Douglas and Jen from the Music and Art & Design Libraries look at lullabies…
What is a lullaby? The simplest definition of a lullaby would be, a soothing song to lull a baby to sleep, they often have a 6/8 metre and are confined to a range of about five notes.
A better question might be, what does a lullaby do, and to answer would perhaps take longer than we have here. The lullaby creates an intimate bond between caregiver and child, it creates an illusion of safety which perhaps, just over the threshold in the real world, may for some children not exist, but for those few moments between wakefulness and the land of dreams, they are completely safe in the arms of the one they love, and the lullaby is an anchor which will always have that calming effect. So much so, that in moments of fretfulness a child can be calmed by the singing of their lullaby. Hannah Reyes Morales in her 2020 article, ‘What the lullabies we sing to our children reveal about us’ in the National Geographic recounts the stories and experiences of parents, mother, fathers and caregivers, and the lullabies they sing and the effectiveness of those lullabies in war-torn countries, in times of uncertainty and in times of Covid.
The lullabies sung can be well known, like ‘You are my Sunshine’ or ‘Que sera sera’, the Doris Day hit from the film, The Man Who Knew Too Much; ‘Morningtown Ride’, ‘Mockingbird’, ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ – it is sometimes a bit strange, what becomes a child’s personal favourite. They can be made up and unique to the one it is being sung to; they can be a family song handed down from parent to child then on through the generations. All cultures and countries round the world have lullabies. In some African cultures it is believed that babies bring the lullabies to the mother before they are born.
Lullabies are like secrets. To hear one not directed at you, and not sung by you, is like listening in on a daydream.
Rivka Galchen New York Times 2015
The safety created by the simple act of singing, a perhaps, simple song, lasts for years and is proven to be beneficial not just for the infant but also for the caregiver. The songs are interesting enough to catch the attention of the infant but not too interesting to keep them awake, which is a good thing because superficially some lullabies are dark, and have a subject matter which if interrogated could keep one awake for hours.
Rock a bye baby
On the tree top,
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock
When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall
And down will come baby
Cradle and all.
This is one which we all might know. It relates to, depending on which history you read, the Kenyon Family, who lived in a huge yew tree and put their eight children in a hollowed-out cradle on its branches. There are also links with this lullaby to the House of Stuart and the offspring of James II of England, who had an infant smuggled into the birthing room, providing an heir, when he didn’t or couldn’t. The rhyme is dark and scary and the sort of thing to keep a child awake rather than lulling them to sleep. There is a more modern version with a last verse which finishes with the line, “Mother is near”. Perhaps that comfort might come a little too late for some little ones; this was a particular problem song for my daughter, who cried whenever it was sung.
One of the earliest recorded examples of lullabies is on an (approximately) 4000 year old Babylonian tablet, written in Cuneiform and recently translated. Again, it is quite a dark text and could keep the feint heart from its slumbers. In its lyrics a god is woken by a baby and vice versa and each seem to cry at the other until they are calmed by wine. A questionable habit of giving a fretting child some alcohol to calm it.
So, for many thousands of years and in all cultures around the world, parents have swaddled their beloved and most precious little ones with simple songs which calm and reassure. The songs fill the infant with a sense of a place which is warm and safe. This tradition continues with the Lullaby Project from the Carnegie Hall in New York, which pairs emerging composers and musicians, with soon to be mothers, tasked with writing their own lullaby for their own child. The scheme is now being run in Britain by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Our Music and Art & Design departments are twinned, and Jen has added a few thoughts on the lullaby from a visual perspective:
Throughout art college I didn’t know about the paintings of Paula Modersohn-Becker, but since having a child last year, I’ve thought of them a lot. Through pregnancy too. Born in 1976, her paintings are important in the history of early expressionism. To me, her work sings – of her feelings towards being a mother, about having a child and children; and existing in a domestic interior. Her paintings say so much and I’ve found it helps – when nights are broken, and the lullabies just do not work – to think of them.
I’ve singled out two pieces. The first was painted in 1906 and shows a mother lying down as she breastfeeds her child. It makes me think of deep lulling sleep, and the more peaceful times of day (night or early morning…). It really was unusual at this point to paint the female nude as she does, and to convey all that she does: about the relationship between a mother and her child, and how they rest together.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The second painting I’ve included is a self-portrait Paula Modersohn-Becker painted on her 30th birthday, which by calculations means she wasn’t actually pregnant (as far as we know) at the time – her child, Mathilde, was born in November 1907. Interesting. I find it so gentle and tender. The greatest lullaby, as the baby sleeps tucked up there in the womb.
Paula Modersohn-Becker,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
We’ve books in the Art and Design library, and Paula Modersohn-Becker also wrote a lot, despite her very early death (at 31, 19 days after Mathilde was born), in letters and journals. We hold these too. Our collection service is running, and we’re hoping to open the department very soon so please do explore.
Naxos
It is normally at this point we would put in a list of suggested listening on our music streaming services but that is difficult. As we have mentioned, lullabies are a personal choice with many memories and our list may not be everyone’s list.
If you enter the word, ‘lullaby’, in the search in both of our streaming sites you get lots of results. Perhaps you won’t get Doris Day, or a rendition of “You are my Sunshine” but there will be lots of results. On Naxos Jazz there are a lot of recordings of the ‘Lullaby of Birdland’ or ‘The Lullaby of Broadway’ but there are much, much more, and likewise at Naxos Classical, Brahms’ Lullaby crops up a lot but so do lullabies by Gershwin, Whitacre and Leroy Anderson.
Tales of One City 