Hello friends,
Today, I read a newsletter written by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker, in defense of lullabies. His first sentence struck me:
“Is any music genre more disrespected than the lullaby?”
Without needing to think, I knew I agreed. Yet even in my agreement, I emphasized Gioia’s point. I don’t think about lullabies when I think about music. Lullabies are for those on the fringes—the children, the sick and dying, the fearful ones. We think fondly of the songs our grandparents sang us to sleep with, yet we never think to sing them until we have kids of our own. We put them in a hope chest in our brains. They’re lovely to pull out and look at from time to time, but mostly we keep them out of sight. Why is that? Gioia lists several explanations for why we ignore the lullaby later in life, but the final one he addresses is shame.
“The obvious explanation,” Gioia writes, “is shame. Adults don’t want to be caught listening to lullabies. In my opinion, this also explains why musicologists don’t want to specialize in this subject, and music historians don’t want to mention it. There’s an opportunity here—not just for scholarship on lullabies, but for a broader study of how shame impacts music education and music criticism.”
Gioia’s observation is mainly in line with my own thoughts. Lullabies are for those on the fringes, the ones we hold at arm’s length. Or rather, they’re for the ones we cradle. Singing a lullaby gives us strength. Being sung to suggests a weakness. How odd that we would reject something we know will calm us.
Every night, as I’m getting settled in bed and preparing for sleep, I listen to what could arguably be called lullabies. I’m partial to jazz at the moment, but I also drift off to ambient beats and modern classical and acoustic indie. If it sounds gentle, I hit play.
So often these days, we flee from anything gentle, anything soft. This isn’t a world for those who need lullabies. And yet they persist, ancient and powerful. They’ve been passed down through the ages in the old style, from one person to another. Rhythms learned in childhood are forgotten until they’re needed. Then memory brings them forth like magic. It isn’t just us singing; we’re singing with everyone who sang before us. Our voice carries the lives of countless other parents and healers. And in the back of our mind is the knowledge that this lullaby is a gift. Our voice, and all the voices we carry, will live on.
While writing this, I couldn’t help but think of my beloved grandmother. Everyone called her Geegee. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve seen me write about her several times. When she sang to her own kids (my dad and his siblings), they would beg her to stop. “Please, mummy,” they cried. “We’ll be good. Just stop singing.” It was a joke, of course, and the joke became part of the memory. Sleep brought on by laughter, and then calm. One day I’ll sing to my children and tell them the joke, and they’ll carry with them the memory of a woman they never met.
What are you listening to lately? Any good lullabies? Let me know.
Until next time,
Yardena