Thinking about music and early childhood

For the last three years, I have been learning about a whole new genre: operas for babies. Here's how it happened. I was trying to deepen my understanding of maternal health, since we had been so involved in the Lullaby Project at Carnegie Hall. I was looking for colleagues and partners with whom I could compare notes. Emily Eagen, my erstwhile lullaby partner here in New York, suggested I listen to a BBC radio documentary piece about lullaby singing at London Hospital. In it, I learned about a teaching artist there named Zoe Palmer. I wrote an email to Spitalfields Music,  where I first learned about their music theater pieces for the very youngest. And perhaps even more importantly, they put me in touch with Zoe. Our first Skype call was one of those  breathless tumbles that happens when you realize that regardless of the miles in between, you are both doing all the same things in fascinatingly different ways. We could hardly stop talking. I sent Zoe the lullabies we'd been making in NYC, and she sent me videos of the music theater pieces they'd been creating in London. I told Zoe about Moving Star, the improvisatory vocal lab that we run at Carnegie Hall, and she offered to send us some poetry that we might sing. We sent her the recordings of our improvisations, and we realized we might just have the seeds for a Cross-Atlantic collaboration. We set up a Dropbox folder (that still has that name),  and began scheming. That eventually led to the creation of OTOYOTOY, pictured above. As we approach the October 2018 revival, I'll be writing more about the journey, which took me to London, to Norway and back again. More soon!