Musical families arouse fascination. People are suspicious about the sheer slog involved. Can children be committed in that way all by themselves? Or is it just that they have pushy parents? The answer is that it can be either or both.
It’s an issue within the musical community too – to the point where many musicians work hard at not nudging their children in the direction of a musical career. They know all too well about the stresses as well as the rewards. A survey of more than 5,000 classical musicians reported in 2016 that 72 per cent of them used or had used beta blockers to control issues they experience during public performances.
The Kanneh-Masons are a classical-music family who have been breaking boundaries in all kinds of directions. All seven siblings are performers. Isata, who at 27 is the eldest, is a pianist; Sheku, the most famous, a cellist; Braimah a violinist; Konya a pianist and violinist; Jeneba a pianist and cellist; Aminata a violinist and pianist; and Mariatu, the youngest, at 14, a cellist and pianist; there’s also a Kanneh-Mason Trio.
Their mother, Kadiatu, has written a book, The House of Music, that gives a parent’s perspective on how a family studying at a regular school in Nottingham managed to become such hot property. It’s a story of unquenchable enthusiasm and serious sacrifice. Kadiatu tells of getting advice from a competition adjudicator who said that to play one of Mozart’s fantasies Isata “needed an understanding of opera, of ballooning emotion, of grandeur and passion. She needed to hear and to express tragedy.”
Opera seats were not something the family had ever been able to afford (although you might be surprised to hear that some successful opera singers experienced an opera production for the first time only when they actually sang in one).
Sheku, who made his Irish debut with the Irish Chamber Orchestra in 2019, and Isata, whose Irish debut was at the National Concert Hall in 2022, make their Irish debut as a duo next weekend in a Music for Galway concert that offers a foretaste of that organisation’s Cellissimo festival, in May next year.
The two musicians’ full schedules preclude a joint interview, so I speak to them a couple of days apart, first about the extraordinary circumstances they grew up in and then about the experience of being catapulted to success and fame.
Leaving aside the parental wizardry in getting seven gifted children to all their music lessons on time, there’s also the sheer amount of sound – music mixed up with technical exercises and scales and arpeggios – that there was in the family home.
The noise seems not to have bothered them. Isata never found it distracting. “No. It was the opposite. Because I felt more motivated to practise, knowing that people were practising around me. It made me feel supported. It was kind of like being in a music school. You just get used to concentrating.”
Sheku describes himself as lucky, because “I could take the cello into any room, so I’d often practise in my bedroom. If I wanted a really nice acoustic, sometimes I practised in the bathroom – until my teacher told me that wasn’t good; it sort of flattered me too much.”
Having other instruments in the background made practice “less of a lonely thing”, he says. “I really, really, really love music and love hearing music. Listening to practice, of course, is a different thing. It’s a lot of repeated, repeated, repeated stuff. Which can be a bit frustrating to listen to, but I sort of got used to it.” Isata points out that “you could always just go outside to the garden if you wanted some peace”.
Sheku also recalls that Isata would “sometimes read books while she would practise. I don’t know how she managed to pay attention to both.” He speculates that “if one thing becomes automatic, maybe that’s quite good, because then it means that on stage you’ve got this sort of automatic basis to rely on.”
Growing up with so many musicians was wonderful, they say, especially the freedom to play chamber music together, and to give each other open feedback. The siblings, Sheku says, talked about music “all the time. We’d talk about it, listen to it together.” But both agree that they were never competitive about music. Just about other things.
Sheku was the first to leap to prominence, when he won the BBC Young Musician competition, in 2016, the first black musician to do so since the contest was founded, in 1978. Two years later he played at the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. He didn’t want the success to go to his head. “I made sure that I still always had regular weekly lessons with my teacher, and I’ve had the same management since I was 17. I have a family who I can trust and who have my best interests at heart.”
Isata says: “Success translates to me as being very busy and having lots of exciting projects coming up. So I just got used to managing my time and practising and finding time to rest. I don’t follow myself online or anything like that. So it’s only at concerts when I feel it. And that’s always a positive thing.”
She talks about feeling overwhelmed at the beginning of her success. “But Covid came quite soon after that, and that gave me the space to find ways to manage performance anxiety. It also gave me the space to prepare for the career that normally you don’t get the chance to prepare for. So, in a way, I was lucky. And I think, also, feeling the loss of all the concerts I was meant to have reinforced how much I wanted to do it. I got a bit overwhelmed in the beginning. But then I had the uncommon gift of having more time.”
What, looking back, might they like to change in their musical upbringing, and what would they like to change in the musical world? “I wish I learned more Bach fugues,” says Isata. “Because I find fugues very difficult to memorise now.” Sheku references periods when he didn’t practise enough and wishes he’d taken a more thorough approach to music theory.
They’re in tune on the changes they would like to see. Sheku talks about the importance of “wider access to music education” and “more openness amongst musicians and audiences and people surrounding classical music”. Isata talks of “no one being boxed into categories as a musician. Just more freedom for a wider range of people to be able to express themselves.”
And what might they have become if they hadn’t become musicians? “I think I would have loved to have been some kind of dancer,” says Isata. “I think I always wanted to do something creative, and I love movement. But I think anything I’d want to become besides a musician is something I would have had to have pursued passionately from the age of six. So either something in dancing or singing, something creative like that. Not something I could suddenly do now.”
“As a child,” says Sheku, “I loved football. And so I think that would be something that I would really, really enjoy. I would have enjoyed to go into something to do with maths or physics. That was also a big interest. I think now it’s probably too late to do anything like science, and mathswise I haven’t really thought about it since school, so I’d be a bit behind. But maybe something in fashion.”
Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason play sonatas by Frank Bridge, Chopin and Rachmaninov at the Galmont Hotel, as part of Music for Galway, on Saturday, November 18th, at 7.30pm; Cellissimo begins on Saturday, May 18th, 2024
