With the V&A on the way and numerous arts spaces popping up across Dundee, the city’s creative scene is flourishing. The latest addition to this is a new centre for music and arts run by local musician and teacher Fiona Bodman. Here she tells Jennifer Cosgrove how she overcame a debilitating condition to pursue her ambition.
Ever since Fiona Bodman studied for a degree in music at Northern College in Aberdeen over a decade ago, it has been an ambition of hers to create a centre of excellence for music where people of all ages can learn. She specialises in piano and voice but also has clarinet, accordion and guitar in her repertoire.
Dundee Centre of Music on the ground floor of the former Chamber of Commerce building in the city’s Panmure Street is the culmination of that dream and brings together a music school, arts and craft and drama classes under one roof.
After starting out as a primary teacher, then moving up to secondary school, Fiona found a job teaching at a private music school in Aberdeen before moving to Dundee to be with her husband. She gave up school teaching to start a family, and is now a mum of three.
After having her first child, she began private tuition in the evenings to fit round her schedule. It started with a couple of hours a week, but it soon became clear that there was a real demand for teaching.
Within a matter of years, Fiona had established the Bodman School of Music, which has had various homes over the years most recently in Dundee’s Constitution Road.
Not one for doing things by half, she opened the music school when she was a week away from giving birth to her middle child. But it wasn’t until the birth of her youngest in 2008 that her life changed so dramatically.
Fiona explained: “When I had my third baby, I lost my sight and mobility because of multiple sclerosis. Things with the music school quietened down after that, and this is just me getting things up and going again.
“After I had Bailey, everything seemed fine, but then I realised there was something wrong with my eyes I just wasn’t seeing properly then one day my sight just went completely and I was blind. It’s called optic neuritis.”
After losing her sight, Fiona started experiencing problems with her mobility and was unable to walk, meaning she became housebound with a young family to look after.
“It was a very hard time. My husband couldn’t give up work because he was self-employed and I had to wait eight months for my first brain scan,” she continues.
“Thankfully, the music school ran itself, although I wasn’t able to take on any new students. The brain scan diagnosed MS. And it’s OK once you take it in. I was just glad at that point it wasn’t a brain tumour, which is what I thought it was to start with. In a way, it was a relief.”
Fiona’s passion for the centre is obvious and she is determined to put the last two years behind her. She attends the Tayside MS Therapy Centre in Peddie Street where she receives hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It was a chance meeting during one of her treatment sessions that set the course for the Dundee Centre of Music and Arts.
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“I met a member of Dundee arts group The Hive and then it turned out that her boss was in our music school’s choir. If I hadn’t met her, I don’t think things would have spiralled so much it would have been music only but I’m so proud of it now.”
Fiona had been looking for a new venue for the music school, particularly because she wanted a ground-floor premises where she could teach classes for children with disabilities and additional support needs.
Dundee Centre of Music and Arts comprises Bodman School of Music, The Hive, which runs artist-led workshops for both adults and children, The Busybug, which allows children to explore shape and colour through messy play, The Drama Zone, offering classes from aged two years to adults and Little Starz photography studio.
Fiona hopes to open a child-friendly coffee shop and to create a relaxing sensory room with fibre optic lights and sound. She also wants to run events like band nights and a youth cafe and to provide rehearsal space.
“We have applied to Awards for All and also Creative Scotland so we can do outreach in different areas of Dundee, because I know a lot of people can’t afford music lessons. We will just have to wait and see what happens.”
Her music school offers tuition in a range of instruments, from piano, clarinet and bagpipes to saxophone and drums. There is vocal tuition and also Glee-style choirs, including the Encore adult choir, which meets on Monday evenings. The music school is for all ages its oldest pupil is 84!
Fiona has always been passionate about bringing music to children at an early age, so there are Kindermusik classes from the USA for newborn to seven years and the Little Mozarts piano programme for three to six-year-olds.
“I started the Kindermusik to share my love of music with my daughter Kayleigh-Jo. It’s an American programme and I trained through Open University using video link. At the time, there were two educators in Scotland and eighteen in the country but now there are over 150.”
Fiona hopes the Dundee Centre of Music and Arts will complement the existing music provision in the city. She admits she has sometimes found it difficult to recruit tutors in Dundee simply because there is no local centre for study.
“The problem is there are music colleges in Edinburgh and Glasgow and the music programme has been cut at Dundee College, so finding people to teach can be quite difficult because they are not going to travel here.”
She has 24 tutors on board teaching everything from piano keyboard to cello, flute, saxophone and drums and believes music is a great way to raise confidence and build community spirit.
“We had an open day recently and on the back of that we have had three inquiries from children between twelve and sixteen who have either got in with a bad crowd or who were being bullied at school and they were looking for some confidence.”
The big move into the new premises took place earlier this month, and Fiona says the teaching continued throughout. It make take a while until they get the space the way they want it, but at the end of it all she hopes to have a child-friendly hub of music and arts of which the city can be proud.
She said: “I’m a great believer that everything happens for a reason. So everything will happen it’s just a case of when.”Find out more at dundeemusicarts.com and bodmanmusic.co.uk.