The Music Man Project UK

David Stanley is a charity CEO, disability rights campaigner, musical director, teacher and composer. He studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, King’s College London, the Royal Academy of Music (learning piano under Patsy Toh) and the Institute of Education. He holds a Master’s Degree in Musical Analysis, a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education and the National Professional Qualification for Secondary School Headship (NPQH).

David is the Founder and CEO of The Music Man Project, a multi award-winning international music education service for people with disabilities. He is a Churchill Fellow (Winston Churchill Memorial Trust), Paul Harris Fellow (Rotary International), Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a 2020 Global Peace Ambassador. David received the Outstanding Contribution to the Community Award from Lions International and has been nominated for a Pride of Britain Award. He reached the final of both the 2015 and 2017 Music Teacher Awards for Excellence and was highly commended at the Festival of Learning Awards by the Learning and Work Institute.

David’s teaching is the basis of PhD research at the Royal College of Music into the effect of active music participation on well-being for adults with learning disabilities. He has lectured around the world, including at the ABLE Assembly at Berklee College in Boston, USA and the UK National Music Mark Conference.

Since 2009 David has raised over £200,000 for charitable causes through his concerts and fundraising activities, including performing 24 continuous hours of piano music at the end of a pier and playing a keyboard strapped to the back of a mobility scooter whilst walking for 12.5 miles. David produced a celebrity fundraising calendar and composed 8 pieces for solo piano which were interpreted by artists from around the world in an international music and art competition for charity.

David campaigns for the equal rights of disabled people to perform at the most prestigious and aspirational venues in the world. He trains his students to become valued musicians in society and composes original music for them to perform.

In 2015 David made his West End debut as a composer, producer and performer in Music is Magic at the London Palladium. The concert featured his original adult and special school students, supported by professional musicians, community choirs, the original Tiller Girls and stars of Britain’s Got Talent. It also included the premiere of David’s musical "From the Asylum to the Palladium" which told the story of mental hospitals where people with learning disabilities were treated as patients alongside single mothers, the mentally ill, gay people, and poorly behaved children.

In 2017 David returned to the London Palladium to present a special concert in celebration of 70 years of Royal Mencap and to commemorate the life of the late Lord Brian Rix. His production featured his Concerto for Trumpet, Trombone and 1521 Triangles which smashed the Guinness World Record for the largest triangle ensemble. David also premiered his second musical "The Label", based on the book by Caroline White. The performance played to a capacity audience, including HRH The Countess of Wessex, and was featured on BBC television.

In 2019 David made his debut at the Royal Albert Hall, composing and producing a ground-breaking concert, featuring over 700 performers, including 200 musicians from The Music Man Project, supported by symphony orchestra, massed choirs and celebrity guests. The concert premiered David’s sci-fi musical “Music is Magic in Space”, marking 50 years since the moon landings. It was the largest ever celebration of learning-disabled musicianship and was the fulfilment of a promise David made to his original students 20 years earlier. The event was featured on ITV’s Good Morning Britain and heralded a change of attitude to learning-disabled music: from accessible audiences to accessible performers.

Since 2017 David has produced a range of resources to support students, families, schools, volunteers and other professionals, including the self-published Music Man Project Songbook and extensive online audio and visual content. The material includes warm-up activities, sheet music, lyrics, signs, backing tracks, video demonstrations and supporting explanations and is available for free at www.themusicmanproject.com and The Music Man Project’s YouTube Channel. He presents The Music Man Project Podcast and records his own journey in his blog. David has released two albums of his music, including the charity single "Music is Magic" which became a number 1 best seller on Amazon’s Broadway song chart. His E-book "Music is Magic: The Story of the Music Man Project" topped the Amazon Kindle Special Education chart.

In 2019 David established The Music Man Project as a separate charity to meet growing national and international demand for his accessible music service, not just for the learning-disabled community, but also for people who are blind or partially sighted, and for those suffering poor mental health, terminal illness, dementia and other disability or disadvantage.

The Coronavirus of 2020 bought many challenges for people with disabilities. David responded to the crisis by developing new online services to engage and entertain disabled communities during the lockdown. His home doorstep visits, Facebook live concerts, Zoom rehearsals, video calls and YouTube videos kept the music playing for thousands of families across the UK. With support from the UK Government, The Music Man Project delivered 60 sets of new instruments for children and adults to play at home.

In 2010, David composed a piano solo called "Through the Efforts of Friendship" to mark his visit to the People’s Republic of China and performed the work at the Confucian Institute in Beijing. Hate Crime, his first musical for people with learning disabilities, was premiered at the Essex Police Conference on Hate Crime in 2014 and reprised for a Kent Police Conference in 2019.

As composer in residence for Pinpoint Create Production Company, David wrote a new operatic setting of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf in 2010 and the music for an Olympic Torch Relay stage show in 2012, including a new song performed by his former student, Lee Mead. In 2013 his Fanfare for Noah was performed at Southwark Cathedral to announce the start of a special performance of Britten’s Noyes Fludde, marking the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth. In the same year, David’s music for "The Nine Wives of Laurel and Hardy" was previewed at the UK Laurel and Hardy Convention. In 2015 David wrote the music for a re-working of a Music Hall performance to mark the centenary of the Great War. He has also composed four Nativity Musicals for the Salvation Army since 2012. In 2020, he appeared in the radio play called "The Power Behind the Microphone" to celebrate 100 years since Marconi’s first ever radio broadcast, which launched the entertainment industry as we know it today. David accompanied international opera singer Anna Steiger and provided incidental music. The socially-distanced radio play was the only live theatre performance during the first Coronavirus lockdown in the UK.