Patience by Naomi Brown

Like many others, I’ve found the last few years to be difficult. Being isolated from family and friends, juggling working from home, teaching from home, supervising home learning and the needs of a toddler, plus the exhaustion of pregnancy #3! One of my highlights of 2021 was meeting Melbournian composer Naomi Brown and collaborating with her to record a solo piano suite entitled, “The Orchard”. Here is one of the pieces from the suite, which seems fitting at this time of year in the lead-up to Easter.

Guy Smiley by Nat Bartsch

A lullaby by Melbourne composer Nat Bartsch. This comes from her Forever and No Time At All album. I love it because it is so calming. Trying to create a calm atmosphere in the womb for baby #2 who could arrive any day now! Here’s what Nat had to say about her piece:

“Basically, this song comes from a suite of lullabies that I wrote just after my son Will was born. The idea is to challenge that idea that music for babies is just 'for babies'. As their parents end up hearing it just as much, if not more, than their child. Music therapists have discovered that if the whole family is calm, the baby will be calm. So it seems silly for the parents to be subjected to repeats of Twinkle Twinkle or Brahms lullaby on the baby monitor over and over, if it drives them crazy! So the idea was to write music that would help babies fall asleep, but also be relaxing and enjoyable for adults. Many non-parents I know listen to this music to fall asleep to as well.

The lullabies I wrote are predominately postclassical pieces, with some improvisation, and are informed by music therapy research into the best kind of music for relaxing babies. to sleep. The pieces use repetition, a steady beat at a tempo similar to the mother's heartbeat, soft and consistent timbres and dynamics, simple melodies and harmony. 

The pieces are all named after the different stages of development that my son Will was at at the time of writing. This piece is called Guy Smiley because it was written when my son was first learning to smile. I composed this sitting at the piano with him - baby in one hand, pencil in the other.”

Straight No Chaser

Here’s a piano solo from our stint at Farouk’s Olive in August 2018

Car Park Honky Tonk Improvisation

Here’s some spontaneous piano playing in a car park after seeing a gig in the city! Can you guess the tune halfway through?

Worksong

Here’s another piano solo from our stint at Farouk’s Olive in August 2018

All of My by John Legend

A small snippet of popular wedding song “All of Me” by John Legend at a beautiful special occasion in Mount Dandenong.