My baby, the opera buff
Sixteen-month-old Oscar encountered his first live opera, in Scottish Opera’s Baby O project. And he liked what he heard.
My baby is going to a baby opera. Oscar is only 16 months old and yet Scottish Opera have targeted him as fodder for Baby O, their new interactive operatic venture for children of six to 18 months. Has the world gone mad? After all, only a decade ago, you were lucky if you had a decent mother and toddler group to hand. Now you can’t move for baby music, dance classes and assorted “developmental experiences”, of varying degrees of quality, all sure to do at least one thing: empty your wallet.
Baby O, with its connotations of musical sophistication, sounds like the ultimate trump card for the Alpha Mummy. After all, there was so much publicity for the “Mozart Effect”, the (erroneous) idea that playing music, specifically Mozart, to your baby could lead to a double first at Cambridge.
Oscar, who wakes up every morning yelling “Mu-mic! Mu-mic!” has musical tastes that range from Tosca to the whirring beat of the Magimix. But he’s stymied by the fact that babies are not, as a rule, welcome in the concert hall. His only live classical experience came at six months, when I sneaked him into the back of a particularly “challenging” contemporary music concert at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney. No one complained, although a woman in the back row said: “I was hoping he’d start bawling so we could make a sharp exit.”
And so Oscar and I toddle off to Baby O, keenly anticipating the promised “tactile garden set to explore”, happily musing about the operatic possibilities of wellies, bumble bees and ducks. Outside the Lemon Tree theatre in Aberdeen, a number of reassuringly nonAlpha mums and babies of varying ages and levels of mobility start trickling into the theatre. Some mothers had been to adult opera before, some hadn’t, and none was quite sure what to expect. “To be honest, I’ll go to anything,” one mum admitted furtively. “Anything to break the routine.”
“I used to go to a few operas when I was a student in Edinburgh, but there’s not much on culturally here,” said Lynne from Stonehaven, who has brought along her ten-month-old. “So you jump at anything a bit different.”
Upstairs, beyond a trestle table selling organic baby snacks, Baby O is a simple setup of low curving banquettes surrounding a performance space. There is no orchestra, no chorus, no gleefully unfeasible plot involving helpless sopranos and heroic tenors. The “tactile garden set to explore” turns out to be a circle of green baize and some stick-on flowers. Alarm bells ring when a man with a clipboard says: “And if you could keep your babies on your laps for the duration of the performance . . .” For 30 minutes? Is that a joke?
Oscar sniffs fear and lets out a battle cry of “wellies” before launching himself headfirst into the performance arena, an enthusiastic flurry of flailing legs and grab hands. Unlike some of the younger babies, gazing in amazement, he’s unimpressed by the first number, a slow, mimed sequence in which the three opera singers “wake up” and flap blankets around. But he gleefully makes buzzing noises during the “bzz bzz bzzp” vocals of the ensuing bumble bee song.
Largely eschewing words, the catchy, sound-based vocalisations are nonetheless sophisticated enough to involve musical motifs and harmony. Intimate, informal, Baby O is more an operatic echo than an opera, entirely sung-through (at reduced volume) by Gloria Ellis, Hélène Adesanlu and a game Stewart Scott, who had lost his voice but not the ability to animate a rubber duck.
Oscar, whom I finally manage to wrestle into a holding position between my knees, wiggles along to any beat that comes his way, including some clearly inaudible to the adult ear, and particularly enjoys singing along, holding his hand up in the air in imitation of the three singers dropping multicoloured feathers to the floor in a descending refrain, “Falling . . . bump!”
The composer and infant development researcher Rachel Drury, who brought the idea to Scottish Opera’s head of education Jane Davidson 18 months ago, says she was trying to find out what babies would listen to. “We discovered that babies liked all the things we thought they wouldn’t: sounds that were very high and very low.”
Quite what would entice an opera singer into this arena is open to question. Blank stares, knife-edge mood swings, an inability to stay still, much less quiet, with a huge and controversial baby age range that equates to playing to everyone from teenagers to OAPS.
“It’s really nice to see the world through a little one’s eyes,” Adesanlu insists, breezily.
Mothers told me they were so amazed that their babies had remained transfixed and calm for most of the performance that everything else faded into insignificance. “He’s never sat that still for that long before,” said Esther, mother to 18-month-old Joshua. Others were less sure. “It would have been nice to have a section where the children could move around with the performers moving between them,” Anna, a primary teacher mother of 17-month-old Maya, said. “And they could perhaps have sung for more extended periods. But it was lovely to see how they were stunned into silence as soon the singing started. I don’t think Maya’s seen adults prancing around at such close range before.”
The live classical music landscape for babies is still remarkably sparse. There was the Association of British Orchestras/Youth Music Cluster programme, piloted by the LSO in 2006, which brings infants face to face with classical musicians. Yet a quick survey of the education departments of the UK’s opera companies shows that most companies’ performance strategies lie with older children, for whom there are excellent projects, including an opera for four-year-olds at Welsh National Opera.
Despite the vast, commercially driven explosion of developmental toys based on the misinterpreted “Mozart Effect”, there is surprisingly little recent research on music and infant development, according to a draft report into research on early years music-making, from Youth Music, the UK’s largest children’s charity devoted to ensuring universal access to high-quality music-making activities for children.
“But the research that exists shows huge developmental benefits,” says Ben Sandbrook, Youth Music’s music education development manager.
Little Movers at Opera North, the only other UK opera company to offer initiatives aimed at those under 18 months, has seen that long-term participatory music-making in more deprived areas has given considerable social and health benefits in terms of parent-child relationships. Davidson noted similarly positive responses when testing Baby O last Christmas in areas where mothers felt social pressure not to engage in the sing-song babytalk, known as motherese, long known to develop babies’ language.
Sitting on the train home after our own baby opera experience, I wonder what will be the effect, if any, of taking Oscar to the opera? Am I honing the world’s greatest opera buff? The next Bryn Terfel? Oddly enough, I may be. Youth Music cites research suggesting that early music exposure can determine taste.
“One of the exciting things is that they haven’t been pigeonholed, boxed up, determined,” Sandbrook says. “They’re untainted, free and fresh minds, so there is huge potential to use music as a medium to expose them to a variety of different cultures and experiences.” I look at Oscar who is hurling a feather from the Baby O CD into the aisle. Alpha Mummy: job done.
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