ALEXIA: COMPOSER, LINGUIST, PERFORMER, POET, WRITER

MEET ALEXIA

The Wikipedia page reads as follows: “Alexia Sloane is a British synaesthetic blind composer and poet. She was the winner of the 2016 Cambridge Young Composer of the Year competition and also one of seven winners of the Classic FM/Royal Philharmonic Society 25th Birthday Commissions in 2017.

Whilst Sloane was born fully sighted, at the age of 2, she was found to have an optic nerve glioma and she subsequently lost her eyesight completely in spite of a lengthy chemotherapy treatment lasting 18 months.

Sloane began composing seriously when she was 12. Common themes that run through her compositions are those of nature, philosophy and psychology, taking much inspiration from Buddhist, environmental and synaesthetic imagery.”

GROWING UP

All our Student Visioneers are growing-up so quickly, and so too with Alexia, whose self-description on Twitter reads as follows “Gay, non-binary, female-assigned Buddhist who composes using Braille music notation… Well, what can I say, you gotta tick those diversity boxes right? Just a gentle reminder that my pronouns are they/them. I realise it can be a tricky switch, & thank you so much to everyone who is already using the right language – but there have been a few slips recently, & I just wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page”

We’ll do our best to honor Alexia’s preferences with new post updates from this date forward.

ALEXIA TODAY

After having improvised music for six years, Alexia Sloane, born in 2000, began taking formal composition lessons at the age of 12. Since then, they have been a composer with Aldeburgh Young Musicians, The National Youth Orchestra and the Britten Sinfonia Academy as well as a First Study Composer at the Royal College of Music Junior Department. They have been fortunate enough to have been selected as the winner of The Cambridge Young Composer of the Year, the Joan Weller Composition Prize, The Humphrey Searle Composition Award, the Royal Philharmonic Society/Classic FM 25th Birthday commissions and the BBC Proms Inspire Young Composers’ Competition. Their work has been performed by VOCES8, The Aurora Orchestra, The Ligeti Quartet, The Brodsky String Quartet, The Hermes Experiment, The Phaedra Ensemble, Dr K Sextet, St Catharine’s Girls Choir, Kings Junior Voices and Ensemble 10/10, among others. They have also written for soloists such as Huw Watkins and Oliver Coates. Over the years, Alexia has been generously supported by the Amber Trust, The Humphrey Searle Foundation and more recently by a Gough Kelly Award at the RNCM.

Now in their third year of their undergraduate studies at the Royal Northern College of Music, studying with Professor Emily Howard, Alexia hopes to become a professional composer and writer. Their poetry is often metrically free with a strong focus on imagery and sonority. They are deeply concerned by the environmental, social and political issues that exist in contemporary times, and both their musical and literary work often reacts to one or more of these. As a Buddhist, Alexia feels that it is essential for activism to be creative and compassionate, and hopes to develop their art with this in mind.

Future projects include a song cycle for alto, counter tenor, non male choir and ensemble. Most if not all of the libretto will consist of their current anthology in progress, ‘ bird’s eye views ‘ which they hope to complete by the beginning of their third year at the Royal Northern College of Music.

STUDENT VISIONEER

Alexia met and got to work with Daniel Kish, Lead Founder and President of Visioneers when he was on assignment in the U.K.

Alexia became fascinated by human echolocation after hearing the BBC Radio 4 documentary ‘Batman and Ethan‘.  When Daniel returned to the U.K. on assignment in 2018,  Alexia was able to do more SonarVision Perceptual Navigation training with Daniel, and another musical prodigy Student Visioneer, Ethan David Loch.

We hope you will take inspiration from these remarkable young talents and make a contribution to support our work with them and others.

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UPDATE: RIP Professor Stephen Hawking –

A Brush With Greatness

Student Visioneer Alexia Sloane, like many of her friends and colleagues in the Cambridge University community in England, is mourning the passing of Professor Stephen Hawking, who died peacefully at home, the morning of March 14, 2018.

In April 2014, as part of her secondary school’s BBC News Report project, Alexia had the privilege and honour of interviewing Stephen Hawking at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge.

As she put it, “This was an absolutely incredible and very humbling experience.

At the end of the interview, I got to play the prologue of my novella to Professor Hawking via my Braille computer who has a very similar voice to his own computer!” You can watch the video of the interview with Professor Hawking below, see more photos of her meeting with Professor Hawking,  and learn more about Alexia’s latest music commissions on her website.

Among some of the highlights throughout 2017, Alexia was named as one of 7 UK composers to have won the Classic FM’s 25th Birthday Commissions in partnership with the Royal Philharmonic Society. Her commissioned piece premiered on October 11 at St.George’s Hall in Liverpool.

In June, last year, Alexia was accepted as one of 4 composers with the Britten Sinfonia Academy, and a week later was declared the Overall Winner of the Royal College of Music Junior Department Joan Weller 2017 Composition Prize, and was one of 21 young musicians from the Royal College of Music to be selected for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, in her case as a composer, for the 2018 season.

ALEXIA: CAMBRIDGE YOUNG COMPOSER OF THE YEAR 2016/2017

Cambridge Young Composer Of The Year

We’re excited to share the news that WAFTB student Alexia Sloane has been named the Cambridge Young Composer of Year 2016/17.

The 16 year-old is the first girl to win the British competition since it began in 2006, and is also the first blind winner. Alexia also won her category in the 15-17 age group.

As Cambridge Youth Music writes: “Alexia, a student at Hills Road Sixth Form College, set Passiflora to the text of “Southampton Water”, a poem by RG Gregory. She dedicated the work to the victims of the shootings in Orlando on the 12th of June, and to the LGBTQIA community. Congratulations Alexia! All of us at Visioneers are very proud of you!

The Winning Piece and The Process

Cambridge Youth Music continues: “Alexia has been blind since the age of two and composes using a braille keyboard. Composing involves her in an extremely lengthy process of dictating every note for someone else to write down.

Her winning composition, Passiflora, took eight hours to transcribe in this way.

Judge Ewan Campbell, himself a noted British composer, described Passiflora as “an ambitious piece that makes excellent use of the available instrumentation, with some very interesting harmonies and unusual melodic scales. The piece attains its timeless, dreamlike feel with a loose sense of rhythm and flexible approach to meter.”

ALEXIA SLOANE: An Extraordinary Talent 

To say that 16 year-old Alexia Sloane is quite a very accomplished teenager would be an understatement of the highest order.

Her challenges came early in life and could have resulted in a withdrawn existence of isolation and fear. However, her quiet, but strong, spirit and the guiding foundation of her family, teachers and mentors along the way would have none of that.

Alexia was born in 2000 and was diagnosed with neuro fibromatosis type 1, also called von Recklinghausen’s disease. One of the risks of this rare genetic disorder is that tumors may develop on the nerves of the eye (optic gliomas).

Sure enough, that’s what happened when Alexia was two years old. Although, as she writes on her website, “I consequently underwent my first course of chemotherapy, (I had my second aged eight), I lost my sight completely.”

Despite the lingering shadow of other complications that can arise over many years from the condition, Alexia pressed-on. Born into a bilingual family – her Father, English, her Mother, French/Spanish – her love of languages would be the first talent to emerge, followed by a love of writing – be it poetry or prose, progressively succeeded in turn by music, both as a performer and a composer.

The photos that flank the editorial flow of text on this page capture the milestones of creative achievement in Alexia’s young life, such as her being awarded the 2014 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation where translated a French poem by a Belgian poet into English. Alexia could combine her multi-lingual skills with her passion for poetry, and has even set a higher goal for herself of eventually further translating the piece into Chinese to “experience the beauty and musicality of the Chinese tones when reading it out loud”.

NATIONAL LINGUISTIC FAME

Alexia’s love for, and diligence in, her language studies would soon bring her national acclaim in Great Britain.

At the age of 9, Alexia took the CGSEs (GCSE stands for General Certificate of Secondary Education. GCSE examinations are taken by most pupils at the end of compulsory school education (Grade 11) in England, Wales and Northern Ireland) in French and Spanish achieving an A grade in both.

In the next two years she would accomplish the same in Chinese, Latin and Italian.

It’s no wonder that Alexia was awarded the Cambridge Young Achiever of the Year when she was just 10 because of her advanced test scores.

At the time, she was interested in pursuing a career as an interpreter for the European Union. She was able to get “a taste of the job”, as she put it, when she traveled to the European Parliament in Brussels that year with, then, UK MEP Robert Sturdy.

As you can see in the flanking photos, Alexia sat in during a full environmental committee meeting and interpreted an MEP speech, translating from French into English. She and her family were feted by EUP staff, and Alexia was even given a medal from Anthony Teasdale, then, Deputy Head of Cabinet of the President of the European Parliament.

The following year, Alexia had a big thrill when she got to meet British author and screenplay writer Anthony Horowitz at his house in London. His works include the Alex Rider teenage spy series, new novels for the James Bond (Trigger Mortis)  and Sherlock Holmes (House of Silk) series, and was originator of ‘Foyle’s War’.

Alexia had a great time playing Bach with him on the piano and said, “He gave me about ten CDs of some of his books since these do not exist in Braille and he was truly shocked when I told him only 7% of all print books exist in Braille or in audio format.”

COMPOSING VS. TRANSLATING

In her early teens, Alexia had been amassing awards for her literary efforts in poetry and prose. And as part of those efforts and awards, she got to ‘rub shoulders’ with some pretty famous people.

In April 2014, as part of her secondary school’s BBC News Report project, she had the honor of interviewing Stephen Hawking at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge.

As Alexia put it, “This was an absolutely incredible and very humbling experience. At the end of the interview, I got to play the prologue of my novella to Professor Hawking via my Braille computer who has a very similar voice to his own computer!”

Her efforts also got her invited to Number 10 Downing Street to meet Prime Minister David Cameron and even his children when it was their bedtime.

Despite her prize-winning accomplishments as a linguist and her opportunity to experience interpreting at the Parliament of the European Union, Alexia came to the realization that a career choice as an interpreter would mean she’d never be able to convey her own ideas.

CAREER PIVOT

After winning the 2016 Cambridge Young Composer of the Year Award, Alexia was also successful in gaining a place as a Composer with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain while studying as a Principal Study Composer and Second Study Recorder player at the Royal College of Music.

Since then, Alexia’s musical achievements have been like an ever-building crescendo.

You can learn much more about Alexia and watch videos and hear recordings of her work at her website.

LIGHT-UP MORE OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALEXIA AND OTHER BLIND PERSONS

The echoes from our SonarVision™ clicks act like sparks lighting up the brain’s Visual Cortex with acoustic imaging.

This trains the brain to rewire. But it takes time, like the progressive semesters working towards a College degree.

Let your donation be the spark of opportunity to give blind persons a new level of independence by learning to

SEE WITH SOUND.

Thank You!

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