Lullabies of the World
Origins and form of lullabies
Project Lullabies of the World
Lullabies I love
Origins and form of lullabies
Lullabies are among the saddest songs of humankind. Musically, their sadness is not of a grieving or lacerating or heavy kind, however — but rather, most often, of soft melancholy. But their lyrics range from soothing, to mirthful, even playful, to dark and macabre. Lullabies are as much for the lulled as they are for the lulling.
Etymology of ‘lullaby’ is pretty transparent — ‘lull’ + ‘bye’ (compare: rock-a-bye, hushaby). But there’s an alternative interpretation where it comes from ‘Lilith-Abi’ — ‘Lilith be gone’ in Hebrew. Lilith being, of course, the foe of Eve who steals children at night.
In 1928, Federico García Lorca delivered a most poetic lecture On Lullabies:
On all my walks through Spain, wearying a little of cathedrals, dead stones, and soulful landscapes, I have tried to find living and lasting elements for whom the moment is not frozen, and which live their tremulous present. Amidst the infinite number existing I have pursued two: songs and confectionery! While a cathedral is permanently of its epoch, giving a continuous expression of the past to a forever-altering landscape, a song suddenly leaps from its yesterday to our today, alive and pulsing like a frog, incorporated into the view like a fresh plant, bringing us the living light of ancient hours, thanks to its melodious breath.
Lullabies are a living memory, reborn with each new child, animated by the voice of her mother, echoing ancient voices that did the same.
For the tiniest of babies, the words of the lullaby are superfluous, and the rhythmic pattern itself, together with a recurring simple refrain, is enough to put them to sleep:
It matters not whether the song has words. Sleep arrives through rhythm alone and the vibration of the voice with that rhythm. The perfect lullaby would be a repetition of two different notes, extended in duration and effect. But no mother wants to be a snake-charmer, though at root she employs the same technique.
But once a child can partake in the language, the lyrics of the lullaby can serve as much for his entertainment (lullaby as an adventurous story) as for his admonishment (sleep, or else!..), education (this is how the world works) or simply for bathing him in tenderness and love.
In her song the mother often constructs an abstract landscape, almost always a nocturnal one, and places in it, as if in some profoundly simple and ancient play, one or two characters who execute the most straightforward actions almost always with a sorrowful effect of the greatest beauty. Across this little stage pass actors whom the child must necessarily imagine and who loom large in the hot fogs of sleeplessness. <…>
The mother transports the child beyond himself, into the remote distance, and returns him weary to her lap, to rest. It is a little initiation into poetic adventure. These are the child’s first steps into the world of intellectual representation.
At the same time, lullabies with creepy and dark lyrics are fairly common across cultures. Some sound more like murder ballads or contain bitter complaints about the husband or thinly veiled allusions to the mother’s adultery (in parts of Spain, for example — in Asturias and Salamanca). These are meant more as an outlet for the mother to say things that are otherwise unsayable in the society, while nobody is listening but her infant who can’t yet fully grasp the meaning of the lyrics.
2. Project Lullabies of the World
Lullabies also present a perfect opportunity for an ethnomusicologist to study a universal human musical phenomenon. There’s a Russian project, ‘Lullabies of the World’, that started in 2005 and created about 60 animations to lullabies from around the world. Of those, three stood out to me:
from the Isle of Man: recounting trials and tribulations of a little red bird who finally finds rest at the end of the lullaby.
Sephardic Jewish: a simple but very striking animation. A lot going on there.
from Azerbaijan: I’m biased here but I do think it’s one of the best on the list. It’s full of gentle melancholy, and the idea of the animation — a child seeing his whole life play out in a dream — is wonderful.
A 2013 collection of Lullabies of the World contains quite a few gems which I collected in this playlist. Among them are:
Brahms: Wiegenlied — probably the most iconic lullaby of the West
Greek lullaby: Nani tou riga to pedi
Indian lullaby: Jasoda Hari Palne
Armenian lullaby: Akna Oror
Norwegian lullaby: Gjendines bådnlåt
Some of the lullabies in this album seem way too entertaining to fulfill their intended function. And then there is the Indian lullaby which instantanesouly transports you straight into the cosmos where you float, dazzled and mesmerized. It would enchant not only a child but an adult as well. The Armenian lullaby struck me with its poised intensity and beautiful, high-strung melodic lines. It hits close to home, as it were.
3. Lullabies I love
From my earlier explorations of lullabies, there are a few that I love above all.
One of them is by the Azerbaijani composer, Fikret Amirov: chamber orchestra version, solo piano version. Pure music, no words.
Another Azerbaijani composer, Gara Garayev, wrote a lullaby as a part of his ballet “The path of thunder”.
Lullaby of the mother bear from the Soviet cartoon “Umka” is one I fondly remember from my childhood.
Come rest in my bosom/Hush-a-bye: best recording I know of is by Elizabeth Farr, Anne Jackson and Donna Lann in “Celtic Crossings”.
Richard Strauss’s Beim Schlafengehen (one of his “Four Last Songs”), written to a poem by Hermann Hesse, is a lullaby for all ages. I made a playlist of various recordings of this piece. Below is the poem in the original and my translation:
The day has made me tired and worn,
And now I long for starry night
To embrace me, gently, lightly
In her bosom, like a tired child.
Hands, abandon all the doings,
And you, my forehead, leave all thought,
All my senses are now ready
In a slumber to dissolve.
And the soul, unwatched and free
Floats in a boundless flight
In the magic circle of the night
Deep a thousand lives to live.
Nun der Tag mich müd gemacht,
Soll mein sehnliches Verlangen
Freundlich die gestirnte Nacht
Wie ein müdes Kind empfangen.
Hände, lasst von allem Tun,
Stirn, vergiss du alles Denken,
Alle meine Sinne nun
Wollen sich in Schlummer senken.
Und die Seele, unbewacht,
Will in freien Flügen schweben,
Um im Zauberkreis der Nacht
Tief und tausendfach zu Leben.
I’ll leave you with the lullaby I wrote as the last movement of my string trio. I hope to sing it to my children someday.
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