Creative Minds in Song and Michał Kawecki‘s “My Child”: Telling stories with music

Music has, in some ways, always been a kind of storytelling but at times it becomes a crucial way of sharing real life stories of struggle and healing, a creative outlet of de-stigmatising certain experiences, the oil to lubricate the wheels of social change.

I attended the 10-year celebration concert of Creative Minds in Song yesterday, a social project founded by its current Artistic Director Gavin Roberts, alongside Rebecca Cohen.

In this project, which has had three instalments over ten years, musicians and composers from the Guildhall School of Drama worked alongside poet participants from MIND in Tower Hamlets and Newham who have lived through experiences of mental illness to create new songs to be performed.

At the concert at St Giles Cripplegate church last night, a selection of these songs were performed by alumni of the project as well as Gavin himself. Wonderfully interpreted by singers Lydia Shariff, Adam Sullivan, Madeleine Holmes and Sophie Whelan, the songs were a testament to the beauty of collaboration between words and music, the wonderfully diverse range of expression in ordinary people, and the boundless positive creativity engendered by experiences of mental illness.

The highlight of last night’s concert was the world premiere of the song cycle “My Child”, the “child”—if you will—of poet Isobel Lane and composer Michał Kawecki.

The project first came about with “My Child”, a collaboration between Lane and Kawecki in 2023 for the Creative Minds project (first performed by me and Lydia! The experience of which you can read about here), which would inspire the whole song cycle based on its name, and which would ultimately become Kawecki’s PhD project at the Guildhall School.

The two songs that bookend the cycle were written during the 2022-2023 Creative Minds Project, while the rest came into being after.

Although separated into eight songs, the whole cycle feels like one narrative, depicting Lane’s dramatic journey through depression as she went in and out of hospitals between 1993 and 2023.

The drama of emotion behind Lane’s words is not lost in Kawecki’s music; if anything, they are enhanced.

Kawecki, at home in different styles from the sweepingly Romantic to the angularly Modernist to the experimental piano-preparing post-Modernist, takes us through different dramatic atmospheres, each one distinct from the other.

Kawecki’s sonic atmospheres always stay true to the words, as when the incessant chanting of the singer and the aggressive Prokofievesque ostinato pattern of the piano created breathless intensity in No. 3, “Black Fire Kills without letting”; when the writing made the piano sound like a broken music box in No. 4, “O Bear, what did you see”; or when the out-of-sync piano and voice melodies in the spacious sonic atmosphere of No. 6, “This is my Space”, vividly created the effect of desolate echoes.

The effect was profound, after a series of transformations in the final song, “My Child Fell”, we circle back to the beginning song “My Child”, ending in a fragile yet beautiful E flat major, a message of hope.

None of the drama of this dramatic yet heartfelt story would have come across without the passionate and very human performance of mezzo soprano Lydia Shariff, accompanied wonderfully by Gavin Roberts.