House of Music by Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason

Author:Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason [Kanneh-Mason, Kadiatu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

14

The Importance of Failure

ISATA’S PIANO PLAYING began to blossom again out of the fragmented personality of puberty, and her performances coalesced into a more definite character. She regained her sense of direction and her results at school dramatically improved. She went back to a circle of friends whom I understood and who supported and liked each other. They had known each other since year seven and I felt that Isata could operate back in a world that didn’t thrust adult challenges at her. She entered BBC Young Musician at seventeen and won through each round until she was chosen to play in the Keyboard Category Final, televised at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. She practised with a burning focus for hours after school. Each time I listened to her, her fingers were quicker and more brilliant on the keys and showed breathtaking dexterity. Isata had the facility to play anything, such was the level of her technique.

I think I was out of my depth. The journalists began entering the house to celebrate her success at getting to this televised moment of the competition, and the BBC cameras arrived with searching questions about how she would feel if she won through to the Final. I was overly excited, dazed by her success and unsure how to help her. I was still slightly intoxicated on having her back with us and felt blissfully relieved that she had been put back into the heart of the house. We felt complete. Here she was, back in the organised jumble and chaos of family life, with little Mariatu, now four, running in and out of the piano room and spreading her crayons at Isata’s feet as they pedalled, still managing to get to the BBC Final. It felt like fate.

I stayed up all night to cut and fix the hem of the long dress we had bought for her performance, its rich blue folds flowing all over the floor as I tried to curb the length. I stayed with Isata for the two days that she had to be resident in Cardiff for the Keyboard Final, having help for school runs, collections and teatime from Matilda, the lovely teenage babysitter who lived in the next street and who took over in Nottingham when Stuart had to be at work. Stuart brought the children to stay with Mum in Caldicot for the evening of the Final. It was an almost surreal experience living in a bubble of cameras, interviews, BBC make-up sessions and meetings with the other candidates, who were strangely friendly. They were each in direct competition with the others, but also in the same stormy boat of teeteringly high hopes and the promise of something wonderfully and yet maliciously close. To have come so near to the final stage of the competition – the top five pianists – was an unreal achievement. Each candidate dreamed of the possibility of climbing to that winning pedestal. To slip at this stage meant a very long fall.

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