Hearing is vital for the enjoyment of music. As Kent’s leading independent hearing company we also know how important good hearing is for everyone’s physical and emotional well-being.

Music also has a positive effect on people’s health and so we’re delighted to be supporting groups bringing music to the area – Monday Music, Canterbury Cantata Trust and the Sacconi Festival.

Watch a video about the groups involved and their work:

Here’s a transcript of the interview with Grenville Hancox and Matt Shipton:

Grenville: My name is Grenville Hancox and I’m the founder and artistic director of Canterbury Cantata Trust.

Matt: My name is Matt Shipton and I am chair of trustees for the Sacconi Chamber Music Festival in Folkestone.
Grenville: Well, Monday Music is the name of the group here in Folkestone. It replicates a group like that in Canterbury. It’s a mental, physical and spiritual workout, an hour’s length, through singing, which is, you know, the most natural thing that’s known to man. It’s a means of actually feeling better very easily in a very happy social group without any sort of affiliation to religious belief or anything like that.
Matt: So, the Sacconi Festival is a celebration of chamber music that happens every year in May in Folkestone. It’s a three-day festival where they invite musicians to come and join them and make music of the highest quality. It really informs everything they do during the year.

In terms of the repertoire that they choose for the festival, it’s a culmination of everything they do during the year. It’s just a wonderful way to bring friends and people who support the quartet together alongside local people who’ve been introduced to the quartet over the years.

How has Hearbase supported your work?

Grenville: Hearbase’s involvement with Canterbury Cantata Trust and specifically here with Monday Music is, of course, a financial improvement to our rather, not precarious, but a state of affairs which depends upon donations and subscriptions, so that’s really important. But, I think maybe even more important than that is actually the validation that’s given through commercial association with a group like Hearbase. It is known for its expertise and for its specialism with hearing, which of course is fundamental to us as being human. So, we actually have a lot in common.

Matt: We are delighted to be connected with Hearbase, which is Kent’s largest independent provider of hearing products. What’s really exciting about this relationship is, particularly for 2020, the 250th birthday of Beethoven who was famously, you know, went deaf during his lifetime. He could hardly hear at all at the end.

So to be able to work with an organisation where we can actually provide a kind of tangible partnership whereby we actually explore what it means to lose hearing. We’re in the process of creating a concert that will replicate the experience of being hard of hearing by manipulating the sound so people with normal hearing caexperience something of what it’s like to have severe hearing loss.