Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason: House of Music
Seven brothers and sisters. All of them classically trained musicians. One was Young Musician of the Year and performed for the royal family at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The eldest has released her first album, showcasing the works of Clara Schumann. These siblings don’t come from the rarefied environment of elite music schools, but from a state comprehensive in Nottingham. How did they do it?
The House of Music: Raising the Kanneh-Masons (releasing August 31, 2021 from Oneworld Publications) reveals the eye-watering level of practical, emotional, intellectual and financial commitment required to raise seven outstanding classical musicians.
In The House of Music, mother
We are delighted to feature this piece by Kadiatu, on the writing of her memoir.
‘For me as a parent, the days now are a time suspended between past and present. Some of the children are stepping into adulthood in that in-between moment of student life and coming home. Some are still in school, waking up every day and returning to the place they have lived in since they were born.’
This excerpt from House of Music represents exactly when I began to write the memoir of my life and of my experiences bringing up seven children in classical music. It emerged from the time I could feel the story of my life as a mother of seven lively children in a noisy house slipping into yesterday. I was in that half-light of the past and a growing future, with some children still at home, some studying away but always returning. I began the chapter with a description of walking round our home so full of memories, lives and life:
‘Recently, I walked around our untidy rooms. There’s never yet been time to get on top of the chaos fundamental to the house. Years of new babies, new toddlers, growing children and lively personalities..’
It felt, to me, like a house embedded and alive with thoughts, dreams, activities, hopes and struggles that I wanted to explain and whose stories I wanted to tell while I was still immersed in them all.
At the end of almost every concert the children played, audience members would come up to me and ask, ‘How did this all happen? What is the story behind this? Who are you all and where did this come from?’ The Kanneh-Masons became a national and then a global story over a number of years, most notably with Sheku, my third child, playing a cello recital at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018.
Before that, Sheku and his siblings had come into the national consciousness with, for example. Britain’s Got Talent, BBC Young Musician and the BAFTAs, known as the Black family of seven children who all played classical music. Sheku’s performance at the Royal Wedding took this awareness to millions more people around the world.
When I sat down to write, I was confronted with the question, what is the beginning? Where do I start to tell the tale? I soon realized I had to go back to origins in my childhood, my husband’s childhood and our parents- the children’s grandparents.
How could I explain why we took the decisions we took or had the determination to take our Black, state school-educated children into a life and profession that many said was not ‘for’ them? We were set on breaking down barriers, challenging stereotypes and allowing our children into the extraordinary creative and beautiful world of classical music.
It seemed to us that what was necessary was a complete belief in our children and a deep understanding of the importance of creativity and music for all young people.
However, sitting down to write, I had to confront what those struggles were and the reality of the sacrifices we made. Arriving as an immigrant from Sierra Leone at the end of 1970, a product of the courage of my parents in marrying each other against the backdrop of early 1960s racism in Britain, formed my perspective on the world. My mother is Welsh and my father Mende, from Sierra Leone. I write,
‘Britain in the 1970s was a cruel place to be Black and mixed race’. I, with my three siblings, faced a reality stacked against us and, as children, had to battle with an identity we fought to survive.
There were times when I thought I wouldn’t be able to continue writing as it was so painful to return to those childhood days, but I knew they formed the kind of mother I became. Tears fell down my face, day after day, as I wrote the early chapters, tucked away on the top floor of the house, in my son, Braimah’s bedroom.
The loss of my father, the daily racism, and the experiences of my husband and of his parents who migrated from Antigua, in the Caribbean made us painfully aware that our children could only succeed by working twice as hard as everyone around them. Our job as parents was to provide the structure, discipline, love and routine needed to give them the confidence to be whoever they chose to be. But choice is hard won.
Reflecting on the years of raising children in music, I thought of what it had meant to let go of my career as a University Lecturer in English. Gaining my PhD and becoming an academic had been so critical for my own identity and self-confidence. This is also a book about mothering and the sacrifices many women make to become mothers and focus on their children. I write about those moments of looking in the mirror and seeing my baby’s face superimposed on mine, the sleepless nights and sheer physical exhaustion of parenting, and the bodily violence of childbirth and miscarriage.
Over again, I was confronted with the extraordinary joy of motherhood, the acceptance of struggle, pain and failure, and the knowledge that parents, in inspiring their children can be equally inspired, in turn, by them.
Writing House of Music was a heartbreaking, challenging expedition into a life I had not yet had time to examine and understand. It was full of revelations and gave me the great gift of forgotten stories and unexpected, unimagined insights.
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Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason is a former lecturer at Birmingham University and the mother of seven children. The third eldest, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, was BBC Young Musician 2016 and performed at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
The siblings have performed at the 2018 BAFTA ceremony, Britain’s Got Talent, The Royal Variety Performance and at major concert halls around the world.
Find out more about her on her website http://www.kannehmasons.com/
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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