DEREK PARAVICINI

Creative Performance

It all started when…

Derek is a truly remarkable musician. Born at 26 weeks, the oxygen that enabled him to survive also resulted in blindness, a severe learning disability and autism. But he began to teach himself to play the piano at the age of two, and came under the tutelage of Adam Ockelford at Linden Lodge School for the Blind in London when he was four. Adam discovered that Derek has absolute pitch and can play music after hearing it only once.

In 1989, at the age of nine, Derek had his first major public concert at the Barbican Hall in London when he played with the Royal Philharmonic Pops Orchestra. He has gone on to play all over the world as a solo artist and with the Derek Paravicini quartet. Derek appeared with Adam in a TED talk in 2013, which has more than 1.5m views and has been translated into 26 languages.

What does inclusion mean to you?

“Inclusion means being able to share my music with everyone else”