The Melancholy Mystery of Lullabies
By RIVKA GALCHEN
October 14, 2015
By RIVKA GALCHEN
October 14, 2015
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 motion picture ‘‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’’ dramatizes the geopolitical status of babies. Or at least that is how I currently see the film, even though there are basically no babies in it. This somewhat eccentric read on a classic is most likely attributable to the fact that I am a mother and have a baby almost constantly on my mind. But I would also point out that the plot of the movie is held together by a song — a song that a mother sings to her child.
It works like this: James Stewart and Doris Day play the outlandishly ‘‘normal’’ American couple, Ben and Jo McKenna, who are vacationing in Morocco with their young son, Hank. The McKennas are normal not in the sense of being typical — they are well-off, and Jo is a once-famous, now-retired singer. Instead, they are normal in that they are devoted to norms and customs. (Even after their child is kidnapped, for example, Ben politely entertains guests.) While in a market one day, the McKennas witness a murder; Ben hears the dying man’s last words, a warning about a political-assassination plot. Soon afterward, Hank is kidnapped. Following various clues, the McKennas fly to London, hoping to find their son, and there, somewhat by chance, save the life of a foreign prime minister. When the McKennas then discover that Hank is being held at that prime minister’s embassy (the prime minister’s own ambassador arranged the assassination attempt) the McKennas get themselves invited to a party there, where Jo McKenna performs the song she used to sing for Hank, ‘‘Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).’’ She appears to be singing for everyone, but really she is singing, loudly, for only one person — her child. Hank hears his mother’s song. So does Hank’s captor, a woman, who is moved by the mother’s voice; she tells Hank to whistle along, and so his father finds him.
It’s a fantastic, ridiculous plot. But for all its improbable hyperbole, ‘‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’’ dramatizes something psychologically real and common: Random families just making their way, being “normal,” are helplessly shaped by vast and mostly indifferent social and political forces. Often these forces manifest as norms. The story of a couple trying to find their son is both minor and major; it is a MacGuffin-ish plot point and also the hinge of an international conspiracy. The child’s status is similarly doubled: to his parents, he is a world; to his captors, a pawn. Hank is at once powerless and a prime mover. The plot of the movie is such that his parents’ efforts to save him wind up affecting global power struggles.
And what saves him? Not Scotland Yard, not ransom money and not his parents’ chance parsing of clues. Instead, Hank is rescued only by his bond with his mother, specifically his bond via a song. And though emotionally this seems over the top, it also seems to express an inarguable truth about motherhood — that the formation of a bond between mother and child will always be as imperiled and imperfect as it is essential.
When the South Carolina-born musician and composer Thomas Cabaniss first moved to New York, in his early 20s, he created a lullaby as a gift for a friend’s soon-to-arrive baby. ‘‘Maybe I got a little carried away,’’ he told me. He wrote the lyrics, produced sheet music and made a high-quality recording. The song was called ‘‘Far Away Child,’’ and Cabaniss continued to write more lullabies for the girl as she grew up. Nearly 30 years later, Cabaniss helped establish the Lullaby Project for Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections, an outreach program that takes music to people in places other than a concert hall: schools, hospitals, shelters, prisons. The Lullaby Project pairs Carnegie Hall musicians with new and expectant mothers, who then together compose and record lullabies written specifically for each mother’s child. More than 150 mothers, and some fathers, have written and recorded songs over the last seven years, and there are now seven satellite programs affiliated with Carnegie Hall doing similar work in other cities, including Flint, Mich.; Austin, Tex.; and Rockport, Me.
The first run of the Lullaby Project came about when Cabaniss, who had been working with the pediatrics unit at Jacobi Medical Center, met the staff of the obstetrics department and asked where they could use the most help. Pregnant teenagers, the nurses said. Young, expectant mothers were under tremendous stress and needed to be motivated to attend their medical appointments. They needed a sense of community, and they needed ways to understand the reality of what was happening to them. Cabaniss created a lullaby-writing project as an optional part of the wellness visits. ‘‘The songs became a way to imagine these children that were on their way,’’ he said.
Musical Connections now runs seven lullaby projects a year, two with groups of mothers from New York’s homeless shelters, two with mothers in hospitals, two with teenage mothers and one at the Rikers Island women’s correctional facility, where inmates have their infant children with them until they are a year old. The project usually spans three sessions: one for drafting lullabies, one for recording them in a professional studio and a third session to share the songs with the group.
The Lullaby Project mothers each have their own struggles, but they are also simply new mothers. Of all the faulty universals out there, that of being a new mother — with all the physical sameness that generally entails — is one of the most illuminating, one of the least wrong. When the Lullaby Project hosted a free public concert of four created lullabies in Portland, more than 350 people attended.
One of the oldest known lullabies is a 5,000-year-old Babylonian song. Its lyrics seem to come to us from around the corner. The words, as translated by the archaeomusicologist Richard Dumbrill, are:
Little baby in the dark house,
You have seen the sun rise.
Why are you crying?
Why are you screaming?
You have disturbed the house god.
Who has disturbed me? says the house god.
It is the baby who has disturbed you.
Who scared me? says the house god.
The baby has disturbed you, the baby has scared you.
Making noises like a drunkard who cannot sit still on his stool.
He has disturbed your sleep.
Call the baby now, says the house god.
What I love about this lullaby is that the baby scares and rivals the god. Both are trying to sleep; both have been disturbed; both have been frightened. This parallelism makes it seem as if they are one and the same: The baby is the house god, the house god is the baby. We, as singers of the song, seem ambivalent about the god’s powers, about the baby’s powers. In the lyrics, we point blame at the baby, but by singing at all, we are appeasing the baby, obeying its cries.
What, really, is a lullaby? We can define it functionally — a song used to lull a child to sleep. In this sense, the distinctive burden of a lullaby is to be interesting enough to capture a child’s attention, but not interesting enough to keep the child awake, which is perhaps why most of the songs we think of as lullabies have a 6/8 tempo and are confined to about five notes. Studies on babies in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) show that premature infants prefer lullabylike songs to other music — their heart rates and breathing steady, their feeding patterns improve and they are more likely, when hearing lullabies regularly over time, to gain the weight they need. It has even been shown that preemies in NICUs who have lullabies sung to them during venipuncture sessions have significantly lower pain scores following the prick. Babies seem to recognize the voices of their parents more readily than anyone else’s. The maternal voice in particular, which a fetus begins to hear around 25 weeks into a pregnancy, is uniquely comforting.
The effects of lullabies on the bond between mother and child, and on feelings of well-being in both, may be more difficult to quantify than respiratory rate or weight gain — so many important things are difficult to name, much less quantify — but they seem just as fundamental. At a recent session, 10 mothers and a mother to be were gathered, along with Cabaniss and six other Carnegie musicians, in the sunny den room of Siena House, a shelter in the Bronx for homeless mothers. Most of the mothers’ babies were present, some just a few weeks old. The babies were resting in portable car seats or nestled in their mothers’ arms. On the floor, a toddler boy held a Casio keyboard on his lap; a little girl held a toy boombox.
The room felt almost too convivial for anything as elusive and dreamy as a lullaby to show up. Then Cabaniss plucked a note on his mbira (a board instrument that is sometimes called a thumb piano), and the room sang the note together. Then everyone sang two shifting notes, before returning to a single note. The communal singing at first felt quite awkward, then pretty normal, then oddly powerful, and by the end of the collective hum, I don’t think I was the only person in the room who had that ‘‘aligned’’ feeling I more commonly associate with having my shoulders rubbed or hearing Ravel’s ‘‘Boléro.’’ Afterward, there was a curious absence of any fussing sounds from the babies.
I have yet to be told of a baby who does not have what seems to the average adult an extravagant and almost unnatural sensitivity to music. (‘‘He was just crying and crying, and I felt desperate, and then, I swear to you, I put on Ornette Coleman/Rihanna/Pandora/bluegrass/whatever, and he/she became calm/quiet/happy/rapt.’’ I have heard this, and probably said this, in countless Mad Libs variations.) But for that baby, it’s never just any music; it’s specific sounds. For example, one of the assorted humblings of becoming a parent is discovering which songs you actually know the words to. When I had a newborn I found that the main song that came to me, unbidden, was ‘‘Cotton Fields,’’ as sung by Creedence Clearwater Revival — a song I hadn’t heard for years and years. I like that song well enough, and I knew it as a child, but I did feel a little bit self-conscious hearing myself, a Jewish girl from Oklahoma, singing a remake of a Lead Belly version of a tune whose lyrics suggest it may have been a slave song to my distinctly fortunate baby. But if I tried to switch songs on her, she would immediately cry. She had chosen her lullaby.
Most parents find themselves singing whatever song happens to come to them; the songs are not deliberately chosen, which may be why many of the women at Siena House that afternoon felt blocked as they tried to write lullabies. One mother, Juanita, who had joined the group late, was almost too overwhelmed with new-mother emotion to come up with any words. ‘‘I don’t know anything about music,’’ she kept saying. Her baby was less than two months old, and though her friend kept offering to take him, she insisted on holding him. Cabaniss came around to try to be of help putting the song together. Juanita said, ‘‘All I can think to say is ‘God gave me an angel.’ You don’t understand, but this baby is a miracle baby.’’ Juanita explained the particular physical difficulties of her pregnancy. ‘‘I’ve got nothing for the song,’’ she said. ‘‘But I want to try.’’ She and Cabaniss eventually put together a simple four-line song, with the fourth line a repetition of the third: ‘‘God gave me an angel/He gave me you for a reason/You changed my life/You changed my life.’’ The tune was simple and clear.
Since childhood I’ve felt anxious about singing any song with the word ‘‘God’’ in it. Unless I was attending a friend’s church, I never sang it — and even then, I would mumble. Call it innate superstition. Or not wanting to disturb the house gods. I wouldn’t even sing ‘‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.’’ And yet: After that first lullaby session, and for weeks afterward, I found, in idle moments, that I was humming Juanita’s lullaby. Which has now entered the limited canon of songs my child finds acceptable.
The lullaby my father sang most often to me was ‘‘Goodnight, Irene.’’ He would sing the chorus, but then he didn’t quite know the verse, it seemed to me, because the rhyme scheme was off. (‘‘Sometimes I live in the city, sometimes I live in the country,’’ he would sing, and then he would repeat the chorus.) I can remember well his tuneless voice — part of what is so moving to me about lullabies is that they are usually sung by people who ‘‘can’t sing’’ — and I remember that sometimes I would just pretend to be asleep, because I would feel guilty, knowing that I wasn’t anywhere near asleep, and that he was trying to help me.
Only when I was a teenager did I hear a recorded version of ‘‘Goodnight, Irene.’’ It was sung by Nat King Cole, and the chorus was as I remembered it, but the verses were different. And yet I recognized which verse my father was singing inaccurately: ‘‘Sometimes I live in the country/Sometimes I live in town/Sometimes I have a great notion/To jump in the river and drown.’’ I don’t think my father was regularly thinking about jumping in a river and drowning. I also don’t think he was consciously bowdlerizing the song to make it more ‘‘appropriate’’ for me. Now that I’m older, I suspect that while singing a lullaby to me he must also have sometimes been singing to himself, or daydreaming, or playing over the day in his mind, or replaying an argument from work. Occasionally, singing must have even functioned as a kind of whistling in the dark for him, for whatever it was that had been worrying him. And in that sense, the hidden darkness of the song, which a part of him must have registered, probably helped him, the way that speaking a dark feeling can. A couple of times I have sung ‘‘Goodnight, Irene’’ to my daughter, and first her lip quivered and then she began to sob. I have often thought that lullabies, whatever their words, mostly just communicate ‘‘I love you.’’ But after my attempts at ‘‘Goodnight, Irene,’’ I started to think that no matter what we try to hide or show in a lullaby, other meanings make their own way through.
If the primary function of lullabies is to lull a baby to sleep, another function is to let the singer speak. Maybe this is one reason the lyrics of lullabies are often so unsettled and dark. One way a mother might bond with a newborn is by sharing her joy; another way is by sharing her grief or frustration. We see this in songs across time. A 200-year-old Arabic lullaby still sung today goes:
I am a stranger, and my neighbors are strangers;
I have no friends in this world.
Winter night and the husband is absent.
And an old Spanish lullaby from Asturias, written down by the poet Federico García Lorca, goes:
This little boy clinging so
Is from a lover, Vitorio,
May God, who gave, end my woe,
Take this Vitorio clinging so.
We assume the sound of these songs is sweet, as no lullaby endures without being effective at putting babies to sleep. Think of ‘‘Rock-a-bye Baby,’’ the way it tenderly describes an infant and its cradle falling to the ground: The singer gets to speak a fear, the baby gets to rest; the singer tries to accommodate herself to a possible loss that has for most of human history been relatively common, and the baby gets attentive care. In the Arabic and Spanish lullabies, the singers get to say something to the one being — their new burden, their new love — who can’t and won’t judge or discipline them for saying it. When even relatively happy, well-supported people become the primary caretaker of a very small person, they tend to find themselves eddied out from the world of adults. They are never alone — there is always that tiny person — and yet they are often lonely. Old songs let us feel the fellowship of these other people, across space and time, also holding babies in dark rooms. In 1928, when Lorca gave a lecture in Madrid about the Spanish lullabies he had for years been collecting, he spoke of a woman he had heard singing a sad lullaby, saying that ‘‘a living tradition worked in her, and she faithfully executed its commands, as though listening to the ancient, imperious voices echoing in her blood.’’ After hearing her sing, he said, he ‘‘tried to collect lullabies from every corner of Spain; wishing to know how my countrywomen lull their children to sleep, and after a while I gained the impression that Spain utilizes its saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to tinge her children’s first slumber.’’ He also noted that the woman he heard singing the sad song, upon approach, looked happy.
Most of the American lullabies that have come down to us through the years are also sad. The bough has broken; darling Clementine is lost; even my sunshine, my only sunshine, has, you will learn if you exit the chorus and enter the next verse, gone away. (My daughter sings ‘‘You Are My Sunshine’’ with the custom lyric ‘‘when skies are great,’’ and I can’t sing her the main verses without crying, and so naturally, I don’t sing them at all.) The sadness in those traditional songs, once noticed, is nearly unbearable, which may be why so many people just sing the choruses, leaving the main sentiment ‘‘forgotten.’’ Still, it can seem strange that these are the songs we have wanted, for so many years, to keep singing to one another. It’s almost as if the songs are trying to work some magic — as if by singing we’re saying, Sadness has already touched this house, no need to come by again.
Almost all the songs written at the Siena House had the characteristic of benedictions; they were less wardings-off of evil than conjurings of good. This may have been in part because the mothers were in the unusually difficult situation of living in a shelter with a young child. Two of the women had partners who were in prison; almost all of them said their primary goal as mothers was that their babies’ childhoods not resemble their own. Music and parenting share a substructure of repetition with variation: Somehow we are at once unconsciously trying to re-enact our childhoods with our children and also trying to defeat them. None of the women remembered having songs sung to them.
For ‘‘The Man Who Knew Too Much,’’ Hitchcock could have chosen any existing song. Instead, he sought out an original one for the film, the still-famous ‘‘Que Sera, Sera.’’ The song is a curious choice. In the film, Day sings:
When I was just a little boy
I asked my mother, What will I be?
Will I be handsome?
Will I be rich?
Here’s what she said to me.
Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be.
The future’s not ours to see.
Que sera, sera.
What will be, will be.
Is the song telling the child that he has no control over his fate? Or is it simply saying that he can’t know for sure, that wondering is of no use? The catchy tune is cheerful and assuring, and never strays from an expected melody line — in keeping with the bright fatalism of the lyrics. But the fatalist streak puts the song in tension with the film’s plot, since the plot is full of decisions that feel as if they will affect the family’s future, maybe catastrophically. In trying to protect their child from the murder scene in the market and the ensuing police inquiry, the McKennas unwittingly hand him over to the kidnappers; then they have to decide whether to heed the captors’ insistence that they tell no one and whether to work with Scotland Yard. They have the power to make decisions, but it’s a maddeningly minor power. Things turn out O.K., repeatedly, but only through a shift of millimeters, though a nudging of luck.
Public-health efforts aimed at infants also have to accommodate some fatalism into their outlooks. Lives are improved a little bit here, a little bit there, sometimes predictably, sometimes less so. Each family finds themselves in a set of norms, like the McKennas do. All new human beings arrive vulnerable to circumstances over which they had no influence, but which, in turn, have enormous influence on them. To try to help infants is to try to push norms in directions that seem promising.
All the mothers I met through the Lullaby Project mentioned that they spoke often to their children, to expose them to as many words as possible — a clear response to the public-health campaign around the importance of babies’ and young children’s hearing a large number of words. Lullabies also slow down language, and in doing so probably make it easier for a baby to follow. The director of the Institute for Neuro-Physiological Pyschology in England, Sally Goddard Blythe, tells a story of how one of her sons, who had a hearing problem diagnosed at 18 months and who went on to have troubles with reading and speaking at school, showed rapid improvement after he joined a cathedral choir when he was 8. The head of the choir told Blythe that he often saw swift language advancement in children after they joined the choir. ‘‘Research on lullabies is harder, but there is plenty of research of the effects of music on reading and maths,’’ Blythe notes. Music is above all a good in and of itself, but studies suggest that sustained musical training develops skills essential to reading, spatial reasoning and, to some extent, the learning of secondary languages.
Much of the value of lullabies is most likely private, as the singing itself is. (When do most adults sing? Almost never, save maybe at a church service, or alone, alongside a pop tune.) Martha Kempe, who helps facilitate participation in a Lullaby Project in Maine, explains: ‘‘To try and teach directly about an abstract thing like bonding — well, that doesn’t always really work, to just talk about it. This is a way to learn about bonding that isn’t abstract.’’
There was a certain ultraviolet feeling that accompanied my observing women in the Lullaby Project — women I didn’t know — as they put together words for their babies. After all, lullabies are like secrets. To hear one not directed at you, and not sung by you, is like listening in on a daydream. A YouTube post of an elephant caretaker singing the elephant Faa Mai to sleep at the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand, has more than 2.5 million viewings.
On the song-sharing afternoon at Siena House, the mothers listened to a Spanish song by a mother named Charlenys, who had written about waiting for morning with her baby, who had gastric reflux and was often up much of the night. After the song was played, a Hispanic mother who had participated in the project a year earlier described how she connected with the song. Then she addressed Charlenys directly, in Spanish. But before she made it through her first sentence, she began to cry. Music is so often a shortcut through time, making old emotions quickly present again. The words may or may not be specifically evocative on their own, however sincere. But then, when a parent sings to the small semi-stranger whom she loves, the emotion somehow comes through.
The evening after the first lullaby session, back when my child used only about five words, one of the most common ones was ‘‘More?’’ — always with that question mark, her inflection already lilting up like that of the normals, the adult women, around her. If I were to estimate, I would say that 87 percent of the time what she wanted more of was milk, though she couldn’t yet verbally specify. But one evening, after I had given her milk, and sung her this and that, and stroked her forehead, and then sat there waiting with all the tension of the end of a Dickens chapter for her to fall asleep — I was desperate for a space of time without her, even though I loved her — she said, More? And then, again, More? But she refused milk. Eventually, maybe with some frustration, and somewhat foolishly, considering that she knew almost no words, I asked her: ‘‘More what? More of what?’’ And then, I swear to you, for the first time ever, she put two words together: “More song?”
Rivka Galchen is the author, most recently, of the award-winning short-story collection ‘‘American Innovations.’’
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Source:The Melancholy Mystery of Lullabies