The composer who unites Trump and Obama

It was performed at the 2013 Fourth of July party at the US ambassador’s residence in Israel. The United States Marine Band was there and its leader later asked her for the sheet music. Some time later she received a letter from President Barack Obama, thanking her for writing the song.

Since then she’s had numerous emails from serving soldiers. “ It means a great deal,” she says.

Kay-Feld was born in Hackney into a creative family. Her mother wrote stories and her father loved music. As a schoolgirl she studied violin and led the school orchestra but when she left school she became a social worker with Norwood. “I always had a guitar strapped to my back to sing to the children.” She studied at the Royal College of Music but realised she was never going to be a professional pianist, which was a blow. Then she dried her tears and set about studying composition.

She met her American husband at 24 and they went together to live in Long Island where she raised her four children and wrote many songs to entertain them. “When they were naughty, I would write songs,” she recalls. “I would write songs all the time and they would sing them.”

She got her big break after a gig at New York’s Public Library, when she was approached to meet the makers of a new children’s show called Sesame Street. “I wondered what they wanted, I’d never heard of them.” At the meeting, she was asked to work on six songs and come back with them in a few months.She wrote all six songs on the train home and six days later was hired as a freelance composer.

Altogether, she wrote more than 300 songs for Sesame Street, and loved it. “I would sit and write all day and then discover that I’d burned the cakes!’

She wrote several Jewish-themed songs including a hymn to Israel which won her praise from Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir. Eventually she and her husband made aliyah where her creativity has flourished into her seventies. Her latest projects are a musical, Upstairs Downstairs 1897, which “depicts England at the height of its glory.” It has 26 songs. and when it was previewed, “I expected it to be a flop, but I was shocked — everybody was shocked — it was a massive success!” She’s hoping for a London production.

She’s been asked by Uri Geller to compose a symphony for the opening of his new museum in Jaffa, which will celebrate his career as a psychic spoon-bender. She recently spent several hours with him, “walking through the unfinished museum and absorbing the energy and the atmosphere so that the symphony will be exactly as he wants and will portray his psychic abilities with enthusiasm and vitality.”

And she has a new children’s book out, Kangamole The Legend, which was inspired by a recent trip to Australia and is based on the Aboriginal legends about Uluru, or Ayers Rock.

Yet again, her love of children and libraries opened the door for her. Staying in Australia, she put on a concert at a public library for the Aboriginal community’s children. This won the trust of the community’s leaders, and they worked with her on her book. In return, she promotes the need to treat the rock with respect as a sacred space and is happy that the Australian government has just announced a ban on tourists climbing it.

All of her children have creative careers: an artist, a magician, a rare books specialist and a choreographer. She hopes to set up a foundation to support disadvantaged students who want to study music. “There are so many children who would love to sing,” she says. “Let’s make it happen.”