Profiling Robert Lee: Musician at Babigloo Music for Babies

This Blog features one of the professional musicians that we are able to employ thanks to Youth Music funding to come and play for the babies attending to Babigloo. Rob has been working on our Youth Music funded programme in East Dorset (Wimborne and Corfe Mullen) with the newly rennovated Museum of East Dorset and Dorset Council Early Years.

Robert Lee brings a wide range of experience in Music and especially in Early Years If he was able to he would spend all his time composing and performing. Rob's musical career has been "a crazy runaround of genres and uses".

You can listen to some of Rob's work on his Youtube Channel

Rob says: I really enjoyed my time in the creative space with Babigloo.  I was struck at the outset by how alert to the actions and sounds of the Babigloo ensemble the babies were - there is an attitude that I felt in the babies and carers that I might describe as “the attentive expectation of gratification!”.  

Whilst the methods of the ensemble were unfamiliar to me, it always felt to me that there was an internal framework of meaning to whatever they were doing, something like dream-logic - a non-verbal rationale that made deep sense and was very satisfying. 

As a musician, I thought the section where the first 5 notes of a simple major scale (up and down) were represented physically through the synchronised rising and falling of the 3 pairs of arms - simultaneously associated with various pitched vocal textures - made particular musical and physical sense. The great (but not loud) emphasis given to the tonic (root-note) by the placing of hands on the floor seemed to go very deeply to our human understanding of music - where the physical and the vocal and the musical are mostly one and the same.

The practioners moved through a series of sensory ‘provocations’ (as I’m learning they are called?) that without exception seemed to be received by the babies with intelligent satisfaction.  No time was wasted trying to dress up these stimulating events in a verbal or conventionally rational narrative, and yet there was a sense of significance to it all, for me - and I think for the carers and babies.

For me, humans are born (amongst other things) to be creative artistic animals - and the Babigloo environment is food and drink for those parts of us that all too often wither through starvation and thirst.  I truly believe that such an experience that validates these non-verbal forms of expression through shared experience can change lives - it opens out the map of what’s possible and acceptable in the pallette of shared personal expression.

I would love to see this method available as these babies grow all the way to adulthood.  Babigloo I think, can help carers to remember, and can help babies not to forget.

We love Rob at Babigloo and Claire Jones' Cello, Jane Saunders' Harp,Gong and Sax, Rich Hughes' Accordion and Tuba and Mark O'Brien's collection of Clarinets and Saxophones. You can see them all play in our Babigloo Online series produced during Lockdown on the Babigloo Youtube Channel