Brian Henderson at the console of the organ at his church in Bromsgrove, U.K.

“I just thoroughly enjoyed playing the organ.” Brian Henderson told me, “until the hearing losses came.” 

While attending church in primary school, Brian found himself counting the pipes of the church organ instead of listening to the sermons. He enjoyed the vast variety of sound an organ can produce in a range of warmth and brightness he could only describe as the “sublime delicacy and awesome power” of the organ. By age eighteen, he was filling in for the regular church organist, and played happily for many years. 

But by 2011, at age sixty-four, he experienced sudden hearing loss in his left ear, and then in 2016, sudden hearing loss in his right ear as well. The left ear was classified as moderate-to-severe hearing loss with significant loss from 1 kHz upwards and the right was classified as moderate, with loss from 2 kHz upwards.

In the United Kingdom, where Brian lives, the National Health Service (NHS) provides hearing aids for free, with the option of going outside the public healthcare system to pay for private audiological care. Brian started out with the NHS aids, but they were optimized for speech. He suddenly found music to be “totally overwhelming,” with “all sorts of silly distortions.” 

He struggled, not only with his own organ playing, but with hearing other performances as well. Concert-going, a favorite activity for years, became difficult. Unless he could see the band or orchestra, Brian had trouble identifying which instruments were being played, whether an oboe, clarinet, or trombone. As a former physics teacher, he was dismayed to discover that even a flute, which he knew from his profession produces the simplest sine wave in the air, came through the hearing aids with repetitive ticking noises rather than a clear stream of music.

With the organ, the wide range of dynamics and pitches which had been so enjoyable was now incredibly difficult. Hearing aids were unfortunately “dreadful for playing the organ,” unable to properly amplify the highest pitches or softest notes. Therefore, “there was a great tendency for the majesty, the brilliance of the organ just to get lost.” Playing the organ had changed completely. “I really hated it,” he said, “and I ended up just stopping playing. It was just too distressing.” 

A few years later, Brian had a breakthrough.  He found a new audiologist, through a series of recommendations originating with a member of his church. The new audiologist “prescribed an expensive pair of aids featuring automatic selection of programs according to the characteristics of the incident sound.” Again, the hearing aids “worked well for speech but proved overwhelming for organ sounds.” 

The audiologist realized he needed to work directly with the source sound to optimize Brian’s aids for music and went to Brian’s church where he “spent an hour  tweaking various settings while I played and described the effects,”  Brian explained. Brian’s audiologist employed Dr. Chasin’s methods for hearing aid adjustment. Working together, audiologist and organist created a familiar, comfortable, and balanced sound. The distortions were gone.

Despite the help from his customized music program on his new hearing aids, much of his playing now relies on musical memory. For Brian, “remembering what things used to sound like, and then seeing them in dots of music on the stave” allows him to hear the music. When I asked what advice he would give to other musicians adjusting to hearing loss, he said: “Don’t panic.” He recommends “small beginnings― start quietly, start gently, and just get used to the sounds and be persistent enough. Try it all as often as you can.” In his own practice routine, he begins by playing something familiar, which grounds him and helps him get back into a place of concentration for his practice and play.

Now, Brian’s hearing aids have optimized programs for speech as well as music,, and the real trick becomes remembering to switch from one program to the other in order to hear the preacher well enough. Despite the challenges, Brian continues to pursue his passion, playing the organ for about four services a month at his local church. “The feeling of having a congregation with you,” he says, “the congregation singing, responding to how loudly [you] decide to play, you get the big last verse and you hear the congregation pick itself up and wrap itself around [you] and sing as loud as they can, it’s an enormous joy.”