Father's Day
Musical pieces with parenting in mind, and a call to arms for change in parental leave.
BBC Music Magazine asked me to write a piece about music inspired by parenting. It’s a genre in fairly short supply, and I didn’t want a list of lullabies. Since it was for Father’s Day, I wanted to use it as an opportunity to talk about the awful parental leave here in the UK. I know it’s worse in the USA, but it is among the worst in the world. How can we ever expect real change, and equality of respect for and value placed on the traditional caring roles that women overwhelmingly take on, if fathers aren’t even given the possibility of sharing them from the start. I’m not denying biological reality and talking about carrying, birthing and breastfeeding children, but I am talking about sharing the looking after, cooking, cleaning, planning, researching, learning, the huge emotional and mental load as well as physical work that goes into making a family and looking after everyone, including your partner. Two weeks barely scratches the surface of post-natal recovery. After an emergency caesarian, two weeks later I still could barely walk and hadn't yet managed to get to the end our road on my intrepid outings. It wasn’t much different with my planned caesarian with my second.
Of course, change takes time, but the message with the current policy is clear - that the standard two weeks is enough and then a father’s role is not at home. It’s a token nod to being an involved father, and then off you go to earn the bread while the mother stays at home, tending the baby and the fire. For freelance fathers there isn’t any statutory pay available at all. None. That is really tough for so many families, as fathers who really would like to be more involved financially cannot afford to, and so mothers are left to carry the weight of care again. And for freelance mothers, the statutory pay is paltry, would frankly barely cover the nappies, not matching income, and it is not possible to share parental leave with your partner.
If we want our children to have a future where there is greater gender equality, we must begin that change at home, and show what an equal home can look like. But the system is absolutely stacked against fathers being involved and sharing the parental load. That must change, and everyone will benefit.
Here’s the piece that was published by BBC Music Mag.
It’s Father’s Day! I doff my hat to all the wonderful fathers in my life, starting with my own, who is always there for me, and my husband and the father of my children, who holds the home fort whenever I am away playing concerts or recording, and shares the day to day parenting with me. Many fathers are fighting hard for greater parental involvement at the moment, in a system stacked against them, with the UK having the worst paternity allowance in Europe. So here, I’d like to celebrate the fathers who are changing the status quo for the next generation, caring for, nurturing , playing, educating, and sharing the running of the home that their families live in.
I have collected a few pieces that fathers have written for their children, and pieces that give me a sense of home, the place where children grow into themselves, and that we all a recreate for ourselves in different iterations throughout our lives. I’ve also included a few of my most loved works that also hold magical childhood memories for me, and to which I still return to on the concert stage time and again.
Debussy Children’s Corner
Unhappily I never practised the piano enough to play this whole set of pieces, violin being my obsession from a young age. though I did manage a few of them. My father had the unenviable task of helping me practice some of these pieces when I was a young child, and I used to make mistakes on purpose to frustrate him. Ah, children…. I had to include them here, written as they were by Debussy for his beloved daughter, Claude-Emma. The world of playfulness, wonder and whimsy that these pieces inhabit is a wonderful painting of the world of childhood by a doting father.
Bach Andante from the A minor sonata
Bach is a constant companion for me and has been since I was a young teenager. Whilst this wasn’t one of the works he wrote for his many children, the Andante from the A minor sonata brings me a profound sense of peace and being at home. The soothing heartbeat and simple melody that spins out across a myriad of emotions resolving with such tenderness and simplicity are the epitome of the idyll of home.
George Fu Lîla-by
My brother in law George wrote this gorgeous lullaby for his daughter, my niece Lîla. It is part of a suite for solo piano that he wrote about crossing from one land to another, one island of life to another, as happens when we enter in to the new and wild world of parenthood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkTlyo05WIM&feature=youtu.be
Brahms Wiegenlied
Whilst Brahms was not himself a father, I couldn’t not include this lullaby. My father sang it to me when I was little, with silly words no less, and we’ve sung it to our children. The power of lullabies to comfort and give a sense of security in the strange depths of the night is surely one of our most foundational experiences, which tie us, like pearls on a chain of memory, to generations both before us and after us. Brahms wrote this for the birth of Bertha Faber’s second child. She had been a great love of his who had married someone else. They kept in touch, and this famous lullaby incorporates a song that Bertha used to sing to Johannes Brahms when they were younger.
Schubert Trout Quintet
I grew up listening to the Trout, and it was one of the classical works that my father grew up with too. It was his father’s favourite, and he had the recording with Amadeus quartet members, Emil Gilels and Rainer Zepperitz, which still today warms my heart whenever I hear it. I’m touring this evergreen masterpiece at the moment, and in rehearsal there are many moments when we search for something more domestic, more tender, more consoling, more homely, in the best sense of the word.
Vivaldi Concerto in A minor
As a child, we often listened to the musical stories by Classical Kids. There was “Mr. Bach comes to call”, “Beethoven lives upstairs”, and mine and my sister’s favourite, “Vivaldi’s Ring of Mystery”, in which a Stradivarius violin and the power of music hold the key to a child lost in the mists of a shipwreck. My 4 year old is now an enthusiastic fan of this story (since infancy she has called Vivaldi “The Magic Music” after hearing me practice the “Four Seasons”.) The A minor concerto featured here captured my heart with its searing beauty and interplay of light and dark as a small child, and it still does. Vivaldi wrote so much of his great music for the orphaned girls that he taught in the Ospedale della Pieta, where he was director of music fo over 20 years, including some who went on to be on the great virtuosi of their day, such as Anna Maria della Pieta. He was one of the fathers of modern violin playing and his music still evokes the magical world of Venice, with its watery secrets, wild masked parties, and crowning beauty rising from the waves. It’s music to heal the most battle weary of souls.