not been for his art. The Musical Brain will bring together a broad range of speakers from the worlds of music and medical science to consider what it is about the arts that can help us to triumph in the face of adversity.

Speakers include broadcaster John Suchet (pictured), author of six books on Beethoven; Professor Barry Cooper, a world Beethoven authority; Stephen Johnson, presenter of BBC Radio 3's Discovering Music; outstanding young composer Lloyd Coleman, who shares Beethoven's hearing difficulties; Dr Paul Whittaker OBE, Director of Music and the Deaf; Nigel Osborne, composer and pioneer in the field of music and healing; the Amsterdam University research team, presenting their recent groundbreaking study on how Beethoven's deafness affected his quartet writing.

The conference will also include concerts given by Ian Brown, piano, Stephan Loges, bass-bartione, Anna Tilbrook, piano and the Sacconi Quartet, who will also illustrate the sessions and join in the discussions.
 

Further information

Venue: Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX

Dates: Saturday 27 October and Sunday 28 October, from 10am. Speech-to-text will be provided for the discussions which take place from 10am-5.30pm. The concert at 6.45pm will not have speech-to-text but your ticket will cover this if you want to stay on.

Tickets: £95 for one day and £160 for the whole weekend.

Deaf, deafened and hard of hearing people who want to use the speech-to-text are entitled to a 20% discount by using the promo code ‘Beethoven2012’ when booking through the Southbank.

Tel: 0844 847 9910

More details and the conference programme can be found here.