Night Music
The Creative Power of Night-Time Care
A few weeks ago, I travelled to try out some repertoire for my upcoming “Lullabies and Dreamscapes” recording, inspired by the night time care that we have given so many sleepless nights to, and which our children still seem to need. As it happened this was also a concert after a long and sleepless night, with both girls up and down, and I saw every hour on the clock. The jagged floating sensation of extreme tiredness can lend a hallucinatory lens to a performance. Through this lens I learned new depths during this concert, of comfort, of silence, fragility and shadows, of the blurred and shifting focus of exhaustion, and the beauty in that too. Afterwards, each member of the small audience shared stories of their time looking after their own small children, the intensity of the nights, the vividness of the memory, the desperation of the smallest hours and the relief when sleep did finally arrive.
When I was first thinking about this programme, searching for purpose in the torture of the endless fragmented nighttimes, to keep my sympathy with my small daughter who needed so much reassurance and company in those strange deep hours where reality bends and dreams are more real than the physical world, I wrote this;
“Like most parents of young children, I have spent many thousands of hours comforting her, singing to her, helping her relax into enveloping sleep in that strange darkness of the night which can be so unsettling. While mothering and caring roles in our western world are still belittled, bringing this quiet comfort to a tender soul night after night connects me to parents stretching back through the ages who have done the same. I’m not only connected to generations past and future through these rituals of comfort, but I also learnt first hand that providing that safe sense of home really is what allows us to become. This experience more than any other has revealed to me how much we need to exist in relation to others.”
Out of these thoughts and sensations, the Dreamscapes and Lullabies programme was born. At bed time, when I was telling my daughter why I was away for a concert, I explained that it was for a concert that she had inspired. Her eyes lit with wonder and excitement, that I saw that she knew in that moment how much she mattered, and how much my caring for her mattered to me, as well as to her. I’d like to think that in time she and her sister will also understand that in myriad ways the work that takes me away from them can also be for them, and that their spirits are always with me. The feeling of constant connection to them feels like a potent psychological expression of the chimeric cells shared for life by mother and child, so that we, like all mothers and children, are always physically a part of each other.
Night after night I would have the enduring vision of a long string of dew drops on a spider’s web caught in the dawn sunlight, each droplet a mother comforting her child, and I one too, who was comforted by her own mother, and in turn the child will comfort her own. In a way that I hadn’t fathomed before, I felt a tangible connection to all the mothers before me that had allowed me to become myself, and all those that will come after me, in a great chain of care for tiny humans, of singing over and over again the same fragments of melody, of counting of 100 and 100 calm slow breaths, of the hot small hand in the firm gentle palm of the parent, and the heartbeat patting of the back as the breathing settles and deepens, spreading out through time, across lands and oceans, a web of care, jewelled by tenderness and surrender.
We’ll be playing the programme, which includes works from Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Schumann and John Cage, as well as a World Premiere from my sister, Freya Waley-Cohen at the South Bank Centre’s Purcell Room on the 6th June, and also recording it for Signum Records in a couple of weeks. The concert will be preceded by a discussion entitled “Night Music; The Creative Power of Parenting”. Led by Octavia Bright, Cordelia Williams, who is my piano partner in this project, and I will discuss how parenting has affected our creative practices. Looking especially at night time care and lullabies, we will discuss why this topic holds so much interest for us, and why it matters. Drawing on our personal experiences as well as the latest research, this is a moment to reframe the work of night-time care as the rich creative source that it can be.
I hope you will join us.