Insulin at Teatime

Author: John Kefala-Kerr

Project: Insulin at Teatime

When composing Insulin at Teatime it wasn’t unusual for fragments of the music to play constantly in my head. These ‘earworms’ can be mixed blessing, especially when they’re of your own making.

While acts of aural imagination are an essential part of the composing process, the mental intrusion of words and melodies isn’t always welcome. For young people receiving a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes, it's likely that the words of consultants and nutritionists, along with nightmarish thoughts of medical complications and fears about how to cope with the condition, will also loop over and over in the mind, like a ‘sticky song’.

Having now heard Insulin at Teatime performed by musicians in a rehearsal setting, my own earworms (both musical and diabetic) have intensified, but now they possess a slightly different character because the music has left the ideal realm of the imagination and gained an irreversible specificity in Ashleigh Charlton’s singing and David Murray’s piano playing.

Whether the act of dramatising the experience of living with a chronic medical condition renders the shadow of disease less ominous is debatable, but speaking as someone who has gained some Brechtian ‘distance’ in creating such dramatisations, it may well be that there is some benefit to be had in encountering these modest, stylised utterances.

The opportunity to work with Ashleigh and David arose directly out of Co/Lab’s carefully judged formula of balancing financial support and creative licence on the one hand, and agreed milestones and a sense of collective purpose on the other. The Co/Lab micro-commission provided a framework for me to contribute to cross-faculty collaboration, and without this opportunity it is unlikely that Insulin at Teatime would have seen the light of day.

I was greatly encouraged to find my collaborator, Dr Kathryn King, receptive, supportive and willing to engage with the Insulin at Teatime ‘experiment’. Thanks to Kathryn’s research, young people have had their opinions and feelings about living with type 1 diabetes documented in a form that sends an unequivocal message to the medical profession about the shortcomings of care for these patients. My hope is that, in translating aspects of Kathryn’s research into song, some of the pathos, humour and stoicism expressed by the adolescent respondents might be conveyed in novel and unforeseen ways. Music research is also furthered in addressing questions about how composition might participate in everyday life: how it might contribute to the qualitative experience of people living in ordinary situations and circumstances. Such questions are easily overlooked in the absence of ‘framed provocations’ like Co/Lab.