Klarinet Archive - Posting 000073.txt from 2010/02

From: avi <avi@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] financial assistance
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:16:43 -0500

If playing your sax is necessary to your employment, then you will qualify
for "assistive technology" through your State Dept of Vocational
Rehabilitation.

On Tue, 9 Feb 2010 13:30:22 -0600, Daniel Stover <kasparguy@-----.com>
wrote:
> Hello to the list. I'm not sure if I will have any luck in this
endeavor,
> but I thought if anywhere would be a good place to start, some of the
lists
> I'm a member of would be the best places, with the broad knowledge and
> range of careers everyone is in.
> Also, with the number of similar lists to which I belong, I hope I did
not
> already post this query to Klarinet so this is not a repeat.
>
> In July 2008, I suffered a severe hemrrhagic stroke which has left me
> unable to use my left hand/arm at all. In early 2009 I found a group
> headed by a saxophone professor in a similar situation as myself
founded
> to try to get adapted instruments into the
> hands of disabled musician like me. the goups is called the One-handed
> winds project(onehandwinds.unk.edu)
> This saxophone rofessor helped develope a mechanism to allow the sax to
> be played with only the right hand. unfortunately, there are, to my
> knowledge, only two such instruments in existence.; the one he plays and
> one on loan to a saxophone student mentioned
> on the project's page. Last Spring, the founder was kind enough to let
me
> try a modified recorder by Marten Visser. after a month of struggling
with
> the mechanism and fingering chart, I was unable to even playsimple
scales
> with any accuracy and returned the
> instrument before my year-long rental contract began. In contacting him
> again to see if there had ben ay progress in making more saxophones
> available, He informed me that the builder gave him an estimate of
$40,000
> to build another. In contacting the builder myself to see what the bare
> minimum to get work started, if I were to donate my alto sax to be
> converted, he told me it would be about $15,000 to do all the work
needed
> to convert an instrument to the one-handed mechanism, and that the
$40,000
> estimate was a prototyping estimate for applying the mechanism to
another
> instrument.
>
> I'm curious if anyone knows of any grants or organisations devoted to
> helping disabled musicians or persons with disabilities that would be
able
> to help with the cost of having my saxophone converted to the
one-handed
> mechanism.
>
> Any and all help is greatly appreciated
>
> Daniel Stover
> Houston, TX
>
> Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469227/direct/01/
> ------------------------------------------------------------------

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