Many would say that Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason has earned the right to put her feet up and retire from the fray. The Nottingham academic is the mother of seven children between the ages of 15 and 28 who have become a fixture in British cultural life; indeed, it is hard to know how the UK’s orchestras, concert halls and festivals would get by without them.
Her third eldest child, the cellist Sheku, won the BBC Young Musician of the Year award in 2016, performed at Prince Harry’s wedding and starred at the Last Night of the Proms last summer. This summer, the eldest sibling, Isata, performs Clara Schumann’s piano concerto at the First Night of the Proms. Sheku and his brother Braimah must be content with a mid-season Prom with the Fantasia Orchestra, a young group performing classics for novices as well as aficionados. The youngest two Kanneh-Masons, Aminata and Mariatu, are still at school but appear as part of family chamber groups playing on professional stages. Three have contracts with major record labels (Sheku and Isata on Decca; Jeneba, another pianist, on Sony). Sheku’s recent Beethoven album topped the classical charts.
For those of us who struggle to get their children into matching socks and through the school gates on time every morning, the achievement of Dr Kanneh-Mason, 58, and her husband, Stuart, seems superhuman. A good pianist in her teens, Kadiatu did all her grades before life got in the way. Stuart played piano and cello to an advanced level. The story that then unfolded in their large but not lavish house in Nottingham — as told in Kadiatu’s acclaimed memoir, House of Music — was of a musical clan growing, arguing, sleeping in shared bedrooms, going on camping holidays in Wales, practising on four pianos around the house and being taken every weekend to junior music college in London. Kadiatu gave up her job as a lecturer in English at Birmingham University (Stuart works for the luxury travel company Belmond). Elton John came to the family’s aid, funding Isata’s £9,000 tuition at the Royal Academy of Music.
But Kadiatu and I aren’t meeting for her first solo newspaper interview so that she can bask in her children’s reflected glory. Nor does she especially like me describing her as “part of a huge success story”. It clashes with the messy reality.
“Parenting is never like that — especially with seven,” she says. “And now it’s not, ‘Woo-hoo, I stop being a mum’ and they go on their merry way. It feels exactly the same as it always has. You get up in the morning and it’s, ‘OK, who needs help? What’s going wrong for who?’ I used to think it would get easier because little children are so full-on. But it’s still like that — just different. I still find that they’re phoning me up from different places or I’m needed for different things.”
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What has changed in parenting terms is a question of scale, she says. “When they were small children, the worries filled the whole of their world and the whole of my world. It’s just now that world has got bigger.”
In January this year Sheku declared on Desert Island Discs that Rule, Britannia! should no longer be part of the Last Night of the Proms. “I think maybe some people don’t realise how uncomfortable a song like that can make people feel,” he said. The resulting headlines unleashed a wave of online abuse which, until now, the family have not commented on. “It was a terribly difficult period,” Kadiatu says. “The children could see what Sheku was receiving — and that they were all receiving it. If one of them gets attacked, then they all do in their minds.”
She found herself scrolling through the racist abuse directed at her son. “I was seeking it out because I felt very protective of him. And I was grief-stricken. My children were being attacked for who they are. That was incredibly difficult.” Not a great social media user herself, she thinks “what’s out there is terrifying. I do think the family is vulnerable. And because they’ve had success, it makes them more vulnerable.”
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We are talking at Ashmole Primary School near the Oval cricket ground in south London. This small, “outstanding” school looks like a brilliant advert for a rounded state education. As the Ofsted report puts it, right at the top of its endorsement: “All pupils learn to play musical instruments from a young age. Many go on to play these to a highly competent level.”
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Yet this is only because the independent charity UK Music Masters, of which Kadiatu is a trustee, has embedded its teachers and lessons into the working week, with minimal cost to the school. She and I have spent the afternoon watching 7 to 11-year-old string players performing with Music Masters teachers, showing remarkable dedication. Half the children in this age group choose to play in the school orchestra.
The teachers concentrate as much on good listening, focus (no slouching!) and discipline. Kadiatu approves. “It’s very difficult to teach music without discipline. And discipline isn’t a nasty word. If you don’t give your children boundaries and discipline, you’re not giving them love.” That child you brought to a concert or the theatre who is now wriggling and fidgeting in their seat? Kadiatu’s prescription is tough love. “Some parents will sit with their children, they’ll fuss about them, and they’ll talk to them. I just think, leave them alone. They will sit, they will look at you, and they will learn by example.”
Music Masters is undoubtedly transforming lives, yet it can only work with a handful of schools. And without the sticking plaster of such philanthropic initiatives, music education in state schools — including the one that all seven Kanneh-Mason siblings attended — is withering to extinction. “Things have got worse and it’s a tragedy.”
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It’s a decline that Kadiatu can chart precisely from personal experience. Trinity Catholic, their children’s secondary in Nottingham, “was a perfect school” — they chose it because of its commitment to musical education. She doesn’t flinch from describing it in other terms now. “It’s a very different school to the one that the older children went to. The ethos was about music. It was a happy school and a nurturing school. That happiness has gone downhill. The children are struggling more.”
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Astonishingly, the rot set in just as Sheku was lifting his BBC trophy. “The term he won, there was a change of head teacher. It became a multi-academy trust, and the new head teacher didn’t like music; Sheku won BBC Young Musician — and he axed the cello teacher.” Sheku donated his £3,000 prize money to the school so that it could continue to have the teacher, which lasted three years. “Paltry,” she agrees — not for her son, but in the context of the school budget.
She is aware that her comments may be negatively received. “I’m a huge supporter of the school — if I go out and say, ‘This school is now going to be terrible’, then that is very disloyal. But I’m very worried. And I think Trinity School is representative of so many schools across the country.”
It’s not about pumping out prodigies, future Kanneh-Masons. “I didn’t expect all my children to become musicians, that wasn’t the point. It’s bigger than that. It’s about confidence, about being able to achieve across subjects. If you have strong music in school, you also have children who believe in themselves and believe in each other.”
Kadiatu says the crisis stems from a hostile agenda that filters down from the government. “It’s not, ‘We’re not interested in the creative arts.’ It’s more, ‘We are definitely interested in getting rid of it.’” Enthusiastic noises, then, from the once flute-playing Keir Starmer or the cellist and (at the time of writing) shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire are not enough. “There has to be something very deliberate to put it all back again and build it up.”
I ask her if she thinks the Kanneh-Mason story would have been different if she was starting out now, with a curious little girl (Isata) who wanted to be a famous pianist. “It would be even harder. And my hope was when they were growing up, the world would change. Things would get better. And that more people who look like them [her children] would become musicians. I think the opposite has happened.”
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In House of Music she writes potently about growing up in the UK in the Seventies (she was born in Sierra Leone but moved to the UK with her Welsh mother after the death of her father), experiencing both casual and aggressive racism. The world of classical music was not a place where she encountered this, however — nor did her husband, who grew up in southeast London with his Antiguan parents listening to classical music. His “Eureka” moment, as Kadiatu calls it in her book, was when the whole family went to see Daniel Barenboim play the complete Chopin Preludes. They also watched him and other stars perform on primetime TV. “Classical music is incredibly inclusive. What makes it exclusive is the lack of music education.”
The gulf between state and private education is emblematic of this. “In fact, the only young black people I know who are studying music to a high standard have got music scholarships to private schools. We could have gone down that path — they [the children] could have got great music scholarships, but we wanted them to live at home, to be able to meet their friends from their own area and their own community. We made that decision — but it’s become almost an impossible decision now if you want to be a classical musician.”
Kadiatu bridles at the idea of “a kind of ghettoising, where black people play black music, white people play white music — that’s a complete distortion”. The inheritance of classical music, however, should include suppressed voices, she argues, such as the mixed-race Edwardian composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. “Black musicians and composers have always been in classical music. What has happened is a deliberate forgetting that they were there.” Rather than downgrading the great composers, others should be joining them at the table. “I don’t want to get rid of Beethoven and Mozart and Haydn.”
Has the Rule, Britannia! furore put the family off the Proms? “No! We’re huge fans because they’re a massive celebration of classical music. But when I was a child, I thought the Proms was the Last Night. I think that’s true for a lot of people, and it’s incredibly wrong. The Last Night is a bit of an anomaly.”
The Kanneh-Mason clan may be almost fully launched in the world. That, however, brings its own challenges — separate careers, perhaps even rival ones. “They manage the balance themselves in a way. They do their own [solo] tours and concerts, and then they come together, sometimes as duos, sometimes as trios, sometimes as a family. They get a lot of succour from each other musically. But they also have completely different personalities — and different musical personalities. Anyone who sits and listens to Jeneba and Isata will hear the difference.”
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There are also two siblings who are taking another path. Konya, 23, graduated from the Royal Academy of Music as a pianist but is forging a career as a children’s author. Meanwhile — gasp — Aminata, 18, will be the first not to go to music college. She is going to drama school instead (but still practises her violin two or three hours a day). “None of them have gone on to be accountants,” Kadiatu confirms, grinning, when I ponder the absence of builders or lawyers.
When it comes to the youngest, 15-year-old Mariatu, it’s business as usual. At the age of six she watched Sheku play the cello “and that was it” — she switched to the instrument from violin. She will enter BBC Young Musician when she’s in sixth form. It would be awfully neat if she won the same gong as her brother. “Neat, yes, but not necessary. She knows it’s not the be-all and end-all.”
Kadiatu insists she wants to use her platform as an advocate. She voted Labour (though she says she’s not tribal about party loyalty), but when I suggest PM Starmer might well find a Labour-leaning Baroness Kanneh-Mason useful she pooh-poohs the idea. “It sounds great, but it’s not going to happen.”
But whether she is ennobled or not, people listen to music’s supermum. So what is her message to the new prime minister? She replies with something more like a warning. “If you allow people to be creative, to think for themselves, then a lot of dangerous things do not happen. The creative arts give you the ability to express what you think from your own place in the world. It could be going on stage in a play, it could be performing a piece of music. When you do those things, you are making a political statement. So if you’re not hearing those statements from most of your population — then that is a political problem.”
How to hear Britain’s most talented family
First Night of the Proms
Isata plays Clara Schumann’s rarely heard piano concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Jul 19, Royal Albert Hall and live on BBC2/Radio 3
Fantasia Orchestra
Brothers Sheku (cello), Braimah (violin) and their friend Plínio Fernandes (guitar) join the Fantasia Orchestra. Aug 4-5, Royal Albert Hall and on BBC4
Isata’s Mendelssohn
The pianist’s fourth solo album showcases music by both Mendelssohn siblings, including Fanny Mendelssohn’s long-lost Easter Sonata. Released on Decca, Aug 9
The House of Music
A talk with Konya and Kadiatu is followed by a concert from the whole family. Aug 16, Bold Tendencies, SE15
Jeneba in recital
The 21-year-old pianist plays Chopin, Scriabin and Scarlatti in a lunchtime recital. Sep 26, Wigmore Hall, W1
