After Tragedy, Daniel Beilman Found a New Path in Music. The Recording Academy Took Notice.

Earlier this year, Daniel Beilman B.M. ’14 was named a quarterfinalist for the prestigious Music Educator Award from the Recording Academy and Grammy Museum. This recognition has been humbling and unexpected. Growing up, Beilman dreamed of a career as a bassoonist. If he thought of teaching at all, it was as a means toward this end. But he’s found that helping students with disabilities achieve new milestones has been a gift beyond reckoning.  

“It’s been the most incredible and fulfilling job I’ve ever had,” he says of his work at Oak Park School in Sarasota, Florida. “I had a student today who said his first five words. Ever. And he’s a junior in high school. Things like this happen all day, every day.”

Beilman uses music as a tool to help his students feel more comfortable with themselves and the world, which helps them build the confidence they sometimes lack. 

“Allowing music to be a form of communication, a way of learning how to speak or hear, is truly special,” he says, adding that music has been a big part of his recovery from a car accident that left him temporarily unable to do either.

When Beilman graduated from Boston Conservatory at Berklee, he was on track to having the life of his dreams. He was traveling the world to play with orchestras, teaching in cities across Europe, and writing new music with ambitious composers. But in the spring of 2020, while driving to a hike, he lost control of the wheel. His car flipped and turned his world completely upside down. 

Over the next six months, his hearing and sight slowly returned. . . . For almost two years, he couldn’t bring himself to even dream of playing his bassoon.

In a movie of his life, this would be where the flashback montage happens. Beilman at six: stealing his sister’s clarinet and playing along to The Lion King soundtrack. In middle school: falling in love with the bassoon after seeing a Disney commercial in which a young girl plays the “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and her toys spring to life. At the Conservatory: staying up into the small hours playing with his classmates. In his mid-20s: pinching himself as he sits in with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Berliner Philharmoniker. 

When Beilman woke up in the hospital, the fear he felt was literally unspeakable. In and out of medically induced comas, he couldn’t see, hear, or move. After stabilizing, he endured extensive facial reconstructive surgery, with over 60 implants and more grafts than he can remember. After his release, 21 days later, he realized that his journey to recovery had just begun. With the horrific behind him, what lay ahead was merely awful.

Over the next six months, his hearing and sight slowly returned. To relearn how to use his facial muscles, he said his ABCs again and again, exaggerating each letter, and slowly regained his ability to speak. For almost two years, he couldn’t bring himself to even dream of playing his bassoon.

“My doctors said that if I blew too hard, a lot of things could happen,” he says. “So I was hesitant.” 

He’s playing again now, though. And while he’s not at the same level he was at before the accident, he’s still able to find the joy that drove him to the instrument and to music—the same joy he loves seeing in the faces of his students. And he’s discovered a deep well of sympathy has opened inside him after his experience of being deaf and blind. “I get sad and emotional if I think about not playing and performing again,” he says. But now, no longer playing just for himself, he lives with a profound sense of purpose.