Feel-good blog

Focus is conductor’s own happy family life

Eszter Richardson was the first student-conductor to transfer from the Pető Institute in Budapest to the National Institute of Conductive Education in Birmingham part-way through her initial conductor-training.

Eszter graduated in 2005 and lives with her English husband and two-year-old daughter in Beverley in Yorkshire, by England’s sunny East Coast. She has been blogging since August.

Her blog is called Richardson-UK. At the top she writes:

Rohan a vilag, fejlodik a technika, igy ugy gondoltuk, hogy mi is csatlakozunk a xxi. szazadhoz...jo bongeszest a blogunkon! [The world is rushing on and technology developing so fast that we thought that we’d better join the 21st century… enjoy playing on our blog]

adding in English

This is a bilingual blog, so both Hungarian and English-speaking visitors can follow everything that is happening to us.

Visit Eszter’s blog at http://richardson-uk.blogspot.com/

Conductor-mothers (and conductor-fathers)

Most conductors around the world are women and many of these have or will be having children of their own though what follows should of also course equally apply to male conductors and conductor-fatherhood).

I have often wondered whether their experience of training and practicing as conductors has affected their parenting and if so how. Everything says that it should have and for the good, but does it? I have talked informally about this with a few conductor-mothers and mothers-to-be but have never had a formalized account.

When conductors have children, some stop work altogether but many return to conducting, some very soon, others after a much longer parenting break. Some longer-term conductor mothers who want or need a part-time job during this ‘in-between time’ find a nearby Conductive Education service that is glad and (lucky) to find convenient sessional or relief help but others have nothing and have to turn their skills to other purposes.

Eszter is in just such a situation and has found what sounds a well-suited occupation for a conductor-mother. She has become a trained and franchised baby-signing teacher for TinyTalk, running three classes in Beverley and Walkington, East Yorkshire.

Baby signing

This does sound an ideal occupation for a conductor-in-motherhood. The outline job-description on TinyTalk’s invitation to train as a baby-signing teacher calls for recruits who are:

…lively, enthusiastic, can sing, have an interest in baby signing… organised, self confident and want a job that has flexible hours that fits in with family life and term time…

Baby signing has been devised for normally developing children and at first sight may seem hardly suitable for children with motor disorders and their families. Further consideration does spark off the possibility of possible elaborations, practical and theoretical, of potential benefit parent-child interaction within for example conductive parent-and-child work.

Conductors feeling good?

Eszter began her blog in August. On 4 October, also from England, conductor Judit Szathmary began a blog that is very different in content but very 'feel good' in intent.

Coincidence, or what?

Notes

RICHARDSON-UK

http://richardson-uk.blogspot.com/

Baby Signing

http://www.tinytalk.co.uk/

Eszter’s baby-signing classes

http://www.tinytalk.co.uk/baby-signing-classes/baby-signing-beverley-richardson.htm

Judit Szathmary's feel-good blog

http://sourcesense.blogspot.com/